The open-source alternative to Mailchimp, Brevo, Mailjet, Listmonk, Mailerlite, and Klaviyo, Loop.so, etc.

That’s the first paragraph of the project page.

Not to rain on the parade, but in my experience, having had to email customers in bulk … sending tickets and logistics requirements for large events … I can tell you that self hosting this is a complete and utter waste of time.

You’ll get blocked before the first batch of emails leave your mailer.

Not even paid MailChimp or Campaign Monitor could guarantee delivery.

The problem is not the platform for sending email, it’s the centralised nature of email hosting, much of it is behind Google and Microsoft hosted services.

I’m a software developer with over 40 years experience. Much of it with FOSS.

Your argument in relation to GitHub does not take in the reality of the effort involved with migrating to a different platform, effort that is likely unpaid, has no logistical upside and stalls the development efforts of a project, not to mention breaking every single source code repository link across the wider internet, links that represent publicity and community engagement.

It’s one thing migrating after a service vanishes, it’s an entirely different thing to migrate due to the philosophical differences perceived by the ownership change to Microsoft. In my opinion, chanting FOSS is insufficient as an argument.

I have several projects and clients that use GitHub and while I detest copilot and the enshitification that the new ownership represents, I’m also aware that it’s likely that the sale provides financial security to the continued existence of GitHub.

I think it’s admirable that a project is asking its community if it should stay or move and I wish the developer(s) wrestling with this all the strength and patience in the world to work through it.

I know I’ve struggled with the same considerations and I’m still using GitHub … for now.

Docker is not virtualisation, although it’s a common misconception.

A better way to think of it is a security wrapper around untrusted processes.

You can prove this for yourself by looking at all the processes running in a Docker host while one or more containers are running, you’ll see all the processes listed.

In other words, you don’t need a CPU capable of virtualisation to run Docker.

Use a bash command line:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6250698/how-to-decode-url-encoded-string-in-shell

It’s like “sugar free” and “green”, meaningless unless it’s regulated, policed and prosecuted.

As others have said, the best labelling system we currently have is the licence that’s attached to the software.

Mind you, that in and of itself is not sufficient, since the source code needs to come with it, and arguably the ability to actually compile it, neither of which are guaranteed, again more requirements for policing and prosecution.

Also, when I say policing, I’m not talking about the law enforcement community, I’m talking about developers and end users paying attention and calling out breaches.

Whilst contemplating all that, this costs money, something that is in very short supply within the wider open source software community and what little there is, goes to pay for food and lodging for a very very very small group of developers.

Fix funding and you can have all the stickers in the world, in the meantime, nope.

So, somewhat disappointedly … no.

Tah, I’ve now added my question on Mastodon.

First of all, congratulations.

Second, I have a question.

Based on the link you supplied, SPI is a USA based organisation. How do you expect to protect yourself against the legal lunacy that is currently overrunning the USA?

For example, what if as a member project you are suddenly compelled by a USA court to install a backdoor into your codebase?

It’s easy to ignore such concerns, but governments around the planet are reevaluating their relationship with companies like Microsoft for precisely such reasons, and they have much more money to spend on legal advice than you do.

When I last played with this a decade or so ago, there were several map tiling solutions in the geosciences that are self hosted.

From memory, “World Wind” is a good search term, but there’s others.

I use sshfs.

I’ve had similar “fun” with the character defaults on MySQL, from memory for a time it was Swedish by default, rather than UTF.

I’m guessing that they pasted code from inside Microsoft Word.

Remember … with great power comes … something.

Hmm … we should start collecting these.

Anyone know of an existing list?

If you look at the UTF definition, it seems that there are at least four of them. The weird one in your comment might actually be one of the other two because as far as I can tell, the “Greek Question Mark” looks identical to the “semicolon”.

Just the last one, right before the EOF.

Speaking of EOF, I wonder what a heredoc might do with this 😇

You are right … but, you’re not thinking big enough.

Think … sticky tape on the bottom of a mouse.

Hmm … bash.

Might well be, but I’ve been writing software for over 40 years and this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Unicode is a way to encode the things that humans use to write stuff into a computer.

ASCII is for example another way, as is EBCDIC.

All these methods translate squiggles that we’ve used for centuries into something that can be represented inside a computer.

For example, the letter “A” is under ASCII represented by the number 65.

This post is pointing out that there are two characters that look identical, but have different numbers, which means that what the user sees is identical, but what the computer sees us different.

This is the basis for much tomfoolery.