07.02.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Walking Like the Talking, Acting Like One’s Preaching
Video download link | md5sum 4c64f42ccf69df3647297de8bf1c9bbf
The Second Half
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: It has now been about 2 years since lock-downs in the world’s Western nations were first loosened or lifted; we’ve thankfully taken advantage of all that commotion (persistent flux; we’ve not solved the underlying issues) to expand beyond and Web and become self-hosted wherever possible
JULY 4th is fast approaching and we’ve already finished the first day of the second half of the year. Time flies and a lot of the world is on fire (war, famine, disease, and inflation; somtimes literally fire). We’ve had a relatively calm year and have in fact become more active since the lock-downs. We expanded to IPFS in 2020, Gemini in early 2021, and we finally moved to a self-hosted IRC network a little more than a year ago.
“We’re more censorship-resistant than ever before and we welcome whistleblowers…”The self-hosted IRC network is very important when dealing with whistleblowers. We moreover have a network for E2EE chats, not just textual but voice too. This equips us with what we need to break high-profile stories, including the current series about Microsoft, GitHub, and Copilot.
As someone put it moments ago in Geminispace*: “GitHub is enabling copyleft violation ✨at scale✨ with Copilot. GitHub Copilot encourages people to make derivative works of source code without complying with the original code’s license. This facilitates the creation of permissively-licensed [**] or proprietary derivatives of copyleft code. [...] Unfortunately, challenging Microsoft (GitHub’s parent company) in court is a bad idea: their legal budget probably ensures their victory, and they likely already have a comprehensive defense planned. How can we determine Copilot’s legality on a level playing field? We can create legal precedent that they haven’t had a chance to study yet!”
We’re more censorship-resistant than ever before and we welcome whistleblowers to tell us about stuff the media refuses to cover, including EPO corruption. █
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* This almost-real-time RSS syndication page shows the latest posts in Geminispace and it updates itself every 60 minutes. It’s quite busy because there are thousands of capsules (that number continues to grow) and many pages are dynamic, e.g. local weather for UK geographies.
** The term “permissively-licensed” is misleading and it’s often used by proprietary software companies looking to close/lock things down. They strive to hoard all the software. By using the positive connotation (akin to permission granted, suggestive of generosity) they want to encourage the practice and turn coders into unpaid volunteers, later to be pushed aside by those who exploit the work. The latter’s preferred name is “non-reciprocal“, e.g. they don’t bind/compel a company like Apple to give back to those it took from. Copyleft a la *GPL is reciprocal licence/licensing (facilitating an exchange and sharing of code in perpetuity), whereas the other licences typically get chosen to enable proprietary appropriation, “open” core etc. For obvious reasons, Microsoft is weaponising GitHub against reciprocal licensing and it’s trying to make GPL compliance very difficult (same for GPL enforcement), as we’ve noted in this ongoing series.
ᶃ Gemini Space
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