While I understand where you’re coming from, I believe that it distracts from a massive positive effect that the GPL has: the way it ensures collaboration. Lots of contributors to GPL software do so in the knowledge that they are working on something great together. I myself have felt discouraged to contribute to MIT licensed software, because I know that others might just take all the hard work, make something proprietary of it and give nothing back.

I see GPL as some sort of public transaction, it is indeed more limiting than MIT and offers less pure freedom in that sense. But I just love how it uses copyright not for enforcing licensing payment for some private entity, but enforces a contribution to the community as a whole. I find this quite beautiful.

If you have nextcloud and use linux: Iotas

It is really simple but suits my needs! Also looks great on the GNOME desktop.

Maybe give it a go if you haven’t yet? I’m also not a fan of web apps and prefer native applications, but it runs really well and is super impressive!

This looks insanely cool!

I think he makes the mistake of assuming that every person has a similar life experience to his own. I’ve read his biography, and apparently he was extremely intelligent and acted like an adult from a very young age. It could be that he hated being seen as a child and saw himself as a fully functional adult in a transitioning body.

In everything he says and does there is an extreme single-mindedness: his extremely strict free software and privacy related ideas show this. I think he applies a similar single-mindedness to a clearly nuanced situation, namely that of conscent. The nuance of power dynamics and coercion probably don’t play a role in his experience and therefore he ignores it. This results in the very wrong and dangerous opinions stated in the article.

I am not saying this to excuse any of his opinions, this is just my interpretation of where it might come from. It’s sad that the people around him are seemingly unable to educate him on these topics, but I believe it might be the same stubbornness that made him the proponent of the Free Software movement that is causing him to not mentally grow on this specific topic. It’s a truly unfortunate situation, but one that should not be ignored and people who oppose him because of these opinions are right to do so.

Just look at issues in software you use.

Start with a simple project. Clone the code and try to build it (this is already a very big step in software development, so don’t be angry with yourself if it takes a while). Poke around in the code, change some stuff, get a feel for the architecture. Then see if there is an issue that you could help with. Ask questions on the projects communication channel(s). Most developers will be kind if you ask for help or advice.

Good luck! 🤞

The concept still works with almost no users. If you’re the only one watching a video, the original host is more than capable of serving it to you and so no need for extra peers ;).

Being able to handle a small amount of users isn’t the problem, it’s once a lot of users suddenly join in that the system would collapse without the peer functionality.

Also, peer tube is not fully decentralized. All videos need to be stored on an instance (similar to torrent seedboxes) so there will always be at least one direct source available. So I don’t think that standalone app as you describe is needed. (That would be interesting though in a fully decentralized model, without any instances but all videos just floating between peers. But that would have the danger of creating dead videos similar to dead torrents)

It’s called COSMIC but cosmos by Carl Sagan is one of my favorite series of all time so do try that out too :)

Hey, unity did some really nice and unique stuff!

But I believe more in System76 than Ubuntu to make this work. They seem to have a genuine focus on ease of use and streamlining stuff. It’s also in their direct intrest as all there income comes from selling Linux pc’s to real users. With Ubuntu the desktop became more and more of an afterthought as they focused more on servers.