I think the bigger issue is the copyright violation. You can’t just take others code and change the license. That’s not how it works.

Stenzek did not do this. He either got permission to change the license of gpl pieces from their original author, or rewrote them. The edit by Leah in her post fails to acknowledge this, but it should be noted that she states the situation has a lot more nuance, and that she is trying to convince steznek to keep duckstation free software, rather thab threatening legal action against him.

reached out to the bigger community for support.

Like Near/Byuu did? And how did that go?

Although, I do agree, and I would rather have free software. But it’s clear that Duckstation going proprietary is his attempt to boycott the retroarch developers.

UPDATE on 15 September. I’ve had a talk with Stenzek. This is an evolving situation with a lot more nuance to it than first glance. The decision to make DuckStation proprietary is still terrible, and I intend to rectify this; I’ve proposedh a number of ideas to Stenzek for how to effectively retain DuckStation as a free software project. If this is unsuccessful, I’ll fully fork it myself (from prior to the re-licensing) and probably find people in the PSX scene willing to help maintain it (in that scenario, my role will only be to facilitate and provide infrastructure, while not having an active role in core development, as I already have my Libreboot project which takes all of my time). I simply wish to prevent what is currently the best emulator of its kind becoming proprietary software.

I hope she’s aware of why the Duckstation dev decided to go proprietary: An ongoing harassment campaign by Retroarch.

There is a post by Near/Byuu that documents some of the retroarch developers problems, and some of it is especially damning. I read through some of the leaked IRC chats, and they refer to Near by homophobic and racial slurs (the n word, yes), and this behavior clearly hasn’t stopped, given Steznek’s abrupt and harsh reaction.

On another thread related to this, I mentioned that many people theorize that Talreth (developer of AetherX2, PS2 emulator for android), and Steznek (Duckstation) are the same person. Although there is not hard evidence that they are the same person, their stories parallel in that both of them took code offline because of persistent harassment.

Leah Rowe taking over a fork of Duckstation is nice, but it doesn’t really do anything. People were already going to fork Duckstation, and the Retroarch team did — in the form of SwanStation.

She notes this in the email she sends:

I would also point out that a fork of DuckStation does indeed exist:

https://www.libretro.com/index.php/category/swanstation/

I posted about all of this on my Mastodon. Please see the following post:

https://mas.to/@libreleah/113131594753424867

Unless the DuckStation author changes the project back to GPL, I would suggest that you all boycott the project, and tell others to do the same; you could send all future contributions to SwanStation instead, which is part of libretro. I would suggest that all future works go to a fork (could be SwanStation), instead of DuckStation, while still permitting Stanzek to contribute; this way, any future abusive re-licensing could not realistically occur. The reason I say this, is because based on my own research, it seems that Stanzek’s bios against the GPL has existed for some time, so I’m uncertain as to whether he could be trusted in charge of a public project.

But, in the github reply by stenzek

I find it especially ironic, considering when the GPL was actually violated on multiple occasions, even as recently as a few months ago, nobody ever takes issue with that.

I like free software too, but this stuff doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I think this and her attempts at action, even with the edit to the post, are premature. Her taking over a fork of Duckstation is nice, but I think she, a transwoman, needs to remember why the Retroarch devs harassed the shit out of Near/Byuu: Because they were nonbinary.

If she does decided to maintain a fork of Duckstation, I hope she has a plan that allows her to avoid falling victim to the same harassment that eliminated Near, Talreth, and Steznek. Because while a Playstation emulator is nice to have, Libreboot is essential to obtaining a truly free software society.

deleted by creator

There was no CLA. The duckstation dev rewrote all gpl code, or obtained permission to change the license.

So, officially no. But there are ongoing theories in the r/emulationonandroid subreddit that they are.

I think it could be either way, but it’s unlikely that they are the same person. In both cases, harassment caused them to shut there projects down, which could be a reasanobale coincidence, or could be indicative of a larger harassment campaign.

Crowdstrike didn’t target anyone either. Yet, a mistake in code that privileged, resulted in massive outages. Intel ME runs at even higher privileges, in even more devices.

I am opposed to stuff like kernel level code, exactly for that reason. Mistakes can be just as harmful as malice, but both are parts of human nature. The software we design should protect us from ourselves, not expose us to more risk.

There is no such thing as a back door that “good guys” can access, but the bad guys cannot. Intel ME is exactly that, a permanent back door into basically every system. A hack of ME would take down basically all cyber infrastructure.

Cal state northridge?

Why are you talking about Creative Commons?

Because (from the article):

Originally open-source under the General Public License, DuckStation‘s license was changed first to PolyFormStrict License and then to CC-BY-NC-ND. These changes prohibit commercial use and derivatives of the emulator, including packaging it for distribution.

Yeah. It’s not supposed to be for code. Didn’t stop the Duckstation developer.

