IninewCrow

Instead of mass migration, they should just institute small changes to small sections or areas or groups … just slowly erode the windows userbase over a period of about four or five or even ten years. Once it reaches a critical mass at some point … then you can just cut the cord altogether and change over everything and everyone.

If they are honest about what they are suggesting … the first step would be to be explicitly clear about who THEY are and WHO they represent.

I really don’t care that much about the technical side of things because I’m not that technically knowledgeable. However, I am more apt to trust the judgment or recommendations of prominent people in the industry (that are not corporately attached or controlled) … I would also trust public institutions or journalists or academics with a track record of social advocacy and wanting to represent people instead of corporations or businesses. I would also trust politicians or political advocates that mostly represent people and public institutions.

I really don’t put my faith in any one person no matter who they claim to be to just say they want to build something meaningful and give me no information on their background, who they worked for, who they represent or what kind of people or organizations they associate with. There have been far too many ‘good natured’ technocrats and technology people from the past decade or two who claim to say that they want to change the world for the better and then end up wanting to burn it all down for a profit.

Depending on who the group is … it is good to first do a thorough check on who the group is … it can just as likely be a group of scam artists that are riding on some nationalism band wagon happening around the world these days.

It works about a well as video editing capabilities from the start of the movie making era from the 1920s onwards. You can make a simple basic straight forward production that can be shared online. It makes great documentaries or just simple straight forward film production that doesn’t require any special effects.

They were able to make full featured films in the 1930s and 40s with far less editing capability. The only limitation is your ability to capture great images and content with your camera and video equipment.

Same here, I have a hard time budgeting most months but I do go out of my way to donate $20-$30-$40 a year to major projects or to sign on to $1-$2 a month contributions.

I think of it from the point of view that I won’t buy that hamburger this week and instead give the money to a developer instead.

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I’ll repeat my comment here to give it it’s own thread
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Nice idea but we shouldn’t associate open source software as “free software”. Yes it can be associated to freedom and freely available but it also suggests that no one ever has to pay for it.

This software even though it is freely available is not free of monetary cost. Someone has to pay for it either with their own money, their expertise or their time … all of which cost people money.

It becomes a whole different level of cost when it comes to open source social media. You need people to run the software, maintain the software, update the software, secure the software … then throw in servers, routing, security … and as instances grow in size you need more hardware, hardware upgrades, updates and people and organizations to maintain it all … at one point in the growth of open source social media, you start to need dedicated full time people to work at maintaining these things.

I’ve chatted with some instance owners and maintainers who say they don’t mind the work because it is limited at this time. Many of them are already professionals with well paying jobs and they don’t mind doing this on the side as a hobby or passion project. However the work is light at this time because there aren’t that many users and the communities are small. But over the past year I’ve noticed more and more instances changing and growing to accommodate a growing user base … it all ends up costing money.

So it isn’t totally “free”

A better and healthier way to see it is to call it “Open source” and remind every one that a critical thing that we should all understand in this new age of open source software is that crowd funding, sponsorship, contributions, donations should all be normalized by everyone who uses this software. And it doesn’t cost that much either. If every open source user just spent a dollar once in a while to the project or software that they used the most or liked the most, then it would add up to thousands of dollars for the developer. The same goes to instance owners and maintainers - we need to properly and regularly fund these guys to keep them all stable and working.

Personally I’ve been contributing for years to projects like Wikipedia, LibreOffice and GIMP … and over the past year or two I’m a small time regular contributor to the instance I use at Lemmy.ca

The danger with just calling it ‘free’ is in making everyone believe that no one has to pay for these services. The danger to not properly funding these projects is that eventually the costs have to be taken up by someone and that is usually the developers themselves or the maintainers or managers. And as popularity and user numbers grow, the costs only add up.

The problem comes when developers and managers have to figure out how to get more money to keep their project alive which is where corporate creep and advertising options start appearing. And also, as one platform becomes popular and becomes too expensive to maintain then it starts showing monetary value for corporations to take over. Corporate rot starts setting in when these projects are not properly funded and kept alive and developers or owners have to make the choice between being underfunded by their userbase … or making a bunch of money by selling out to a company or corporation.

We have to start normalizing funding, sponsorship, contributions and donations because that will protect our communities from being swallowed up by corporate interests in the future. If we don’t fund or pay for these things … some millionaire or billionaire will eventually come along to use their wealth at the cost of ownership and control and eventually lock up everything again behind a wall and a gate.

