Aug 25, 2020

When madness of crowds affects the election results, the wins and losses are meaningless

We live in a world where everyone is digitally connected and social media influencing is at an all time high and to top it, the IQ of the average voter is less than a few cents. All of this doesn't sound like the right combination, especially for a political system like democracy where largest head count determines who the winner is.

Aug 12, 2020

Its high time that social media companies start compensating content creators with some revenue

Its no hidden fact that users on any social media platform are typically both consumers and publishers of content. The content which the user wearing "consumer" shoes relishes to read or watch is exactly what another user wearing the "publisher" shoes has put online. Consequently, the "publisher" user automatically deserves a fair amount of income generated out of all content activity on a given platform.

Aug 11, 2020

"Open Source" feels like a slap on freedom's face when it comes to projects like Android

The word itself should have made it clear but we still didn't listen. The lax licensing of Android to Apache-2.0 should have given us a hint, but we still chose to ignore it. Of course, not everyone ignored it, there were people like Richard Stallman who kept talking about it and warned us about it back in 2011:

Aug 8, 2020

Susan Svrluga is one brave and independent journalist whom Stallman fans should follow on twitter

Yeah Yeah, we all know that twitter is a non-free platform which RMS himself refuses to use but that doesn't mean his fans should do the same too, especially when the recently appointed President of FSF himself is on twitter - the guy who is supposed to be the RMS replacement!

Aug 7, 2020

Stop donating to "foundations", donate directly to developers if you want to help open source

The problem with foundations (and many similar tribalism constructs) is that they are highly prone to politics and turf wars over non-issues. The top brass in these organizations hardly care about the core issues their "foundation" was meant to solve such as advocacy of free software (in case of FSF), they are more interested in things like national politics and general social issues which may not be related to software (or their core activism) at all.

Aug 5, 2020

What is a "GPL condom" and why NVidia's latest updates to Linux kernel has become such a big controversy

The biggest drama unfolding on Linux subreddit yesterday was this below post about some updates to the linux kernel source which seems to have irritated some people.

Aug 1, 2020

Snapcraft is what happens when organization controls developer and developer controls the software

Snap isn't something that was "released" but like many other Canonical's offerings, it was actively shoved down upon users' throats. I remember the Amazon fiasco of 12.04 days when they tried to integrate Amazon advertising and data collection in the default distro, but the backlash was such that Canonical had to take it back.