Samhain, the night when !witchymemes@lemmy.world leaks into other communities. And I’m here for it.

Written by true sleezebags.

What’s wrong with the Fediverse exactly?

Chicory. Be careful. It’s pretty potent.

Open Source that shit. (If you want to get it to a more “done” state first, that’s fine.) The world can always use more FOSS.

Hmm? OpenMW works great on my Gentoo machine. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I’m in the middle of my first playthrough of Morrowind on OpenMW. (I mean, it crashes sometimes, but not often enough that it’s a problem. Oh, OpenJK had a progression-halting bug when I last played it on Arch, but I got around it.)

I was saying that even with as good as Wine and Proton have gotten for playing Windows games, good quality FOSS engine reimplementations are preferable to Wine/Proton, and it would be great if we could get to the point where 90% of Windows games had FOSS engine reimplementations that would a) allow people to play natively without Wine or Proton, b) remove antifeatures, c) improve the modding scene and otherwise give more insight into how the games work mechanics-wise, d) make more options for engines from which to fork and make new games, e) let me simply increase the FOSS-to-proprietary-software ratio on my personal systems, f) let folks in the community contribute to it, etc.

That’s great. Now let’s get to where 90% can run on native FOSS engine reimplementations like OpenMW for Morrowind and OpenJK for some of the Jedi Knight games.

I can’t imagine you’re the only one in this situation. If I were in your shoes, I’d search for similar stories online and see if I could get a sense of how friendly the company is to swapping OSs. For some companies, changing the OS is a complete deal breaker. Other companies are pretty willing to assume the issue was indeed strictly hardware and had nothing to do with changing the OS, and thus will go ahead and do the repair.

If you find that company is more like the former, install Windows. If not, just start the warranty repair process.

What do Bitcoin and dark web add to the conversation, exactly? That can be done with fiat currencies on the regular-old internet. (It could be done with brick-and-mortor stores, and vinyl, for that matter.)

Whether it could “work” (as in, become popular) is another question, but darknet-only and cryptocurrency-only would make it harder for it to take off than just putting it on the internet and letting people pay with Visa, Mastercard, Discover, PayPal, etc.

Nothing about copyleft causes the “owner” to not hold the copyright on a work.

Copyright gives the holder (either the author or the party to which the copyright is assigned) a few specific (but broad) exclusive rights to the work: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution, public performance (which probably doesn’t so much apply to software), and public display (also not applicable to software, so much). (And then there’s circumvention, but that’s yucky and irrelevant to this case, so we’ll ignore it.)

“Exclusive” means nobody is allowed to do any of those things except the copyright holder (unless the copyright holder licenses those rights to others, but we’ll get to that.)

The copyright holder can give/sell/transfer the copyright to someone else (in which case the previous holder is now excluded from doing with the work all the things in the first paragraph above because someone else now holds all those exclusive rights), but that’s not what the AGPL does.

The copyright holder can also license any or all of the exclusive rights in the first paragraph to some person or party (or in the case of an “open license” like the AGPL, to everyone).

The AGPL licenses rights like distribution and preparation of derivative works to others (under certain conditions(/covenants) like “you can only distribute copies if you do so under the same license as you got it under”).

So, if some hypothetical party named “Bob” started a project, they’d hold the copyright. If Bob put the AGPL on that project and also required any contributor to assign copyright on their specific contributions to Bob, Bob would hold the copyright on the entire project code, including all contributions. Someone else could take advantage of the terms of the AGPL allowing derivative works and redistribution to create their own fork (so long as they abided by the conditions(/covenants) in the AGPL), and if they did so, they could omit on their fork any copyright assignment requirement, in which case the fork could end up owned by a mishmash of different copyright holders (making it hard to impossible for the administrator of the fork to do anything tricky like changing what license future versions were under.)

However, on Bob’s original (non-fork) version, if Bob, as the copyright holder, changes the license file to something proprietary, Bob has (arguably?) created a new work that is not the same work as the previous version, and Bob can license that new version under a different license. (I suppose one might be able to argue that changing just the license file isn’t legally enough to make a new version, but the very next time a nontrivial change was made to the codebase, that would qualify as a new version, so it kindof doesn’t matter.) Bob has already licensed previous versions of his non-fork under the AGPL, so Bob can’t really rescind that license already granted on older versions. But new versions could indeed be put under a different license. (Mind you, there are licenses that have specific terms that make them rescindable on old versions. Take for instance the Open Gaming License fiasco that WotC tried to pull not terribly long ago. But I don’t think the AGPL is a license that can be rescinded.)

Since Bob can’t rescind the license on older versions, if Bob made a future version proprietary, the community or any particular party that wanted to could take the last AGPL version of the non-fork and make a fork from there that remained under the AGPL.

The moral of the story is: if you don’t want the copylefted code project you start to be changed to a proprietary license later, don’t do any copyright assignment agreement. The codebase being owned by a diverse mishmash of different copyright holders is a feature, not a bug.

And, as mentioned elsewhere in this post, Immich is owned by a lot of different copyright holders as it has no copyright assignment requirement.

Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?

Well, there’s Corey Doctorow, of course. He literally wrote the book on Enshittification.

There are definitely more “behind the scenes” folks doing a lot for that particular cause who don’t so much have a following of anywhere near the same size, but nonetheless do fight enshittification in big ways. Bradley Kuhn comes to mind.

Yaaas! I love DSLs like this.

Huh. So anyone could maintain a fork or patchset and distribute builds that were feature-for-feature identical to Immich but with no nag screens. Just an interesting thought.

From what I’m seeing, you’re right. If there was a contributor assignment policy (some official policy associated with Immich saying that by submitting a PR, you agree to assign copyright on your code changes go the Immich project), FUTO could change the license on future versions as they wished. But it doesn’t look like there’s any contributor assignment or contributor license agreement on Immich.

To be pedantic, Immich did change from MIT to AGPLv3 a while ago. FUTO could technically scrap the current version, grab the last MIT version of the code, relicense it under their “source-first” license (or any other license they like, pretty much), and declare “this is now the official development version of Immich from which new releases will come.” That would be drastic even for FUTO, though (I don’t think that’s likely any time soon), and the community could then fork the latest AGPLv3 version with a different name and carry on with development.

That is not supporting fascist projects

Literally what I just said in the comment you responded to.

Ah. My mistake. I’ll edit my comment.

Edit: According to another comment in this post, FUTO “took over” Immich. Seems like maybe Immich was AGPLv3 before FUTO got hold of it. Still qualifies as “one of FUTO’s projects”, and your point is still well made, but it does still add a bit of context, and honestly I have to wonder whether future versions of Immich will remain FOSS.

The article I linked in another comment explains more, but Eron Wolf, founder of FUTO, kindof pressured or hoodwinked Louis Rossmann into publicly interviewing Curtis Yarvin who happily refers to himself as a “reactionary fascist” and publicly states that black people are inherently suitable for enslavement.

I don’t know that it’s so much that they support “fascist projects” as much as they go out of their way to be a platform for spreading fascist propaganda, and particularly promoting the fascist Curtis Yarvin.