I think it’s important to consider that the GNU General Public License is really only a part of the Free Software Movement, which is “An effort by a group of people to achieve a social or political goal”. That movement is defined by a group of people and a goal and has “infrastructure”, such as “The Free Software Foundation” (“a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization”). “The idea of the Free Software Movement is that computer users deserve the freedom to form a community”, but if you want to accomplish a different goal, it might be useful to clearly communicate that goal to other people to create a different movement (and create new “infrastructure” to support your effort).

Changing only a part of the GNU General Public License might make it incoherent or otherwise a hindrance to your goal in a way that you might not expect. It might be better to focus on talking with other people about a goal of yours, and you might discover that you can be most effective without investing any energy in creating a new license for software, but if you determine that creating a new license is important you can create a comprehensive design for one to match your efforts more closely.

It seems that your goal might be summarized with “I want people to be able to help themselves (using software) without contributing to spreading hate” (“putting a motion in the positive is a rule in parliamentary procedures”).

See also “Chesterton’s Lamp-Post” (a suggestion to only start to act when you actually know what you want the final result to be) and “Chesterton’s fence” (a suggestion to not change things when you don’t know what the final result will be) for some context about what an undesirable design/plan is.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/

[email protected]

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/

It’s not the typical type of thing that is shared using this community, or using Lemmy in general, so I understand that people might be surprised. However, It doesn’t seem that there are recent posts for this community, and the community name is relevant to my post, and it doesn’t seem that there are actually any rules for the community, so I used this community anyway.

I had some thoughts about the concept of a “Contributor License Agreement”.

If you are the sole author of a program, you have a special position in that you can distribute the program with any license you choose. People that are not the sole author that copy the source code are not able to do that. If the original sole author of a program incorporates changes from someone that did not sign a Contributor License Agreement, they lose that special position, since distributing the program with a new license would require consent from all the authors, which is surely harder if there are more authors.

Because of this, it might be worth supporting some “community fork” more than an “original” repository, since that makes it clear that the program is likely to only be distributed using a specific license. However, if I’m interacting with an “original” repository, I will expect to have to interact with a Contributor License Agreement in order to have my changes used, since the original authors will want to preserve some flexibility regarding what licenses they can use with their software.

Car manufacturers aren’t required to document how to repair “infotainment centers” because they aren’t critical to the operation of a car. Making them more useful might require a car manufacturer to spend more money by allowing more requirements to be imposed upon them.

Whatever the first implementation does ends up being a suicide pact by default.

I agree. The behavior of rm and cat and cp and mv and dd and many other utilities don’t necessarily have the interface I would prefer, but they are too widely used for it to be helpful to radically change them. It’s somewhat unfortunate that these names are already reserved, but I don’t think it’s necessary to change them.

In the same way, I don’t have a problem with packages having generic names but not actually being useful: I’ve read that the requests and urllib3 packages for Python aren’t being maintained very well, but I don’t mind that as long as I can accomplish things while following best practices.

Because of this, I’m not afraid to use names like “getRequest” or “result”, especially if they were generated with an automatic refactoring, and I’m not upset when I see similarly generic names being used with source code I’m changing, since I know that the second name for something that’s similar to an existing thing will have to actually be descriptive, but the first name is likely to not be.

I have another example of how I’d apply these thoughts: the process for developing v2+ modules for the Go programming language strikes me as inelegant, so I would probably prefer to just create an entirely new repository rather than try to attempt that.

What operating system should I use with my laptop that isn’t an awkward kludgy idiosyncratic mess? I would say that Windows has plenty of kludges, like having problems with certain file names. Many versions of macOS are UNIX® Certified Products (for example, macOS version 15.0 Sequoia on Intel-based Mac computers and on Apple silicon-based Mac computers), so it’s surely not any less kludgy than Linux.

