Vincent Tunru @VincentTunru@fosstodon.org
- Website
- https://vincenttunru.com
- https://twitter.com/VincentTunru
(Front-end) engineering, civil rights, and the intersection between those two.
Mozilla, https://plaudit.pub, https://solidproject.org, @ToSDR, and a never-ending stream of unfinished side projects — though Toots are my own.
Joined Apr 2021
People are literally getting rickrolled by people younger than rickrolling itself. Imagine that.
I like Progressive Web Apps, but I'm not convinced about installing them yet. Where's my tracker blocker? My other extensions? Browser preferences? Synced passwords?
Given how most browser chrome disappears when you scroll anyway, I find I'm mostly sticking with bookmarks, possibly as an icon on my home screen.
Being trained in the scientific method means that you get to prefix your bad arguments with "anecdotal, but".
Mozilla's unique selling point is that it's a non-profit. However, its real strength is that it answers to its community of contributors. It's not a perfect organisation, and it makes mistakes, but it can and will be held accountable, and that's what makes it better.
Welp, just posted my first StackOverflow question as a result of my first fight with the #Rust borrow checker, as is tradition. Now to wait until it's closed as a duplicate.
But if anyone has any pointers (hehe), would appreciate: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70286206/why-may-a-closure-outlive-the-current-function-by-borrowing-a-u32
Doing #AdventOfCode in #Rust again this year (this is not a promise that I'll keep it up 😛), and today is the first day that I feel like I've written somewhat idiomatic Rust, by myself. Very satisfying.
Anyway, keep in mind that I'm not a lawyer, and that there are nuances to every licence. That said, I hope that this rough mental model can be helpful to some of you when working with (or hopefully contributing to!) open source in the future.
This mental model also helps explain how a project can have multiple licences: since they just confer extra rights, they're strictly additive. Users can benefits from the rights granted to them in both licences.
It's not just to enable closed source work though. It can also prevent having to reach out to all contributors if there's a good reason to change the licence in the future.
For example, this is what LLVM is having to do now: https://foundation.llvm.org/docs/relicensing_long_tail/
Of course, that gets messy when there are multiple copyright holders: a contributor can use their *own* code in a closed source product, but not others'.
That's why some projects require a "Contributor Licence Agreement", giving an org even more rights than the licence does.
It's also important to note that open source licences only *give* rights to others; the only limitation it places on the copyright holder is that they cannot revoke those rights.
That's why even under the GPL, the copyright holder can still build a closed product on top of it.
This means that a licence violation, in essence, is just a copyright violation.
In other words, if someone e.g. uses GPL'd code in a closed-source product, the offence is the same as if they'd have used non-open source code: a copyright violation.
They were never given permission to use that copyrighted code in a closed-source product in the first place!
Some examples:
- The MIT licence says that people can use your code, provided they do not remove the licence from it.
- The GPL says that people can use your code, provided that, for anything they build on top of it, they give the same rights to anyone they give it to.
You (or your employer) automatically have copyright over everything you write. That roughly means that you can do pretty much everything with it, and others nothing.
At their core, open source licences simply allow others to use what you wrote as well.
Given how open source is everywhere, it's useful to know how open source licences work. Luckily, a rough mental model is not too difficult to form. I'll sketch one out in the replies to this post.
I cracked my phone's screen 😢
However, it's a @Fairphone, so I just replaced the screen with that of a friend's old Fairphone. Took me all of five minutes 😎
The cool thing about working on developer tools is that you get continuous UX research, for free, just by lurking on your issue tracker, forums and/or chat rooms.
Just did my first system upgrade since switching to #Fedora and... Wow! Not only was it easy (literally: press the "download" button, then the "restart and install" button), but also very fast. Like, I quickly got to 50%, then I went to the bathroom, and as I got back it was done.
And here I'd set aside my Saturday to deal with any potential issues.
Vincent Tunru
boosted
Please boost:
A screen reader for Linux (GUI) is being developed in Rust. If anyone knows Rust and would like to help, or to just view the great work taking shape here, see:
Often, the good parts of an approach will be discarded because they are outweighed by the upsides of a newer approach. Then when eventually someone finds a way to get the benefits of the old approach with the new one, some clever cynic will come out of the woodworks lamenting how 'everything old is new again', completely disregarding the advances made in the meantime.
- Website
- https://vincenttunru.com
- https://twitter.com/VincentTunru
(Front-end) engineering, civil rights, and the intersection between those two.
Mozilla, https://plaudit.pub, https://solidproject.org, @ToSDR, and a never-ending stream of unfinished side projects — though Toots are my own.
Joined Apr 2021
