We've lost a lot with the deletion of this repo. Not the code - that's already out in the ether - but the absurdist comedy of the issues, pull requests, and commit history of trying to piecemeal delete third party non-FOSS software.
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Sometimes I wonder though why GitHub allows like an anonymous account with no projects and no followers to do things like upload executables to my issue tracker, or file a dozen new issues on a project with 160+ watchers. Then there's the people who use AI to fill their profiles with fake content to look less sus. It's particularly spicy when you work for a non-profit that puts a lot of oversight into decisions like banning people. I think Microsoft could be doing more to make sure the people who participate in the GitHub community are openly original and have good intentions.
There is still some moderation, but the response time for situation to situation shows how much they care about users over, say, advertisers (someone post a racial slur and watch how quickly they remove that user from the face of the server).
At least sourceforge has a download button in the front page.
They turned Github into a social media.
Which in itself would summon the vitriol of the super-trolls. "Moderation is censorship" is the most absolutely ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
It's fine both to "moderate" your own repo, as well as to "censor" your own repo. No need to play word games or demand that strangers that you owe absolutely nothing to can't be upset. They can be upset, and you can ignore them until they go away.
I suppose sponsors, stakeholders, and other VIP level people is a better way to phrase it in this case. Anything that can explode to a huge PR issue will put all those off.
> Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.
> Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)
Read the whole thing:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...
People often conflate the two. That censorship and First Amendment violations are one and the same. They are not.
And the reason the U.S. government saw fit to restrict its ability to censor its public is because they recognized that that ability could be used to censor legitimate criticism of the government.
Even worse is "moderation of this kind would disproportionately impact disenfranchised LGBTWBIPOC+ users since they're more likely to have new accounts", "gatekeeping" is therefore racist, etc. ad nauseam.
That's for sure is the most absolutely ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
To my mind, premoderation is the way. Any new user's submissions go to the premoderation queue for review, not otherwise visible. Noise and spam can be rejected automatically. More underhanded stuff gets a manual review. All rejections are silent, except for the rare occasion of a legitimate but naive user making an honest mistake.
What's passed gets published. Users who passed premoderation without issues for, say, 10 times, skip the human review step, given that they've passed automatic filters, so they can talk without any perceptible delay. The most trusted of them even get the privilege to do the human review step themselves %)
This is such a ridiculous accusation. Why do discussions about source-available models often turn into accusations of soliciting free labor? Why can't authors just provide access to source code, but reserve some or all of the distribution rights? It's their code, after all. Nobody is forcing 'the open source community' to contribute under the terms set forth; anybody who does contribute does so under their own free will, under the terms set forth by the license.
It doesn't always have to be a binary choice between open source and closed source, nor does it justify further accusations of "openwashing."
In the Christian religion, God ultimately protects the virtuous pacifists by putting them in Heaven, away from bullies. In an online forum, there's no transcendental force to render such a service, so...
But yes; even newsgroups, BBSes, etc. were subject to this kind of stuff. People have always been people, even smart people with money to purchase computers.
> * Contribution to Project: You are encouraged to contribute improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes back to the project. Contributions must be submitted to the official repository and will be reviewed and incorporated at the discretion of the maintainers.
> * Assignment of Rights: By submitting contributions, you agree that all intellectual property rights, including copyright, in your contributions are assigned to Winamp. You hereby grant Winamp a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, modify, and distribute your contributions as part of the software, without any compensation to you.
> * Waiver of Rights: You waive any rights to claim authorship of the contributions or to object to any distortion, mutilation, or other modifications of the contributions.
>Nobody is forcing 'the open source community' to contribute under the terms set forth; anybody who does contribute does so under their own free will, under the terms set forth by the license.
And? Yes, we're all acting out of our own free will. The owners of Winamp decided out of their own free will to release their code under those terms, and I'm criticizing them for trying to take advantage of people also out of my own free will. What's the issue?
>The Winamp Collaborative License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works.
I find value in every one of these types of releases. Sometimes that value is just a chuckle... knowing even successful codebases are as duct-taped together as all the rest.
Look at Apple, they claim E2EE, but don't even allow to verify that defeating the purpose of E2EE entirely (lack of need to trust the provider)
Simple. Because the company literally wrote this in their press release[1] at the time they were releasing it.
Direct quote “This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.”
Further direct quote: “With this initiative to open the source code, Winamp is taking the next step in its history, allowing its users to contribute directly to improving the product.”
They are literaly soliciting free labor.
This is how the press release ends: “Interested developers can now make themselves known at the following address: about.winamp.com/free-llama” what is that if not a solicitation for free labour?
> anybody who does contribute does so under their own free will, under the terms set forth by the license
So wait. Just so I understand. Is your problem that you think they are falsely accused of soliciting free labour? Or that they are indeed fully were soliciting free labour but you would rather not want people harsh your vibes by discussing this?
1: https://www.llama-group.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024-...
Dang rate limited my HN account because I got into too many controversial discussions. Arguments just like this one. Did I call him out for censorship? No. I asked him to keep it rate limited. Because the truth is sometimes I see things and I just have to reply.
