stinerman

Of course you can fork it, but you can’t call it Mastodon. That’s trademarked. Just like how you can fork Firefox but have to call it Waterfox or Iceweasel or Librewolf.

The confusion here is between Mastodon the company and Mastodon the software and instances of the running software. Eugen Rochko owns the first two. He also owns the instances mastodon.social and mastodon.online. Everything else is outside of his control.

It was never controlled by a single person to begin with.

The computer program called Mastodon was (and still is for now) completely controlled by Eugen Rochko. In the future it will be controlled by a non-profit.

See this and this for more info.

You can see exactly what he made in 2023. The report is available here.

€60k

the retailer is generally considered oblivious to the situation until proven otherwise they have zero incentive to vet the product.

In fact they are willfully ignorant because selling counterfeit merchandise helps line go up.

Yes and it’s likely that they will not be allowed to any longer after Google lost their anti-trust case.

Someone who repackages/patches free software has different incentives than upstream. So generally speaking, derivative browsers are more privacy friendly, have better features, etc.

That’s not to say that upstream isn’t important. It absolutely is! It’s just that derivatives are generally better.

The Supreme Court did pretty much read out that 3rd section.

I got big time Ferengi vibes from that comment.

It’s porn if the state wants to harass you for something.

There’s a guy who works as a product owner at my employer. He has a PharmD. He got fed up with the metrics for how many prescriptions he had to fill. Now he does software.

It’s crazy to think that someone has a terminal degree in a really technical field and he nope’d out because of how bad it got.

Microsoft’s most important customers are businesses, who generally don’t deal with this (they have corporate images). Home users also generally don’t deal with this given they buy a computer that has already been configured.

Linux-based systems have always needed to be better because almost no one buys a computer with $DISTRO already installed and configured.

I had forgotten about that and now I am sad that I’ve been reminded.

If Back to the Future was made today, Marty would have traveled back to 1994.

Glad I could be of service.

Ahh the halcyon days of downloading one song from a private FTP server with upload ratios, found by Lycos FTP search. Over a modem, natch, so it took about 50 minutes…and that’s when your mom didn’t kick you off the internet so she could make a call.

It will come down to the laws in your country and how much money you plan to spend on lawyers if your employer wants to force the issue.

He (Linus Torvalds) made Linux as a hobby during his time in college/university to teach him about operating system design. Because it was the part of the operating system called the kernel that the GNU project didn’t have yet (more on this in a moment), it became very popular. Richard Stallman created the GNU project because he believed that every person should have the right to study and share the software that runs on their computer.

There is nothing specifically anti-corporate in either of their motivations.

the only viable alternative, for 99% of the population, is Apple

This is largely because Windows and MacOS come preinstalled and that’s how the vast majority of people interact with operating systems. If you had to choose your OS, I’m sure there’d be more choice in the market. Not necessarily Linux, but just more choice in general.

I’ve been using some Linux flavor for about 15 years. The biggest thing about switching (at least back then) was I knew how to configure Windows just to my liking. With Linux it was a lot more difficult because I had to google everything. Like “how do I change the wallpaper?” How do I get the login screen to appear on the correct monitor, etc. It was just frustrating because I knew how to do this in Windows, but I felt like a major noob again with Linux.