Red Hat, the world’s largest provider of open source software, would begin to reserve the source code of its flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to paying customers only.

I think they should have done that in the first place. You can sell open source software just fine; you shouldn’t be expected to make the sources public—only to those with a binary copy of your software who ask for it. Organizations that write and maintain open source software should be paid for their work.

In 1984, a researcher named Richard Stallman released a software project called GNU. Stallman licensed GNU for free, with his only stipulation that users sign an agreement called the GNU General Public License. […] To Stallman, freedom meant no restrictions — not necessarily no costs. “Think free as in free speech, not free beer,” he is quoted as saying.

Yes. Stallman sold copies of GNU Emacs on physical media back in the day.

This article doesn’t touch on the contentious issue, which is that RHEL’s terms say, if you share the Red hat sources as a customer to a non-customer, Red Hat may stop serving you as a customer. The controversy isn’t about cost. It’s about being punished for exercising the freedoms Red Hat gives you.

Of course, SUSE and Ubuntu Enterprise have had the same terms for years. Red Hat was the outlier until now.

It doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It’s romanized as “Shi”. If you know your Japanese, you’ll know “Shi” is how you pronounce 死; or “Death”. The word is not usually written in Katakana, though. There’s also ツ, which is romanized as “Tsu”.

Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:

• 大文字と小文字を無視する
• だいもんじとこもじをむしする

Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That’s the sanest suggestion (who’s with me?):

• ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル

Of course, you’re kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don’t generally render unicode…so let’s go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.

I haven’t missed a thing. I don’t even get most of my news from Lemmy or Reddit communities; I get it from RSS feeds or books. I lurked /r/linux for a long time after I stopped actively contributing. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I started contributing to Lemmy, the first collection of online communities I’ve been a part of in years. I’m of two minds about it.

I’m actually grateful for it because I started complaining about things that have bothered me for a long time, and The Great Lemmy Migration made me realize, well, there’s no reason I can’t do something about that. It helped me change my attitude. So, in a very real way, I’ve contributed to several upstream projects because Lemmy made me rethink things and I am now less annoyed. It’s weird how Lemmy feels like an actual community in the way no other social site (including Reddit) has.

On the flip side, I think I spend too much time on Lemmy…but this week has been uniquely rough.

So how else would you combat malicious forks like what happened to new pipe?

Trademarks. Anyone malicious can take your source-available code anyway, but if they infringe on your trademark by calling it “Firefox” or “Newpipe”, you are legally in your right to take it down. Trademarks deal with fraud; copyright doesn’t.

Iceweasel is a classic example of what happens when free software projects like Firefox seek to defend their trademark. They didn’t want to allow Debian to use the Firefox name, as that may cause users to attribute quality problems to Mozilla when Debian is actually responsible because of the patches they had made.

Want to remove an app using the GrayJay name without your permission if it’s a registered trademark? Here’s a link to report it to Google Play.

As the OSI says in the post linked above:

This is not to say that Elastic, or any company, shouldn’t adopt whatever license is appropriate for its own business needs. That may be a proprietary license, whether closed source or with source available. […] What a company may not do is claim or imply that software under a license that has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative, much less a license that does not meet the Open Source Definition, is open source software. It’s deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

A lot of companies are trying to redefine what “open source” means. And regrettably, this is probably something that was inevitable with a name as open to interpretation as “open source”, but it’s unfortunate that the OSI was denied the trademark for the term. If they owned the trademark, nobody would believe projects like ElasticSearch and MongoDB are open source when they do not meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), because those companies wouldn’t be able to claim they are.

Open source was never about preventing people from making a profit. That sounds more like the original Linux license, where Linus Torvalds didn’t want money to change any hands in the process of conveying the software. I can’t imagine how much worse things would be if Linus never transitioned to a license that met the OSD. My belief is that there is nothing wrong with making money so long as the software meets the OSD. I know at least the GNU Project actively encourages people to sell free software.

The GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the Hurd. Its original name was Alix—named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time. She, a Unix system administrator, had pointed out how her name would fit a common naming pattern for Unix system versions; as a joke, she told her friends, “Someone should name a kernel after me.” I said nothing, but decided to surprise her with a kernel named Alix.

Source: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html

You can build visual novels in Ren’Py, which uses only Python, but that might not be what you’re looking for.

However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.

Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.

Mojeek’s Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy’s very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/