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!

That would be “Free as in Freedom”!

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.

Hey,

I am an electrical engineer, but a natural at coding so after I got my degree I was quickly pushed by my employer towards more programming related projects. I was pretty good at it, but I suffered from similar issues as you. The race seems never ending and there’s always a new thing to know just around the corner, with seemingly no space or time to learn stuff in depth or create a decent and understandable architecture and documentation. I also really missed the social and emotional aspect, which seemingly is not how all people function: a lot of my colleagues were perfectly content to spend 8 hours a day racing through libraries and editors and calling it a day. In the end I got a pretty severe depression and anxiety (those issues were already underlying but the work triggered them again). It took a long time to start recovering again, but now I feel OK most days and I have beautiful moments and value in life. After a period of therapy I started volunteering as a bike repairman parttime (as this is the only workload I could handle) and that was really nice. Now I actually started studying again to become a librarian or work in another function for public information and I feel that it suits me well at the moment. No one can tell what the future will bring, the librarian thing might work out or it might not, but there is always something new to do. Don’t spend your life trying to be someone you’re not. Don’t try to do what you’d love to be, try to love what you are.

This got a bit serious, but this seems like a safe space 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! 🤞

Well, for me it was a bit to focused on visual programming, as I actually do know quite some programming languages and feel more comfortable with a full language.

But it has great tutorials, everything you create is yours, the full engine is Foss and it is very capable. I think it is the ideal engine for beginners, I remember thinking that I wished it was around when I was just starting out :).

The only paid stuff is if you want to use their online services (for hosting your game or leaderboards) and some assets are also for sale I guess (but this is the same in almost any other engine, e.g. unity asset store or Unreal). So no paywall in my opinion, again, the full engine is MIT licensed.

GDevelop fits your question 100% in my opinion.

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)

This looks really awesome. I’m also working on a small project in godot (just a simple sokoban implementation) but this looks way more complex! Nice of you to make it open, makes it easy to learn and contribute.

Can I ask why you choose MIT over GPL for licensing? Just thinking about this because of an article that was recently posted here.

Thank you! Every contribution to the ecosystem is valuable :).

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.