The word 'censorship' is clearly defined to include actions by many groups, not just governmental entities.
Now, I think there is a line between moderation and censorship but it is not based on who is doing it. That line is can get real fuzzy, but in my opinion (and it mirrors some supreme court decisions) the most significant difference is in what they try to control. Moderation tries to regulate how people communicate and censorship tries to control which ideas get expressed. Almost all moderation also includes some amount of censorship.
I'd also be careful attributing these actions to malice without further motive, when it very well could also be attributed to excitement i.r.t. sharing and collaborating on Winamp's source code in public, under a single-source.
Yes, "good ol' days" types will always move the goalposts further and further back when you point out that things were exactly the same in the mythical time period they want to return to
Meta uses they LLMs to summarize comments already and can do this, yet they choose to allow obvious crypto scammers, T-shirt scams, “hey add me comments”.
A simple LLM prompt of “is this post possibly a scam”, especially for new accounts, would do wonders. GitHub could likely do it too.
We get about 50% [obvious] spam/scam signups (only 5 or 6 a day).
That’s pretty sobering, when you consider that it’s a very low-profile, unpromoted, region-locked (US, Canada, Ireland, and India), iOS-only native app.
We vet each signup manually.
Academic censorship? Start your own journal and publish there. Religious censorship? Start your own church and gather your followers. Forum censored you? Start your own website where they have zero say about anything and write about whatever you want.
Government censorship? You are screwed, and you go straight to jail if you try to break free and start your own.
Once, that option got turned off accidentally and anyone could sign up. We got about 10 signups a day until I reverted the change, all spammers and bots.
The server logs also show that we get hit by script kiddies dozens of times an hour. This is such a tiny scale operation, with no meaningful commercial activity going on, but anything exposed to the public internet should be considered under attack 24/7.
Fair Source is a better model in that regard, kudos for using that! And I personally have no problem with using the term “open source” for that, although just using the distinct term is better.
In case of Winamp though, they:
1. Used a crayon license that prohibited pretty much everything and was indeed focused on collaboration
2. Made a press release about “opening up” the source – not using the exact phrase “open source” (except in the URL: https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-co...), but misleading nonetheless
3. Weren’t even the original authors
This is openwashing, and it is ridiculous, and they were rightfully shamed.
these actions could be construed as malice, but i would definitely attribute them as greed. AKA, they want contributions, but want to prevent anyone else but themselves from being able to commercially exploit it.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL assert the same right recursively for downstream users, more or less (details vary between copyleft licenses). But granting the right (to distribute modified copies) to first-order recipients of the source code is common to all free and open-source licenses. That's great! I imagine it's what you're getting at with the phrase 'properly secured'.
But to qualify as open-source, a license must allow redistribution of modified copies, and copyleft is not the only kind of free software license
See (for instance) the Free Software Foundation Europe's FAQ entry 'what is open-source software?':
https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/legal/faq.en.html#opensource
as well as the Criterion 3 of the Open Source Initiative's open-source definition: https://opensource.org/osd
That assumes that everyone has full information of course. Discussing the terms publicly is helping everyone reach that state.
> Nobody is asking for an uninvolved third-party to police the collaboration.
And someone is asking you to police what people are chatting about here? Doesn’t feel to be an entirely thought through argument.
> I'd also be careful attributing these actions to malice without further motive
I don’t actually care if they are “malicious” or “inept” or “ill informed” or anything else. In fact I think someone was excited about the open collaboration, and someone else at the company was worried about losing business opportunities and that is how we ended up with this situation. Maybe it was even the same person at different times.
Maybe they heard about open source but never really understood the concept, and the motivations of people participating in it.
Or maybe they are just as greedy as they appear to be.
Who knows and who cares. What matters is that this is a rough deal and people should not play within their rules.
But not even all Christian scholars subscribe to that definition, let alone pacifists in general. Many pacifists are perfectly ok with self-defense.
But, to my mind, pacifists choose to not fight back by definition, or that would be violence, so their prolonged existence is only possible because other social mechanisms hold back violence which would destroy them. Interaction with these mechanisms may be the point of holding a pacifist position: say, a monk or a nun may have a higher moral authority because of a declared personal abstinence from any violence, and hence indirectly incentivize lay people to protect them.
Of course there are people who call themselves pacifists but admit a right for self-defense, but only not organized or military; such a position again is only possible when someone else would partake in a defensive warfare and protect them.
Abstaining from aggression while being ready and willing to respond to aggression with full force, lethal when required, looks to me like the most logical "lawful good" position. It has a chance to produce an equilibrium when multiple parties live in peace for a long time, and any violent deviations are quashed.
We can quibble about whether a "hacktivist" group can even exist at all or if it's a convenient lie the Internet has collectively told itself to justify groups of thugs attacking the targets they don't like as "the good ones", but they fit the modern definition of a hacktivist group.
I dislike prescriptivist language. I will continue calling things open source whenever I can see the source code, no matter the license.
