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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Oh! That’s good to hear. Honestly, that issue has kindof pissed me off enough at Rossmann specifically that I kindof quit watching his YouTube videos and stuff. So I very much haven’t been following him or FUTO.

    I wonder if the FUTO website still claims that they require all projects to be or have a plan to become specifically “Open Source”.

    Edit: Yup. They still say “All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so” on this page. Maybe that means that they intend for Grayjay to “develop a plan to eventually become” properly Open Source and not just “source first”.


  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlNewPipe v0.27.0 No longer Working? [Update]
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    5 months ago

    Just in case this matters to OP or anyone else in this thread, Grayjay isn’t Open Source, despite Rossman’s and FUTO’s claims to the contrary. Its license disallows any commercial use of Grayjay, and also disallows removing any features related to paying FUTO. Which disqualify Grayjay as “Open Source” by the OSI’s definition.

    And consequently, F-Droid won’t distribute Grayjay unless they change their license.



  • Yeah. I figured the day-of-the-month change should definitely happen at UTC midnight. I kindof like the idea that a day of the week lasts from before I wake up to after I go to sleep. (Or at least that there’s no changeover during business hours.)

    But hell. If you wanted to run for president of the world on a platform of reforming date/time tracking but planned for the days of the week to change at midnight UTC, I’d still vote for you.


  • Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

    Good call. The definitions of “noon” and “midnight” would need to be formalized a bit more, but given any line of longitude, the sun passes directly over that line of longitude “exactly” once every 24 hours. (I put “exactly” in quotes because even that isn’t quite exactly true, but we account for that kind of thing with leap seconds.) So you could base noon on something like “when the sun is directly over a point on such longitudinal line (and then round to the nearest hour).”

    Could still be a little weird near the poles, but I think that definition would still be sensical. If you’re way up north, for instance, and you’re in the summer period when the sun never sets, you still just figure out your longitude and figure when the sun passes directly over some point on that longitudinal line.

    Though in practice, I’d suspect the area right around the poles would pretty much just need to just decide on something and go with it so they don’t end up having to do calculations to figure out whether it’s “afternoon” or “morning” every time they move a few feet. Heh. (Not that a lot of folks spend a lot of time that close to the poles.) Maybe they’d just decide arbitrarily that the current day of the week and period of the day are whatever they currently are in Greenwich. Or maybe even abandon the use og day of the week and period of the day all together.

    Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?

    Yup.

    I’m just thinking about things like scheduling dentist appointments at my local dentist. I’d think it would be less confusing for ordinary local interactions like that if we could say “next Wednesday at 20:00” rather than having to keep track of the fact that depending what period of the day it is (relative to landmarks like “dinner time” or “midmorning”) it may be a different day of the week.

    And it’s not like there aren’t awkward mismatches beteen days of the week and days of the month now. Months don’t always start on the first day of the week, for instance. (Hell. We don’t even agree on what the first day of the week is.) “Weeks” are an artifact of lunar calendars. (And, to be fair, so are months.)

    (And while we’re on the topic of months, we should have 13 of 'em. 12 of length 30 each and one at the end of 5 days or on leap years 6 days. And they should be called “first month”, “second month”, “third month”, etc. None of this “for weird historical reasons, October is the 10th month, even though the prefix ‘oct’ would seem to indicate it should be the 8th” bs. Lol.)


  • No, see, how it would work without timezones is:

    • Everyone would use UTC and a 24-hour clock rather than AM/PM.
    • If that means you eat breakfast at 1400 hours and go to bed around 400 hours and that the sun is directly overhead at 1700 hours (or something more random like 1737), fine. (Better than fine, actually!)
    • Every area keeps track of what time of day daily events (like meals, when school starts or lets out, etc) happen. Though I think generally rounding to the nearest whole hour or, maybe in some cases, half hour makes the most sense. (And it’s not even like everyone in the same area keeps the same schedule as it is now.)
    • You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
    • One caveat is that with this approach, the day-of-the-month change (when we switch from the 29th of the month to the 30th, for instance) happens at different times of the day (like, in the above example it would be close to 1900 hours) for different people. Oh well. People will get used to it. But I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour. (Now, you might be thinking "yeah, but that’s just timezones again. But consider those timezones. The way you’d figure out what day of the week it was would involve taking the longitude and rounding. Much simpler than having to keep a whole-ass database of all the data about all the different timezones. And it would only come into play when having to decide when the day of the week changes over.)
    • Though, one more caveat. If you do that, then there has to be a longitudinal line where it’s always a different day of the week on one side than it is just on the other side. But that’s already the case today, so not really a drawback relative to what we have today.


  • Thank you for bringing more awareness of this. I’m what you might call an “AI skeptic” and don’t really care what happens in the AI space as long as it doesn’t screw up things I care about.

    But I care deeply about FOSS and AI is screwing it up. I don’t want to have to explain why XYZ thing absolutely is not Open Source and that “Open Source” has a specific meaning beyond “you can look at (at least some of) the source code.”

    (Compare it to the term “hacker” that has among at least a lot of muggles taken on the exclusive meaning of committing some kind of fraud with computers. Originally it meant something very different. And it’s unfortunate the world has forgotten the old meaning.)