I suppose that it’s not bad to change documentation to be more specific, and change a program such that it matches the new documentation and wouldn’t cause any harm if it replaced all the existing versions of the program, but makes it possible to use the program to solve more problems. That would be to “add functionality in a backward compatible manner”.

You are also free to create new programs that are not an exact replacement for existing programs, but can enable some people to stop using one or more other programs. That would not be what I describe as stagnation.

“The cat utility shall read files in sequence and shall write their contents to the standard output in the same sequence.”, so I would be very annoyed if it did something different with a certain file but not others. I wouldn’t say that the contents of a file and the contents after the file is expanded are the same. In fact, I expect that some people use cat to process compressed files, and changing how cat acts with compressed files would probably cause them a large amount of annoyance, and would needlessly make a lot of existing documentation incorrect.

I’m impressed that this (mostly) kept the same text on an object consistently.

This has a serious sanpaku problem though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanpaku https://gomoviereviews.com/2016/07/sanpaku-eyes-cinematic-device/ https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2020/01/small-irises.html

I think that providing an exit status that is not 0 when zcat is used with an uncompressed file is useful. Though my opinion is less strong regarding whether it should write more text after an error occurred, it’s probably more useful for a process to terminate quickly when an error occurred rather than risk a second error occurring and making troubleshooting harder.

I think that trying to change any existing documented features of widely used utilities will lead to us having less useful software in the future (our time is probably better spent making new programs and new documentation): https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

You are correct. This probably produces something more similar to what you’d want the original command to do, but with better safely:

find -- . -type f -regex '^\./[^/]*$' -exec sh -c -- 'for file in "${@}"; do zcat "${file}" || cat "${file}" || exit; done' sh '{}' '+'

That assumes you want to interact with files with names like .hidden.txt.gz though. If you don’t, and only intend to have a directory with regular files (as opposed to directories or symbolic links or other types of file), using this is much simpler and even safer, and avoids using files in a surprising order:

for i in *; do zcat -- "$i" || cat -- "$i" || exit; done

Of course, the real solution is to avoid using the Shell Command Language at all, and to carefully adapt any program to your particular problem as needed: https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/safe-shell/

I hope this will be helpful to you: https://giveupgithub.org/

Remember that the system documentation can be different for different operating systems. For example, it’s notorious that the documentation for sed differs between GNU and macOS, particularly regarding the -i option: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4247068/sed-command-with-i-option-failing-on-mac-but-works-on-linux

In order to avoid surprises related to this, “POSIX.1-2024 defines a standard operating system interface and environment, including a command interpreter (or “shell”), and common utility programs to support applications portability at the source code level.” https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/ https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/sed.html

If the people you’re talking to will make or have accounts, https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ should have more useful information for you.

If people don’t want to make accounts, I know about https://framatalk.org/ (from https://degooglisons-internet.org/ (from https://framasoft.org/)) but I haven’t used that software myself.

Programs that do multiple things are not simple, so successfully using or understanding what they do is less likely to be possible for you. I expect that wanting to avoid interacting with many programs will lead a person to use programs that are nonfree more often than they otherwise would, so it would be more likely that a program controls the users.

I can list some alternatives to Discord that you probably don’t know, and requirements for an alternative to Discord: https://degooglisons-internet.org/ https://framasoft.org/en/manifest https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/#criteria

Also consider https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ [email protected]

How do things work? I provided my perspective, partly so that I could refer to it later, so it would be enlightening to learn about yours.

I think the tax system in the USA is designed to reward people who form corporations and then get people employed. People who are employed don’t have as much time to work on reforming institutions, so giving a tax break for employing people makes powerful people’s lives easier. In order to keep this process revenue neutral, earned income is taxed instead of taxing business as much. After extracting money from people’s labor (since labor is clearly necessary in order to create wealth), the remainder of budget needs is made up from whatever resources are easily available (which is currently the assets of rich people, since they have been given a lot of money to get people employed).

