Notices by Christine Lemmer-Webber (cwebber@octodon.social), page 9

@aral I certainly agree with criticisms of surveillance capitalist organizations. However there is another problem: the commons is frequently exploited by large corporations that take and take and take from FOSS and don't give back.

If a company is willing to give some money to support free software orgs, no strings attached other than their name appearing on the site, I think that's something we should encourage *more* of. Many companies are taking and not giving, and that sucks.

@aral I have serious criticisms of Google and Facebook myself. However, I don't agree with your criticism of Conservancy/Copyleft Conf. Conservancy has actually lost a lot of money over the years because it has stuck to its principles when sponsors preferred that it do something different (eg drop copyleft enforcement). That's one reason they started doing community fundraising drives, because they wouldn't have had the money to keep going otherwise *because* they stuck to their principles.

SocialCG call in 10mins: https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2019-01-09

Just got in my donation to Conservancy. Our donation is much larger than usual in order to reflect the proportionally important role that I think Conservancy is taking in the software freedom space. I hope you might consider donating also! https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/

There's a new episode of @librelounge out where we interview Karen Sandler about herself and her work as Software Freedom Conservancy's executive director https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-5-karen-sandler-and-software-freedom-conservancy.html

Can I also just take a moment to say... WOW! Karen Sandler is our first guest on Libre Lounge! Karen co-hosted Free as in Freedom and that show is an obvious direct inspiration for Libre Lounge; it's *amazing* to me that she's our first guest!

Hope you like the episode! I think it's our best yet!

a) the way we do addressing is so fucked
b) I should probably move off of Linode already
c) augh

@emacsen @Cadeon @varx Emacs's config file *is* code, and tbh most of the programs that I prefer to use recognize the importance of that because ultimately they'll add those "features" later, but worse. See also the popularity of "oh we'll just use YAML, this is just a config file" and then "oh no we need conditionals, let's add Jinja2 or some other ill-fitting templating language"

Heck, was it ansible or salt? One of them recently added *exception handling* to their YAML configs! *Come on.*

@adfeno I don't think "user freedom" is an alternative to "free software", which still falls under its umbrella, but user freedom also encompasses some other things like network freedoms and privacy... plus it's good to emphasize that the goal is not the freedom of developers as much as the freedom of users (who may *be* developers).

Is this openwashing? Claim of MIPS going "open" but it looks like you need to "sign up" to get access to their "IP" https://wavecomp.ai/mipsopen

uh

btw, some of the "gaps" that were left in the activitypub spec were intentionally there to enable this to exist https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-fall2017/blob/master/final-documents/activitypub-decentralized-distributed.md

for example "why didn't activitypub require https as the only valid uri scheme / protocol"

well, the solution to the "content surviving when nodes go down" may rely on the fact that this was left open: https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot7/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/magenc.md

allow me to criticize the state of the fediverse as much as love it:

- tiny brain: mega-node such as mastodon.social oh dang it we've reinvented twitter
- regular brain: I'll just choose an instance off of joinmastodon.org oh dang it got shut down everything I love is lost
- galaxy brain: I'll self host fedi software oh god this is hard I'm afraid to upgrade
- universe brain: we need to merge the fediverse with p2p network designs so a node going down isn't catastrophic

anyone who self hosts email now and then gets falsely marked as spam and has to try to figure out why, and do the not fun process of experiencing the anxiety of "oh god, did my server get compromised somehow"

Looks like I'm speaking at CopyleftConf after FOSDEM this year on "Boundaries on freedom and copyleft in decentralized network environments"

/cc @conservancy

It's official, the universal fediverse name for a microblog post is a "tooth". I look forward to retoothing your tooths on this matter https://sunbeam.city/@socalledunitedstates/101218497755563349

#Nextcloud introduces social features, joins the fediverse https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-introduces-social-features-joins-the-fediverse/ #activitypub

Nextcloud's Frank Karlitschek was an early supporter of the ActivityPub standard and I remember well sitting across from him over coffee talking about how to get our projects to talk to each other. Excited to see Nextcloud friends join the fediverse!

Zooko over on the Birdsite:

> It kind of depresses me how everyone is responding to the npm dependency injection by talking about reusing code less or vetting authors more (same thing), instead of talking about *making code reuse safe*. This is why I think @agoric@twitter.com is important.

YES.

another npm package with wide deployment backdoor'ed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392 https://blog.bitpay.com/npm-package-vulnerability-copay/

There are two paths to mitigating this stuff, which both should be taken:
- Focus on auditable and reproducible packages. Sadly, mostly impossible with NPM, which is one of the worst language package environments: https://dustycloud.org/blog/javascript-packaging-dystopia/
- Introduce ocap security into the ecosystem. Probably won't happen but MarkM explained how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Snbss_tawI&list=PLKr-mvz8uvUgybLg53lgXSeLOp4BiwvB2&index=25&t=0s

Friends don't let friends use npm.

If anyone has expertise with Atom feeds and wants to help us debug why the atom feed at https://librelounge.org/atom-feed.xml isn't being recognized correctly as a podcast, and why you can't simply subscribe by entering the https://librelounge.org/ address into a podcatcher, help would be appreciated.

Happy to see that the fediverse response to https://librelounge.org seems so positive. Makes me excited about producing more episodes!

It disappoints me that Etherium did such a good job of making people think that "smart contracts" are only for code that runs on a blockchain. That term exists before blockchains has, and was used for distributed transactional agreements between parties since the 90s. While smart contracts on blockchains is absolutely an application, in the 90s smart contracts ran on even just the actor model. You can read more here: http://erights.org/smart-contracts/index.html