Why? How many kilobytes of disk space are you going to save from that?

**

**

Fun fact: argument and discussion can be synonyms, but they can also have distinct meanings.

It’s amusing to see this much projection. You say that I can’t read, then proceed to misunderstand a basic sentence. You say that you don’t respond because you think I will insult you, then resort to name calling.

Let us find something better to do with our lives, ok? Have a good one.

There is no argument, dear child. There is only a value judgement being made by a silly cartoon and you suffering because you refuse to admit that you do not share those values.

Why you need to resorting to name calling and hiding yourself behind “others” just to avoid facing this uncomfortable truth, I do not know.

I argue many people don’t care about “software freedom” and MIT is better for those people.

Which is completely besides the point of the post and carries no value in the conversation.

P.S: you are still talking about “other people”. Can you try to make any value judgement and own it? How about “I don’t care about software freedom and prefer to get free stuff”?

If you want to talk about fallacies, here are some good examples:

we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy.

Bandwagon Fallacy

If it was so much better, that it justified the price, it would outcompete the free one anyway.

Failure to understand basic microeconomics

I did not write 90% of the things you claim I did.

That is true and at the same time does not contradict my point. The whole discussion is about how MIT-style licensing is not as effective for software freedom as GPL licenses. And because you do not have anything to stand on to make an argument against the statement, you keep bringing points that do not address the main issue. When asked directly what you would do, you refuse to give a definite answer.

So what is your argument? Who is responsible for the decision-making process that leads to “hand writing an inferior solution”? Why do you think that this at all acceptable and reasonable?

You’ve been writing nothing but opinion-as-fact and resorting to wild rationalizations to justify your preferences, now you want to couch yourself under the questionable ethics of “it’s done this way and I can not fight it, so it must be the correct thing to do”?

Let’s make a simple test: if you were in charge and had the choice between spending some $$ to dual license a GPL package or to pay for the development of a GPL-only system vs paying $$$$ to do it in-house because you did not find a MIT/BSD package that does what you need, what would you do?

we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy.

What company are you working for whose leadership thinks that it is a better use of their time to reimplementing FOSS solutions just because they can’t get it “for free”?

There is no fundamental problem in working for free either. It’s second-order effects that we should worry about. Those who are “working for free” because they “just want have software being used by people” are diluting the value of the professionals and in the long term end up being as detrimental as professional designers or photographers who “work for exposure”.

If you ask me, the reason that is so hard to fund FOSS development is not because of bureaucracies, but because we are competing with privileged developers who are able to afford giving away their work for free.

I’m pretty sure that I got paid to work on GPL software, and I am pretty sure that said software would never have been developed if I wasn’t going to be paid for it.

What I don’t like is that the title minimizes the contributions of the MIT developers.

It’s not about the contribution. The MIT license still lets people study and share the code. It’s Free Software. The contribution is still there. The “problem” is that those contributions can be taken and exploited by large corporations.

You answer are reasonable justifications for why MIT is used, but they also work pretty well to illustrate the title of the post: If you are doing MIT, you are working for free. If you are working with GPL, you are working for freedom.

GPL means big corporations just won’t use it.

Great. No corporation is working on software for the freedom of its users.

they will just search for an alternative or make their own.

Or pay the developer to dual license, which can and should be the preferred way for FOSS developers to fund their work?

What is your base image? It has no python installed.

You know that you can configure minio to only serve images for authenticated requests, right?

Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you have a very good reason to do so.

Yes, but if you put it a public library you will be opening yourself for all sorts of copyright trolls trying to sue you for file sharing.

Correct, so when I post my song I created to Funkwhale, it’s then federated across the fediverse, living on other servers and able to be downloaded.

AFAIK, the songs do not get distributed across the Fediverse, only the link to the original server.

Someone in the fediverse likes my song and they download it. Who then protects my license and attribution rights beside myself?

How is it different from you hosting your songs on your own website?

How is it different from songs you made available through Bandcamp? Does Bandcamp go chasing people pirating your work and/or using in unlicensed cases (e.g, playing in a commercial setting)?

Monal works fine now.

No, it doesn’t. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn’t have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.

That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being “damned” because of its funding. But let’s just agree to disagree, because I don’t see how this discussion can go any further.

Again, if “venture funding” is some sort of cheat code, why can’t XMPP make use of it? Do you want some moral high ground or some minimally useful product with mass reach?

nominally FOSS

Does it allow copying and redistribution? Yes

Can people fork it in case Element tries anything ridiculous like what happened with Elastic/MongoDB/Redis? Yes.

The thing is FOSS. This is what matters. Enshittification is being thrown around way too easily nowadays

rather about not shitting into your own water supply.

And where is the water provided by the XMPP side? “if you are on iOS, use siskin” is not at all an acceptable answer on 2024. The mobile OS with the largest market share in the USA simply does not have a decent client. What is going to be the next line? “People shouldn’t be using iOS anyway, so we shouldn’t spend our resources on it?”

Honestly, we are going in circles now. I don’t want to get in some type of flamewar over two separate open protocols. It starting to get ridiculous like discussing which branch of the Christian Orthodox Church is the purest one.

I am not trying to distort anything, I just don’t agree with your “venture-capital has enabled Element to snatch away the little sustainable funding that exists” premise. I don’t see what going after government contracts has to do with “open source funding” and I don’t think that “using VC funds to give away free stuff for developers” is something to be held against them just because the XMPP companies are not willing to risk it.

If the XMPP business are thriving in the IoT space, good for them. But to me, as a consumer, this means nothing if they are not willing to compete in the space.

Also, as long as we are talking about Free Software for the end product, I honestly do not care about who is funding it. All I care about is that I can find some way for my parents to talk with me and see their grandkids without depending on Facebook/Google, and if doing it with Element/Matrix is easier than doing with XMPP/siskin, then I’ll be using Element. I don’t need any of them to pass some arbitrary purity test, I just need them to deliver something minimally usable.

So, companies working on XMPP are healthy and thriving, but they can not afford to extend into the consumer space because… they don’t want to go up against Discord?

makes business sense if you care about the longer term survival of your company

Then you make a separate entity to take risks in that space, kinda like what Amdocs did with Matrix?

I’m sorry, you can’t have it both ways. Either XMPP consumer XMPP is in a dire situation because Element beat ahead of the others due to their VC funding, or businesses working on XMPP are not interested in the consumer space because they don’t see it as worth the risk. But it makes no sense to claim that Matrix has achieved bigger mindshare with no actual merit in making a more accessible product, and that XMPP is acceptable as is.