• 26 Posts
  • 220 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 2nd, 2023

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  • Whilst I do understand that sentiment, with our project we have made as much effort as possible to make sure that nobody thinks we would ever do such a thing.

    We are rather tight fisted with our donations and make sure we only spend them when absolutely necessary - none of it goes out as regular stipends for the team and all funds for expenses get sent in response to the actual bills incurred, I don’t think any of us would dream of siphoning it into our pockets.

    We were even debating if we should use the “standard” funds to foot the bill for a new hosted service thing but felt this was a bit of a grey area - the service would be provided for free but footed by the donors of which only a small percentage would likely use it… We realise just how much of a privilege it is to be in receipt of the funds so we treat them with utmost reverence.

    Not that I’m trying to encourage you to donate money to projects rather than time, I very much do the same as you and donate time and effort rather than money, but there are some good guys out there.


  • I have to admit that I don’t. I have done a couple of one-off donations before but I generally hope that my karma is balanced by some of the effort I put into helping out with a couple of projects.

    That said, I’ve been utterly floored as to how generous the community has been with donating to one project I help with in particular. We added a donation platform with OpenCollective early on in the project but kind of hid the link away a little in the navbar, I thought we might get a tiny bit thrown at us every so often. When Distrotube did a video on us, one of the comments he made is that we should make the Donate button much more obvious, we did and now we have a whole bunch of super generous sponsors backing the project and making it possible. We keep the spending as open as we possibly can - it mostly goes into our backend hosting costs and website stuff and really does help it all stay alive.


  • There is a difference between censorship and the right to not have to listen to somebody. Being banned from having a platform to speak from could count as censorship (for example being banned from Reddit). However with Lemmy those on lemmygrad are free to say whatever they want, the difference is that everyone else is just as free to not have to listen. The idea of the Lemmy instances is that they have the ability to curate content - an instance catering to an LGBT community is not going to want to have to listen to right wing evangelicals and you join up on that knowledge. If you want to have the option to hear every single voice then join an instance with that mindset or just host your own.


  • And I wasn’t aware of the Elementary thing with Flatpak! Admittedly I hadn’t really thought of it in that way, I was thinking something more akin to F-droid where there are a couple of extra repos you can add which have applications not on the main one due to slightly looser requirements. But making it specifically for apps for that ecosystem in particular makes a lot of sense.





  • From the conversation it seems to be a similar situation to the project I’m with is in. The flatpak is essentially community maintained rather than being directly supported by the team. To become verified it needs to be done so by a representative of the maintainers of the software. To be verified it doesn’t have to have a team member involved in it but this is a requirement Inkscape seem to have imposed.

    For us we just aren’t in a position to want to support it officially just yet, we have some major upgrades coming to our underlying tech stack that will introduce a whole bunch of stuff that will allow various XDG portals etc. to work properly with the Flatpak sandboxing model. To support it now would involve tons of workarounds which would need to be removed later.


  • Yeah this has been our (well, my) statement on requests to put out ARM binaries for Pulsar. Typically we only put binaries out for systems we actually have within the team so we can test on real hardware and replicate issues. I would be hesitant to put out Windows ARM builds when, as far as I know, we don’t have such a device. If there was a sudden clamouring for it then we could maybe purchase a device out of the funds pot.

    The reason I was asking more about if it was to do with developer licences is that we have already dealt with differences between x86 and ARM macOS builds because the former seems to happily run unsigned apps after a few clicks, where the latter makes you run commands in the terminal - not a great user experience.

    That is why I was wondering if the ARM builds for Windows required signing else they would just refuse to install on consumer ARM systems at all. The reason we don’t sign at the moment is just because of the exorbitant cost of the certificates - something we would have to re-evaluate if signing became a requirement.






  • The moment you exclude any group or persons from your licence, it is, by definition, no longer open source.

    Of course that doesn’t sit well with some people and there are some initiatives to try to account for that, for example the Hippocratic License that allows you to customise your licence to specifically exclude groups that might use your software to cause harm or the Do No Harm license with similar goals.

    Honestly, I find it hard to object to the idea. Some might argue it is a slippery slope away from the ideals of software freedom (as has been the case with some of the contraversial licenses recently like BSL and Hashicorp. I’m not a hardline idealist in the same way and if these more restrictive licenses that restrict some freedoms still produce software that might otherwise not exist then I’m happy they are around.

    Would I use one? Probably not, for me, whilst I like the idea, I think the controversy generated by using a non-standard licence would become its defining feature and would put off a lot of people from contributing to the project.



  • I feel you haven’t been reading what I’ve been saying if you are claiming a “single chat log”. The whole point of what I’m saying is that there are various forms of communication that can be used in a project and the one I’m part of literally couldn’t function with an async-only forum type setup. Chat is for temporary, transient communication. Forums (and by extension Lemmy/Reddit) are for longer form async discussions with defined topics. Both are valid as has been the case all the way back into the days of having both a mailing list and IRC channel for a project.