Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If they’re the copyright holder, they are allowed to use any license they want. Including a modified AGPL. It’s up to the users to understand what license they’re getting the software under. In this case, it is a modified-AGPL.

    This is like Qt when they used the modified GPL (Qt 2-3 era, before they went full LGPL). Qt was the copyright holder and can issue under terms they decide. Then it is up to the users to decide if those terms are acceptable. KDE decided these terms were acceptable, but some other users did not.

    However, if a user decided to ignore the additional clauses in Qt and treat it as unmodified GPL, they would have been in violation of the license. Because Qt was the the copyright holder and can dictate terms. Qt would have won the court case. It never happened, so it wasn’t tested, and that’s ancient history now.

    But here OnlyOffice is in the same boat. They can dictate the terms, and a court can decide if a user is in adherence of those terms. There’s no part of copyright law that OnlyOffice is violating here.

    What will be up for legal debate is whether EuroOffice is willfully and maliciously violating it, or if they just interpreted differently. If the latter, then there will be a great deal of legalese. The real question will be: the AGPL as amended by OnlyOffice – does it permit forking, and are forks subject to the same modified clauses.

    I suspect OnlyOffice wins this one if it actually goes to court. Which will be super annoying from an end user perspective.








  • Okay, first off, I’m really impressed that Lemmy (the web interface anyway) embeds TIL.vids video player and it just works. Since it’s peertube, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. (I wonder how hard it is to create a peertube instance, hmmm.)

    Next: as a former KDE dev, I love these sorts of updates. Put it on the background while I was working this morning :)

    Most interesting: hiding things from screencasting… if Plasma were ever deployed in an educational context, this will hurt the anti-cheating software that screencasts your screen during test taking. Well, they probably make you use windows in that situation anyway ;)

    Weirdest: mouse pointer stays in centre mode… bizarre. Would be fun to couple with an eye tracking camera to create a fucked up feedback loop haha.





  • When modern billboards became a thing, many cities or similar jurisdictions passed laws limiting their proliferation, in order to ensure you didn’t end up in a billboard filled dome.

    In Canada, at least, you can register your address as a “no admail” destination, and you’ll stop getting those flyers entirely. It doesn’t stop certain protected classes of ads, in particular ads for prospective politicians during an election campaign, or mail that is personally addressed to you (even if it is an ad). But does shut it almost completely down. This would be the legal equivalent of installing a real-world ad-blocker.


  • I spent about a decade as a KDE developer.

    KDE has this mindset where if someone wants to implement something they think is cool, and the code is clean and mostly bug free, well – have at it! Ever wonder why there’s 300 options for everything?

    Usually (because there’s a bunch of people trying to optimize the core for speed and load times and such) this also means that the unused code-paths are required to not contribute negatively to things like load times. So a plugin like this that doesn’t get loaded by default unless enabled, and thus doesn’t harm everyone else’s performance. It also means that if it stops working in the future and starts to bitrot, it can be dropped without affecting the core code.






  • Corporate journalism is digging (no pun intended) its own grave in many cases.

    A feedback cycle where no one wants to pay for content, so advertisers are needed to fund their staff, which means clicks and engagement become the metric of success. But, the solution is either publicly funded news (largely unpopular), or regulating the open internet (more unpopular). So, yeah, the death of corporate journalism is coming.



  • Troy@lemmy.catoTechnology@beehaw.org*Permanently Deleted*
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    10 months ago

    I wrote for Ars for a brief period, on Linux topics. This was prior to the digg exodus. As a writer, I got a set rate for each page of content, with an expected average word count per page. I’d get a bonus anytime my story hit the front page of digg, slashdot, or similar aggregater. It happened a few times.

    But that bonus incentive meant I was encouraged to specifically write stories that would resonate with those audiences. It wasn’t fraud or a scam – it was free market economic pressure. But the effect was the same – I was tailoring my content to maximize aggregator exposure.

    I began to submit my own stories to Slashdot and similar, because a minute of my time could pay me $100 or whatever.

    I am not sure that reddit is biased towards these publications as much as they are likely intentionally gaming the algorithms, and encouraging their writers to do the same – write content you know will hit the frontpage. I don’t think it is wrong necessarily, but it certainly isn’t organic.

    That said, Ars generally has very high quality content due to some very good reporters. Eric Berger comes to mind. So it could be both effects: quality and gaming the system.


  • Things like platinum notwithstanding, It will almost always be more expensive to go get things in space than on earth.

    Hell, even on earth it is often too expensive to get metals like iron if there isn’t rail or a port nearby. Imagine having to fly iron ingots around and the associated aviation fuel cost. Whatever crazy fuel bill you’re imagining, multiply by a hundred or more if you’re imagining getting it from space.

    No, all of those metals in space are best used to build some future version of our civilization _in situ. _