Nice idea but we shouldn’t associate open source software as “free software”. Yes it can be associated to freedom and freely available but it also suggests that no one ever has to pay for it.

This software even though it is freely available is not free of monetary cost. Someone has to pay for it either with their own money, their expertise or their time … all of which cost people money.

It becomes a whole different level of cost when it comes to open source social media. You need people to run the software, maintain the software, update the software, secure the software … then throw in servers, routing, security … and as instances grow in size you need more hardware, hardware upgrades, updates and people and organizations to maintain it all … at one point in the growth of open source social media, you start to need dedicated full time people to work at maintaining these things.

I’ve chatted with some instance owners and maintainers who say they don’t mind the work because it is limited at this time. Many of them are already professionals with well paying jobs and they don’t mind doing this on the side as a hobby or passion project. However the work is light at this time because there aren’t that many users and the communities are small. But over the past year I’ve noticed more and more instances changing and growing to accommodate a growing user base … it all ends up costing money.

So it isn’t totally “free”

A better and healthier way to see it is to call it “Open source” and remind every one that a critical thing that we should all understand in this new age of open source software is that crowd funding, sponsorship, contributions, donations should all be normalized by everyone who uses this software. And it doesn’t cost that much either. If every open source user just spent a dollar once in a while to the project or software that they used the most or liked the most, then it would add up to thousands of dollars for the developer. The same goes to instance owners and maintainers - we need to properly and regularly fund these guys to keep them all stable and working.

Personally I’ve been contributing for years to projects like Wikipedia, LibreOffice and GIMP … and over the past year or two I’m a small time regular contributor to the instance I use at Lemmy.ca

The danger with just calling it ‘free’ is in making everyone believe that no one has to pay for these services. The danger to not properly funding these projects is that eventually the costs have to be taken up by someone and that is usually the developers themselves or the maintainers or managers. And as popularity and user numbers grow, the costs only add up.

The problem comes when developers and managers have to figure out how to get more money to keep their project alive which is where corporate creep and advertising options start appearing. And also, as one platform becomes popular and becomes too expensive to maintain then it starts showing monetary value for corporations to take over. Corporate rot starts setting in when these projects are not properly funded and kept alive and developers or owners have to make the choice between being underfunded by their userbase … or making a bunch of money by selling out to a company or corporation.

We have to start normalizing funding, sponsorship, contributions and donations because that will protect our communities from being swallowed up by corporate interests in the future. If we don’t fund or pay for these things … some millionaire or billionaire will eventually come along to use their wealth at the cost of ownership and control and eventually lock up everything again behind a wall and a gate.

I will forever associate the first initial pre release beta whatever you want to call it GIMP 3.0 to the second time Turnip was elected.

The day of that announcement was the first day that GIMP 3.0 was mentioned for release

Just use Deepseek for US government data … what could go wrong?

lol … classic GIMP … this is becoming the best part of a terrible day

GIMP 3.0 has kinda sorta maybe been released but they’re still working on it

lol … this will be one for the memory books

American loses their minds … for the 100th time … on the same day as GIMP 3.0 was released

MIGA

Make Image-manipulation Great Again

Beautiful work … I really don’t mind the long wait between releases … the previous Gimp 2.0 versions were so robust and practical that they have lasted for close to 20 years

In the early 2000s, I started off with cracked version of photoshop before I discovered GIMP and as soon as I did, I stuck with them since. They’ve saved me several thousand dollars in software costs over the past 20 years that I really don’t mind waiting for the latest major release.

They can take their time releasing 3.0 for all I care. I’m still using 2.10 and I probably will for the next long while until 3.0 becomes stable. They’ve done a mountainous amount of work already and I congratulate them on everything.

This makes me realize too that I should probably donate something to their community for all the money they’ve saved me over the years.

THE END IS NEAR!!

Swappable hard drives

I have a ThinkPad with easy access to the hard drive. It’s one screw, remove a small panel and slide out the hard drive, slide in a new hard drive and reinstall the panel and screw. It all takes about a minute.

I have a drive for my Linux setup and another for windows.

I gave up setting up dual boot setups because I’m not as skilled or capable and I’ve lost entire setups in the past due to updates and changes and it was constantly frustrating for me. So I figured that just swapping hard drives was the easiest for me. No configuration, no changes and neither OS can interfere with one another.

I use my Linux as my daily driver for everything and windows when I need something from windows. I only ever use windows maybe once a month or once every second month. I spend more time regularly updating windows than in actually using it.

BSOD

Blue Soda Of Death