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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Because non-open ones are not available, even for a price. Unless you buy something bigger than the “standard” itself of course, like a company that is responsible for it or having access to it.

    There is also the process of standardization itself, with committees, working groups, public proposals, …etc involved.

    Anyway, we can’t backtrack on calling ISO standards and their likes “open” on the global level, hence my suggestion to use more precise language (“publicly available and sharable”) when talking about truly open standards.






  • Federation is irrelevant. Matrix is federated, yet most communities and users would lose communication if matrix.org got offline.

    With, transport-only distributablity, which i think is what radicale offers, availability would depend on the peers. That means probably less availability than a big service host.

    Distributed transport and storage would fix this. a la something like Tahoe-LAFS or (old) Freenet/Hyphanet. And no, IPFS is not an option because it’s generally a meme, and is pull-based, and have availability/longevity problems with metadata alone. iroh claims to be less of a meme, but I don’t know if they fixed any of the big design (or rather lack of design) problems.

    At the end of the day, people can live with GitHub/GitLab/… going down for a few minutes every other week, or 1-2 hours every other month, as the benefits outweigh the occasional inconvenience by a big margin.

    And git itself is distributed anyway. So it’s not like anyone was cut from committing work locally or pushing commits to a mirror.

    I guess waiting on CI runs would be the most relevant inconvenience. But that’s not a distributable part of any service/implementation that exists, or can exist without being quickly gravely abused.








  • What’s needed is renewed ethos, not just fresh blood.

    What’s needed is people who actually like the projects, on the technical level, and use them daily. Not people who are just trying to maintain an open-source “portfolio” they can showcase in pursuit of landing big corpo job.

    A “portfolio” which also needs to, in their mind, project certain culture war prioritizations and positionings that are fully inline with the ones corpos are projecting.

    It will be interesting to see how much of the facade of morality will remain if these corpo projections change, or when the corpo priorities and positionings, by design, don’t care, at best, about little unimportant stuff like American-uniparty-assisted genocide! We got to see murmurs of that in the last few months.

    Will the facade be exposed, or will it simply change face? What if a job was on the line?

    I’m reminded of a certain person with the initials S.K, who was a Rust official, and a pretend Windows-user in hopes of landing a Microsoft job (he pretty much said as much). He was also a big culture-war-style moral posturer. And a post-open-source world hypothesiser.

    Was it weird for such a supposed moral “progressive” to be a big nu-Microsoft admirer? and one who used his position to push for the idea that anyone who maintained a classical open-source/free-software position towards Microsoft is a fanatic? No, it wasn’t. He was one of many after all.

    All these things go hand in hand. And if you think this is a derailing comment that went way off the rails, then I hope you maintain the same position about the effects of all this on the open-source and free-software world itself.





  • Proper HTTP implementations in proper languages utilize header-name enums for strict checking/matching, and for performance by e.g. skipping unnecessary string allocations, not keeping known strings around, …etc. Every standard header name will have to added as a variant to such enums, and its string representation as a constant/static.

    Not sure how you thought that shares equivalency with random JSON field names.