    Another project that is diluting the term “Open Source” is Grayjay, a video streaming app that is a FUTO project (and FUTO is a Louis Rossman thing.) Rossman has called it Open Source in YouTube videos, but it’s not Open Source. (The license is here and forbids things like “commercial use” (selling the software or derivative works) and removing facilites for paying the FUTO project from derivative works. Which is a lot less restrictive than the license was last time I checked it. Previously it didn’t allow redistribution or derivative works at all. But it’s not Open Source even now.)






  • The Open Source Iniative has a particular definition of “Open Source” that includes a lot more things than just “the source code is available.” I’ll admit that there is a certain extent to which the OSI’s definiteion is implicit. For instance the OSI wouldn’t consider a license that didn’t allow recipients to sell the code for profit, but that bit’s implicit under “6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.”

    (I should mention that there’s nothing in the Open Source definition indicating that Open Source software repositories can’t have gatekeepers or anything. That’s expected.)

    I wouldn’t use the term “Open Source” (and I kinda like to capitalize it to make it clear what definition I’m using… though I’m not 100% consistent about it; maybe I should start being so) to refer to any software that didn’t meet the OSI’s definition. So, for instance, I wouldn’t refer to Louis Rossman’s Grayjay (which disallows for instance sale and derivative works) or Meta’s LLaMa as “Open Source” despite the fact that the source code is publicly available for no charge to anyone who cares to download it. (The term “source available” certainly fits applications like Grayjay and LLaMa’s engine, though the term “Open Source” doesn’t apply to LLM weights.)

    And the distinction’s important to me. I don’t exclusively run Open Source (or Free/Libre) software, but there are a lot of specific contexts in which I do only use Open Source software. For instance, I don’t run any proprietary (by which I mean “non-FLOSS”) apps on my smartphone. And Grayjay doesn’t count in my book, and until/unless it one day does (or I quit abandon that particular restriction), I wouldn’t consider using it on my smart phone.

    Your point that Open Source software contributions basically always have to be approved by somebody before the they get into “the” repository (the most canonical one that “everyone” pulls from, though you can totally make your own derivative work and publish it if it’s truly Open Source).



  • Ah! Yes. No reason why you couldn’t. It would require making a new repo, copying the files into the new repo, and committing in one big commit before pushing to gitlab, but yeah. Definitely doable.

    (I basically always do this myself. I don’t start the Git repo until I want to Open Source it. So when I first Open Source it, it’s a “complete” (or at least “minimum-viable-product”) project and there’s only one commit. Every commit I make and push thereafter is public, but there aren’t any from before my first push/publish.)


  • Open Source is sometimes described as “anyone can contribute”, but that’s an oversimplification. Open Source projects always have a gatekeeper or small community of gatekeepers who decide which contributions are actually incorporated into the project and which are rejected as not up to snuff or straight up bad ideas or whatever.

    That’s what you meant by your first question, right? Not “how do I hide the code of future changes” but “how do I retain control over what code is added to my repo”, correct?

    Even if you meant it the other way, you could theoretically do that. Open Source one version and then never release any newer versions.


  • (Did I mention IANAL?)

    Yeah, but at least in the U.S., the rules are that if you made something subject to copyright protections as part of your job, absent any specific agreement between you and your employer, it’s “work for hire” and thus owned by your employer. That is, it doesn’t require any specific agreement/contract to make it your employer’s. It requires a specific agreement to make it yours and not your employer’s.

    (Unless you didn’t write the “custom functionalities” as part of your job, which can be pretty dicey. If you did it during off hours but using your employer’s computer, for instance, it becomes a difficult question to answer whether you wrote them specifically as part of your job. Even if you did it during off hours and on your own hardware with your own license for the proprietary software in question, it’d be difficut to decide whether it was work for hire or not.)

    So, if you want to do things the right way, that involves making an agreement with your employer that you own the copyright on the code in question. If you moved forward with distributing the software you wrote without such an agreement that wouldn’t be “doing things the right way.” That would be “hoping you don’t get caught.” I don’t think there’d really be any confusion, really, since it’s pretty cut-and-dried that unless you’ve discussed this with your employer and made an agreement, you clearly don’t have the right to distribute this software under any license (open source or otherwise.)

    Now, even the step of making such an agreement would be kindof complex. Assuming your employer was open to the idea, you might assume you could make a contract transferring ownership of the work to you, but contracts require “consideration”, meaning both parties (you and your employer) would have to benefit from it. You could potentially argue that by open sourcing it, your employer has the chance of benefitting from voluntary contributions by a community of Open Source developers, and that could likely (IANAL) fulfill the consideration requirement.

    Another option, and I’m thinking probably the most straightforward, would be for your employer to retain the copyright and grant you permission (and I think it’d be good to get that permission in writing, though it wouldn’t have to be on paper; an email would be fine, but you’d probably want to forward it to an email address you own and would retain if you ever left the company) to publish it as an open source project (and I believe the GPL would be fine for this) on their behalf as part of your job. Lots of companies do this. Netflix for instance.

    And, again, IANAL and this isn’t legal advice. I’ve done some research and I’m interested in these topics, but I’m not an expert and you’ll get a lot more mileage from consulting a lawyer.