There are plenty of options in licenses in the post-open source, copyfair, copyfarleft, & such that work for software that are not considered “free” or “open” (where open is more corporate than free, which free is obviously the better one) but still allow users to modify read & usually modify the source.

I would have to evaluate those licenses on a case by case basis, but I suspect I would find the vast majority of them okay enough. But again, this is moving the goalposts. I was expressing my concerns issues with the CC BY NC ND, but you have changed the discussion to be about other licenses. Although interesting, they are not relevant since the DuckStation license is not those.

I still think government funding for free software is the correct solution, however. I generally find all of the post open and whatnot licenses have restrictions can be problematic, or loopholes that can be abused to get out of the “good” restrictions. I noted a while ago with one of the licenses that demand that corporations making over some amount giving up a percentage of their profits, that Google used to do a scheme where Alphabet (parent company of google) was the actual owner of the google logo, and then they rented it to Google at an absurdly high price, in order to artificially lower Google’s profits. I think that it would be too simple for the extremely wealthy companies to do something similar and use post-open licensed software without consequence.

Taxing corporations is hard, but having every individual entity behind a software try to extract resources from a corporation will be harder. “Divide and conquer”. My understanding is that license violations are a Civil case, meaning you have to spend money on lawyers and other legal things and… you would be going against some of the richest entities in the world in a court where money is basically a win button.

And of course, allowing society to continue to rely on proper Free Software licenses, ensures software freedom is preserved.

usually modify the source.

No. If I cannot modify the source, then I don’t really view a difference between it and proprietary software. Both the OSI and Free Software Foundation at least require the ability to modify the source code, in order for a license to actually count at FOSS under their guidelines — and I agree with them. Code I cannot modify, is a piece of my computer I do not own.

Some of these license are very clear about what is commericial

The license chosen in this article is the Creative Commons license, which is not a code license, but instead one intended for art. On their own page, they acknowledge the difficulty with categorizing commercial vs non-commercial usecases:

In CC’s experience, it is usually relatively easy to determine whether a use is permitted, and known conflicts are relatively few considering the popularity of the NC licenses. However, there will always be uses that are challenging to categorize as commercial or noncommercial. CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the rights holder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses.

What’s wild is the banshees here rarely acknowledge how AGPL works similar to these now adding restrictions instead of laying out what you can do, but daddy OSI approved it so it must be good.

1. “You must share source code of this service with your users” is not really an actual restriction on who can use the software and who can use it.

2. Fuck the OSI. They’ve done more harm to free software than any other organization. In the recent controversy with redis and SSPL, they refused to acknowledge the actual problem of the SSPL license, that it was unusable due to requiring all “software used to deploy this software” being open source. Does that mean that people who deploy software on Windows have to cough up the source code for Windows? What about Intel Management Engine, the proprietary bit of code in every single Intel CPU. Redis moved to a dual license with that a proprietary license. An unusable license… and a proprietary license = proprietary software. But instead, the OSI whined that the problems with the SSPL was that it would “restrict usage” because people have to share more source code. The OSI, and open source, have always been corporate entities that unsurp free software. Just look at their sponsors page and see who supports them: Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft…

The goal is often to help workers & the commons—say you as an individual are free to use it for, or others for places where folks have equal pay or say, or less than 10 seats. To say that since a software license says Amazon can’t use this but you can means it’s all proprietary means you are either Amazon or a goober to think these are equivalent. Something something baby out with the water fallacy

You are moving the goalposts. I argued against a license that restricts derivatives and commercial use. You are now defending licenses that target specific entities and seek to remain open to workers and the commons. A license that restricts derivatives is not this.

To be blunt, I would be okay with a license that specifically restricts retroarch devs from making derivatives, and I would find it funny af. I think that was what the Duckstation dev was going for with the noncommercial and no derivatives (since retroarch maintains forks of software in order to add it as cores), but I’m frustrated at what is essentially a shift to a proprietary license instead.

Although such a hypothetical license that targets the retroarch developers would not be approved by the OSI or the Free Software institutions, I don’t really care. Racists don’t get rights.

No, these licenses are problematic. Fundamentally, it is proprietary software, and restricts me from full ownership and control over my computer.

No derivatives prevents me from modifying the program and maintaining the control I am owed to have over my device. Every bit of proprietary code is a percentage of my computer that is no longer truly mine.

No commercial usage is a continium fallacy. Is my blog commercial, because I advertise my resume on it? Is retroarch* commercial, because they have a patreon and get paid? Are “nonprofits” not commercial, since they claim to not want to make a profit? Or are only registered businesses commercial?

The correct solution to maintain softare freedom is for governments to extract money from the entities that profit the most off of free software, and use those taxes to fund free software. Germany is kind of doing this with their sovreign tech fund.

