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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Your freedom to do those things under capitalism is wholly bound by your existing wealth, and wealth begets wealth. When your parents are well off, you can get into good schools, get better education, and ultimately get a better job and, really, be a better worker bringing more wealth into the already existing pool of wealth your family had. Those who have been disenfranchised by way of things like eminent domain, redlining, or the straight up prosecution of them and their fellow men simply don’t have that option to rise up. They don’t even have the opportunity to try and fail, they’ve failed by their very existence. At a macro scale, once you’ve reached the top (e.x. Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) you have the resources to not only out-do any of the competition but to sell products at a loss to starve your competition and bully them into submission, which big companies do all the time instead of investing in better products. It’s just good business.

    Circumstance plays a lot into how much wealth you start out with and how much wealth you end up being able to accrue, so while it’s nice being not even at the top but even just the middle, it’s important to have the mindfulness to know that there are those below you who don’t have the same freedoms, and they’re not there because their businesses did poorly. Some of them are, but most are simply victims of greater powers stealing their capital.


  • What sucks is if there was no commercial part here - i.e. like how you’re doing it just for fun, or if we lived in a magical world where we all just agreed that creative works were the shared output of humanity as a whole - then there would be no problem, we’d all be free to just use what we need to make new things however we want. But there is a commercial part to it, somebody is trying to gain using the collective work of others, and that makes it unethical.











  • You could check out Frappe Drive (and Frappe, the framework it’s built on, it’s pretty awesome). They aren’t accepting contributions at the moment but I’m sure that’ll change once it’s out of beta like with the other frappe apps. There’s also Raven messenger also built on Frappe and you can use the two together (but without any real integration between the two yet, but that’s on the roadmap on the Raven side).

    I’ve spent a lot of time researching alternatives and NextCloud is the only one that does everything it does in one place. I’ve dug into the code a lot to find places to make it work faster and came out confused and mostly empty. It’s also federated, and I think it’s the only FOSS file sharing platform that is. It’'s a very mature application so you’ll be hard pressed to find features that are missing, but also to find things that could be further optimized without ripping out major chunks of the application which are likely interconnected with other major chunks of the application. For my personal use NextCloud instance I’ve resorted to just completely deleting the database and installing everything fresh between major versions, then just rescanning my local folder.


  • Then they’d be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn’t be able to lock down the code that’s already been released under the more permissive BSD license.

    Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It’s huge, which makes me think it’s the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.

    EDIT: turns out it’s Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.