The problem is that to outsiders, the initial set of gatekeepers who arose naturally in the early community as "the people that knew what it was about" will themselves appear to be "the toxic assholes", so every community will naively eventually cut out its gatekeepers to be more inviting to newcomers.
Only to have the actual toxic assholes flood in, become the new gatekeepers, and dominate the discussion, and suddenly your Faces of Evil speedrunning Discord must have a stance on the war on Gaza and the US election because we clearly need to keep out the neo-Nazis according to our CoCs, right?
And no, I don't have an answer to this other than to largely disconnect from online platforms and start engaging in your local community. Something I myself am not guilty of doing.
Giving WINE (originally WINdows Emulator) a cute backronym does not change the definition of the word emulator or whether Wine is one. Please check your favorite dictionaries for that.
The OSD does not originate with Amazon. Its ideas and text are drawn from the free software movement and indeed from a not-for-profit, volunteer-driven, community-based project-- namely Debian. Its text is essentially lifted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The term 'open-source' was created to describe an effort by a commercial entity, though-- for the project that would eventually give us Firefox, at a time when the web was dominated by a deeply proprietary monopoly in Internet Explorer.
But all of this should be common knowledge among 'hackers'. At any rate it is extremely easy to discover.
> prescriptivist language
Talk about knowing enough to be dangerous! lol.
> I will continue calling things open source whenever I can see the source code, no matter the license.
Okay? You are successfully resisting being nagged about your use of terms. You are also broadcasting your ignorance of the giants whose shoulders software developers stand upon today.
Software, like many things that can satisfy human needs and wants, is an instrument and mechanism of power. In particular, software and the terms under which it is distributed are often a mechanism by which the software publishers exert power and control over the software's users. 'Open-source', like its more frank ancestor 'free software', exists to signal terms of software distribution that variously protect users from certain strategies of domination by software vendors. Historically (and recently!), that signal associated with the phrase 'open-source' has been a fairly clear (if simplistic) one, because the phrase's usage has been consistent.
When you choose how you will or won't use the phrase 'open-source', you are making a choice about how useful a signal that phrase will be for such purposes in the future. What language is 'correct' in this case gets at a practical and political question we can alternatively get at without any commitment or appeal to a notion of linguistic correctness. That question is this: should there be ready ways to identify terms of software distribution that seek to spare software users from domination by software suppliers?
If one's answer to that is 'yes', then it takes a bit of footwork to get to 'I intend to participate in applying this established safety label to unsafe things'.
> calling things open source whenever I can see the source code
This kind of behavior is arguably a predictable outcome of the strategy of distancing the licensing tactics of the free software movement from that movement's explicit politics, articulations of its on motivations, etc.
(I remember trying at the time of the incident and having less success than now.)
Thanks for sharing the direct link to that video. At the time of the initial outage, I only saw some assertion that they were 'a hacktivist group' on some article on Bleeping Computer, and at the same time the only reason they'd claimed for the DDoS was 'because we could'. Hacking something just because you can is, of course, not doing hacktivism.
If these people are sincere, they are idiots in their propaganda strategy and artless in their 'hacktivism'... but definitely hacktivists.
But tbh this seems too stupid and ill-directed to me to be anything other than a false flag operation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Either way, thanks for the additional context!
Botnets weren't a thing, either.
L-MO = Language Model Optimized
Again, this is a valid, but narrow definition of pacifism. One that is more often found in misguided Christians who take Mathew 5:39 literally than serious scholars. The willingness for self defense does not preclude pacifism at all.
A good example is Mahatma Gandhi who is widely recognized as a pacifist, yet argued that it is better to fight than to be a coward in the face of injustice.
> In computing, an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the host) to behave like another computer system (called the guest).
say, a monk or a nun may have a higher moral authority because of a declared personal abstinence from any violence, and hence indirectly incentivize lay people to protect them.
Abstaining from violence at the expense of others putting themselves in harms way to protect them?
Shouldn't they try to make these "lay people" abstain from violence as well?
But then who is left to defend the pacifists?
Does that mean in the face of outside aggressors all pacifists will die soon or live horrible lives under oppression from the aggressor?
Which I guess is OK for them if they believe that something better is available for them in 'heaven'?
The classical thought experiment replaces the British Raj with a German, or, better yet, Soviet occupation administration. With them, peaceful protests spectacularly won't work, and would be insane to try.
(Right after the independence was achieved, the land descended into a brutal war that claimed 20M dead, the death toll similar to that of WWI.)
It would be hypocrisy if the monk commanded others to fight instead of him, while also declaring that he finds violence morally debasing and thus unacceptable for himself. But I don't think that laypeople would respect such a figure.
https://www.winehq.org/about states that it was an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator", and it isn't now, the opposite of what you claim. (I don't really believe winehq, but I can't find the original discussion on newsgroup archives.)
In fact, it does. Literally, "This is not a pipe," because an image of a pipe is not a pipe.
From the artist:
> The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!
Sourced from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images