*Fuck the retroarch devs btw. Did a little digging, they seem to have been very problematic, and ran multiple harassment campaigns.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Internet#Pastebin_services

That pages shows how to use curl to upload to 0x0.st.

I’ve used the pastebinit program listed on that page to upload to paste.debian.net, but it supports other sites as well.

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-webtop/

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/run_latest_gnome_kde_on_distrobox.md

Might be what you want.

So, you might be misunderstanding how BTRFS snapshots work.

A BTRFS snapshot is not a complete copy of the system, but rather, merely a recording point, and only CHANGES between the current system and the snapshotted system actually take up space. Like, if you snapshot a system, and then install 1 GB of updates, that snapshot only takes up that 1GB of differences in the system.

It’s exactly because of this, that it’s somewhat difficult to shuffle BTRFS snapshots around.

So, you can use BTRFS send/receive to send subvolumes to other btrfs devices.

So, snapshots are really just a subvolume that only takes up the difference between your main subvolume that you use, and the snapshot subvolume. You can use btrfs send/receive to send them them to another btrfs partition… but I don’t know if sending subsequent backups will deduplicate data properly.

What you might want instead, are rsync backups. Timeshift also supports rsync backups, which copy all the data over to any device using rsync for the initial backup, but then use hardlinks to store only the changes between the backups for subsequent backups. Similar to btrfs — but simpler, is my understanding.

Yeah, but idk if phones can use joycons in the double joycon mode. My understanding is that it requires either root or a physical adapter of some kind.

If I am being honest, I prefer the Switch form factor with the dumb little controllers

Android phone + Telescopic gamepad + winlator might be what you want…

(Or you can use one of the switch emulators on android…)

Because forgejo’s ssh isn’t for a normal ssh service, but rather so that users can access git over ssh.

Now technically, a bastion should work, but it’s not really what people want when they are trying to set up git over ssh. Since git/ssh is a service, rather than an administrative tool, why shouldn’t it be configured within the other tools used for exposes services? (Reverse proxy/caddy).

And in addition to that, people most probably want git/ssh to be available publicly, which a bastion host doesn’t do.

So, I’m not gonna pretend flatpak doesn’t use more space then normal apps, but due to deduplication (and sometimes filesystem compression), flatpaks often use less space than people think.

[nix-shell:~/Playables/chronosphere]$ sudo /nix/store/xdrhfj0c64pzn7gf33axlyjnizyq727v-compsize-1.5/bin/compsize -x /var/lib/flatpak/
Processed 49225 files, 21778 regular extents (46533 refs), 22188 inline.
Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL       53%      898M         1.6G         3.6G
none       100%      499M         499M         1.0G
zstd        34%      399M         1.1G         2.6G

[nix-shell:~/Playables/chronosphere]$ du -sh /var/lib/flatpak/
1.7G    /var/lib/flatpak/

I only have one flatpak app installed, and du says that takes up 1.7 GB of space… but actually, when using a tool that takes up BTRFS transparent compression into account, only half of that space is used on my disk.

I recommend using compsize for a BTRFS compression aware version of du and flatpak-dedup-checker for a flatpak filesystem deduplication aware checker of space used.

I think flatpak absolutely does use up more space, because yes, it is another linux distro in your distro. But I think that’s a tradeoff people accept in order to have a universal package manager for graphical apps.

Also, you can flatpak cli tools. They are just difficult to run at first because you have to do the flatpak run org.orgname.appname thing, but you can alias that to a short command. Here is a flatpak of micro, a terminal based text editor.

(I prefer nix for cli tools though, and docker/podman/containers for services).

So based on what you’ve said in the comments, I am guessing you are managing all your users with Nixos, in the Nixos config, and want to share these users to other services?

Yeah, I don’t even know sharing Unix users is possible. EDIT: It seems to be based on comments below.

But what I do know is possible, is for Unix/Linux to get it’s users from LDAP. Even sudo is able to read from LDAP, and use LDAP groups to authorize users as being able to sudo.

Setting these up on Nixos is trivial. You can use the users.ldap set of options on Nixos to configure authentication against an external LDAP user. Then, you can configure sudo

After all of that, you could declaratively configure an LDAP server using Nixos, including setting up users. For example, it looks like you can configure users and groups fro the kanidm ldap server

Or you could have a config file for the openldap server

RE: Manage auth at the reverse proxy: If you use Authentik as your LDAP server, it can reverse proxy services and auth users at that step. A common setup I’ve seen is to run another reverse proxy in front of authentik, and then just point that reverse proxy at authentik, and then use authentik to reverse proxy just the services you want behind a login page.

I just realized… a previous lemmy post I saw appears to be this sign.

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21651766

The solution to what you want is not to analyze the code projects automagically, but rather to run them in a container/virtual machine. Running them in an environment which restricts what they can access limits the harm an intentional — or accidental bug can do.

There is no way to automatically analyze code for malice, or bugs with 100% reliability.