They will use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Which means it’s not open source, and no-one else can sell replacement cartridges, parts etc.

It might still be a good printer and enjoyed by some, but it really annoys me when companies mix these terms up, almost certainly deliberately.

Speaking later to BBC1’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Mahmood denied this was about banning protest: “This is not about a ban. This is about restrictions and conditions that would enable the police to maybe put further time restrictions or move those protests to other places.

From the BBC’s article:

The home secretary will carry out a review of current protest legislation to “ensure powers are sufficient and being applied consistently”, the government said.

This will include powers to ban protests outright, the government said.

I think it will be Oracle. They massively fund the Tony Blair Institute, and Blair has always had a love of ID cards.

I for one would love to throw money at Mozilla, or any alternative, that has experienced developers behind it, doesn’t have conflicts of interest and acts on behalf of its users. This is why I donate to Servo, Ladybird and Dillo too (I know one of these is not like the others 😄).

I don’t think they’d reach their current levels of funding through donations, but it might be possible to get enough together to keep it on life support.

I know this wouldn’t be perfect, but surely better than losing it completely.

The only way to get people to switch from Adobe is to wait for Adobe to make the life unbearable for their own customers

Completely agree with this! The big opportunities to get mindshare will come completely out of the blue, and likely as a result of massive blunders on Adobe’s side.

We never know when the blunders will come, we just have to be ready and provide the next best user experience so that the free software is the “obvious” place to switch to.

As we saw from the twitter/reddit migrations, the fediverse did get a large amount of traction, but bluesky became the obvious alternative because its UI was basically the same.

And that’s fine - the fediverse is it’s own thing and many people (myself included) don’t want “adoption at all costs” - but I think it’s worth pointing out that it does hinder adoption in these big moments.

I have a lot of respect for free software projects that deliberately replicate the UI of an existing proprietary project. They make it so easy to recommend for people to switch when those moments come.

What I have seen is that once people get a taste of free software that really easily solves their problem, it makes the benefits “real” to them and they start to look for other alternatives on their own.

I agree with parts about entitlement. The expectation of support and treatment of open source software as if it was proprietary is a real problem.

But, the authour makes a similar mistake - they conflate open source software with source-available (proprietary) software. As an example, I strongly disagree with this part:

When software is open-source, it is open-source, not necessarily free and open-source (FOSS), and even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive licence. The code being available in and of itself does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.

If you replace it with this version, I am happy:

When software is source-available, it is source-available, not necessarily open source or free and open-source (FOSS). The code being distributed under a source available license does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.

I think it’s really important that we keep a clear delineation between free/open source software on one side, and source-available (proprietary software) on the other.

A lot of companies are trying to co-opt and blur the meaning of the term so they can say “seeing the source was always the point, none of the other freedoms mattered”, in order to sell you proprietary licenses.

Open source gives you the right to take, modify and redistribute it. Source available does not. And that’s ok, just please don’t blur the terms together.

even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive license

Likewise, this is definitionally untrue. The whole purpose of FOSS is to give you the four freedoms.

I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source - public money, public code! The only way to take down these giant US companies is to work together, and the most effective way to work together is to release everything in the open in such a way that anyone can build on top of it.

If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US. It wouldn’t increase productivity in the long run, it would instead substitute dependency on a few US companies for a few EU companies.

But, if they invest in open source software, it could spur innovation not only in the companies that are directly funded, but also thousands of other companies throughout the EU that would now have common infrastructure that they can build on top of.

That’s good news, in my opinion. If they’re allowed to just completely disregard copyright when training, then I should be able to completely disregard any attempted copyright on the output too.