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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Exactly, permissive licenses such as MIT allow for other people to do a rugpull and change the deal (pray I don’t alter it any further). With open source licenses the community can just fork.

    That’s why I always pick AGPL for my projects. Then I can be certain that the code can be freed from greedy hands, and the actual users get all the value of the effort I put in.

    VC funding really is making a deal with the devil, because you suddenly have a huge amount of cash, so the startup starts living large (hire more devs, run on expensive cloud infrastructure). But sooner or later they want their money back, plus interest; and few services are profitable, let alone that profitable. So the only thing that startups are usually capable of is to squeeze their users for all they’re worth.

    Take a look at all the big startups and see:

    • how long it took for them to be profitable
    • how much VC funding they got until then

    Companies need to pay that back and then some.

    And don’t forget that VC’s see this as a perpetual investment, so your revenue must grow year after year, even if you’ve saturated the market.










  • They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

    I do have several questions:

    Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

    Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

    Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?




  • Exactly, ansible is basically imperative, where write the steps declaratively.

    Whereas nixos is more like a compiler that compiles to a working linux install.

    If I added the software myprogram and a config file at /etc/myprogram.conf, that’s pretty easy in both. But if I needed to to then remove those it gets different .

    With nixos it’s at easy as removing the two lines that add the program and the config file; after the next “compile”, the file is gone and myprogram is no longer available in the PATH.

    With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use apt remove instead of apt install and to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.

    Don’t get me wrong, ansible is still better than writing a lot of bash scripts, especially if you don’t have people with a lot of shell experience.

    But tools like nixos and guix are on a whole other level.