• 21 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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    • I wouldn’t want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I’m running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn’t want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I’m kindof a “forever GM.”
    • Yeah, I’m good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn’t support WotC. I don’t consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that’s one used copy that won’t be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM’s Guild. Piracy is the only way I’d be ok with it. (And if I don’t want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I’d be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM’s Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker’s Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
    • I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact’ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I’m currently between groups… and have yet to acquire the PF2e books… and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing… but when I get back to it, I’d love to do either PF2e or… I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
    • There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn’t immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
    • I haven’t seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I’m not just boycotting WotC. I’m boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.

  • Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:

    TTRPG:

    • Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It’s really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.

    Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:

    • Any Austin - Kinda “philosophy of gaming” is how I’d describe his latest content. I’ve been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he’s really fascinating. His alternate channel “The Excellent Man From Minneapolis” is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
    • Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin’s channel.
    • gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It’s about everything and nothing.

    Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:

    • OKI’s Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
    • Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
    • Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
    • Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
    • Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I’d imagine if you like one, you’d like both.
    • Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
    • Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right “works” and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.

    Tech/hacking:

    • Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
    • Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
    • James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.

    Satanism:

    • The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a “black mass” at the state capitol. I’m just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And… I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. “Part of the solution” if you will.
    • Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they’ve shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he’s really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It’s pretty cringe.

    Other creepy stuff:

    • Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
    • Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
    • Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
    • blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
    • Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.

    Vidja gaming content:

    • Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
    • Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.

    I’m sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don’t usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.












  • I can’t imagine you’re the only one in this situation. If I were in your shoes, I’d search for similar stories online and see if I could get a sense of how friendly the company is to swapping OSs. For some companies, changing the OS is a complete deal breaker. Other companies are pretty willing to assume the issue was indeed strictly hardware and had nothing to do with changing the OS, and thus will go ahead and do the repair.

    If you find that company is more like the former, install Windows. If not, just start the warranty repair process.





  • As others have said, you’re changing the topic talking about FUTO’s license in a response to a comment about the AGPL.

    But to continue your thread:

    If you ask them to articulate their concern, I haven’t heard one that isn’t on the lines of “I want to be able to use this code in my paid product”…

    I specifically want anyone to be allowed to use any and all FOSS software I write (and I do write and publish some) commercially, so long as they abide by the terms of the license I choose. (Typically the AGPLv3.)

    If, for instance, a mainstream commercial consumer electronics device incorporated my code into the firmware and because my code is under the AGPLv3, end users had the legal right to demand the means to modify the behavior of their devices to better suit them, I’d be thrilled.

    Plus, if a company with an IT department is distributing a modified version of my code, that might well include some improvements generally useful for all/most/many users of my project. And if my projects is under the AGPLv3, I can demand a copy of the source code of their modified version and incorporate any improvements back upstream into my project so all users of my FOSS project can benefit from it.

    Commercial redistribution is more of a feature than you think. I think you’re missing the point of copyleft.


  • Nothing about copyleft causes the “owner” to not hold the copyright on a work.

    Copyright gives the holder (either the author or the party to which the copyright is assigned) a few specific (but broad) exclusive rights to the work: reproduction, preparation of derivative works, distribution, public performance (which probably doesn’t so much apply to software), and public display (also not applicable to software, so much). (And then there’s circumvention, but that’s yucky and irrelevant to this case, so we’ll ignore it.)

    “Exclusive” means nobody is allowed to do any of those things except the copyright holder (unless the copyright holder licenses those rights to others, but we’ll get to that.)

    The copyright holder can give/sell/transfer the copyright to someone else (in which case the previous holder is now excluded from doing with the work all the things in the first paragraph above because someone else now holds all those exclusive rights), but that’s not what the AGPL does.

    The copyright holder can also license any or all of the exclusive rights in the first paragraph to some person or party (or in the case of an “open license” like the AGPL, to everyone).

    The AGPL licenses rights like distribution and preparation of derivative works to others (under certain conditions(/covenants) like “you can only distribute copies if you do so under the same license as you got it under”).

    So, if some hypothetical party named “Bob” started a project, they’d hold the copyright. If Bob put the AGPL on that project and also required any contributor to assign copyright on their specific contributions to Bob, Bob would hold the copyright on the entire project code, including all contributions. Someone else could take advantage of the terms of the AGPL allowing derivative works and redistribution to create their own fork (so long as they abided by the conditions(/covenants) in the AGPL), and if they did so, they could omit on their fork any copyright assignment requirement, in which case the fork could end up owned by a mishmash of different copyright holders (making it hard to impossible for the administrator of the fork to do anything tricky like changing what license future versions were under.)

    However, on Bob’s original (non-fork) version, if Bob, as the copyright holder, changes the license file to something proprietary, Bob has (arguably?) created a new work that is not the same work as the previous version, and Bob can license that new version under a different license. (I suppose one might be able to argue that changing just the license file isn’t legally enough to make a new version, but the very next time a nontrivial change was made to the codebase, that would qualify as a new version, so it kindof doesn’t matter.) Bob has already licensed previous versions of his non-fork under the AGPL, so Bob can’t really rescind that license already granted on older versions. But new versions could indeed be put under a different license. (Mind you, there are licenses that have specific terms that make them rescindable on old versions. Take for instance the Open Gaming License fiasco that WotC tried to pull not terribly long ago. But I don’t think the AGPL is a license that can be rescinded.)

    Since Bob can’t rescind the license on older versions, if Bob made a future version proprietary, the community or any particular party that wanted to could take the last AGPL version of the non-fork and make a fork from there that remained under the AGPL.

    The moral of the story is: if you don’t want the copylefted code project you start to be changed to a proprietary license later, don’t do any copyright assignment agreement. The codebase being owned by a diverse mishmash of different copyright holders is a feature, not a bug.

    And, as mentioned elsewhere in this post, Immich is owned by a lot of different copyright holders as it has no copyright assignment requirement.


  • Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?

    Well, there’s Corey Doctorow, of course. He literally wrote the book on Enshittification.

    There are definitely more “behind the scenes” folks doing a lot for that particular cause who don’t so much have a following of anywhere near the same size, but nonetheless do fight enshittification in big ways. Bradley Kuhn comes to mind.