I’ve been told Hungary does, though I haven’t heard much about it until recently: https://www.uscisguide.com/dual-citizenship/u-s-dual-citizenship-and-taxes-with-hungary/

I’ve also been told South Africa and Eritrea do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if places like North Korea and Turkmenistan do too.

Somehow Hungary gets a score of 30/50 for taxation for 2024 from https://nomadcapitalist.com/nomad-passport-index/ (United States and South Africa and Eritrea get 10, North Korea and Turkmenistan get 20) but I’d be suspicious of anywhere with a lower rating than 30.

Wealth tax does not block economic growth, rather the opposite, because it forces wealth to be reinvested to not lose too much value.

Do you have a source for this? I see that “wealth taxes have failed in Europe”, and it seems that places with a wealth tax were mostly in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264290303-4-en

One example that caught my attention is Belgium, which introduced an “annual tax on securities accounts”, which suggests that they were taxing resources that were invested already.

I can imagine that it’s possible for government spending to produce more economic growth than would have happened without taxation, but the entire point of money is to have a multitude of people working towards prosperity in ways that can’t be predicted by state authorities, so if there are more taxes it seems likely that economic growth will be reduced.

Of course, an analysis would have to account for things like using resources from a wealth tax to make cheap/free healthcare available, which might then make people vastly more productive such that any negative effects of a wealth tax are neutralized. Also, providing an obviously higher quality of life might be worth some cost.

You clearly need a lesson in proportional taxation if you think people would have their personal property appropriated.

Is a car or shirt or house personal property? It seems things like that are seized in response to people not paying revenue services: https://home.treasury.gov/services/treasury-auctions https://www.treasury.gov/auctions/treasury/gp/index.html https://www.cwsmarketing.com/?p=36139 https://auctions.cwsmarketing.com/auctions/1-9DDP42/gp-dayton-nj-live-wsimulcast-august-21 https://auctions.cwsmarketing.com/lots/view/1-9DE12Y/wearing-apparel-riverside-ca

I do see that items had bids much higher than I’d expect, and they were being auctioned at the same time watches and jewellery and electric motorcycles and trailers, so I suspect any clothing was “luxury” in some way, or the auction was for more clothing than is documented with pictures.

I do not give a fuck about you placing your dignity in ownership of material assets, that is a you problem.

I reference “dignity” because it’s part of “the unshakeable foundation of the Republic of Poland”, and thinking about dignity seems like a good way to tell if something is a bad idea, and I probably wouldn’t feel like I had more dignity than 1 month ago if I was having my car or house seized because I hadn’t paid as much taxes as a revenue service thought I should. I expect that you will have more trouble implementing policies you like if you express that you’re disregarding dignity.

The top 10% pay less income taxes as a fraction of their income than the bottom 10%.

I expect that this is true.

Really, we should remove the capitalist class because they will fight back to the detriment of everyone else.

I’m certainly for social change, and people with entrenched interests will probably try to hamper it. However, other people might not want to cooperate with you if you remind them of the Soviet Union, and I expect that saying “we should remove the capitalist class” will do that.

I do not give a fuck about the IRS. I am not an American. My country actually has a wealth tax.

If you don’t care about the IRS, why are you talking about a wealth tax using English? I suspect that that the majority of people who speak English as well as you do are U.S. citizens, so I’d assume you were interested in speaking to U.S. citizens. Are you trying to talk to people in Europe / worldwide in a common language?

Who is the target audience for your messages? I’m interested in where/how you’re focusing your efforts.

You are repeating misinformation and capitalist propaganda with little understanding of what you are saying. Have you even reflected on what “the economy” really is? If you are a trickle-down Reaganomics-follower, you might want to get your brain checked.

What misinformation am I repeating? I wouldn’t have written a statement that I don’t think is true, so I suggest you point out anything you think is incorrect and explain your perspective, and maybe share a URL for some more interesting sources.

Note: I originally pressed “Reply” too early by mistake, so I edited this text. Originally I had only written “Is a car or shirt or house personal property?” and one URL.