Michael Downey 🇺🇳 @downey@floss.social

Open Tech Summit Thailand finally confirmed for 1-2nd October, please join us #fediverse!

In light of Kenneth Reitz withdrawing from maintainership of his projects (e.g. requests), I'd like to post this again:

https://drewdevault.com/2018/12/04/How-to-abandon-a-FLOSS-project.html

If you're struggling as a free software maintainer, I'm sympathetic to your position, and I have a guide here on how to responsibly step back from your projects at the pace you need, be it today or next week or next year.

Why is software created using taxpayers’ money not released as Free Software?

* Tax savings: Similar applications don't have to be programmed from scratch every time.

* Collaboration: Major projects can share expertise and costs.

* Serving the public: Applications paid by the public should be available for everyone.

* Fostering innovation: With transparent processes, others don't have to reinvent the wheel.

#democracy #democratic #politics #freesoftware

https://publiccode.eu/

If anything's going to keep FOSS alive it won't be web-scale upstream-owning megacorps, and it won't be yesterday's problematic icons alienating everybody they talk to today.

It's gonna be you, doing stuff you think is cool and helping other people do stuff they think is cool.

Thanks to everyone for coming to Classic Pianos for Winterreise tonight for post #OSCON romantism/Conservancy fund-raising!

Interested in volunteering for #softwarefreedom with Conservancy? Swing by our booth at #OSCON today and let's talk about it!

Dear fediverse:

Fascism joining the fediverse is extremely bad, and we have to do something about it. But please, please, please: give me two weeks before you roll out any new solutions. Some of the solutions being proposed look like they will make the situation better but will make it much worse.

I am dropping nearly everything to write a demo and spec explaining how to do things right. Please give me two weeks. I've been preparing for this.

urls often contain tracking information added to the end of them. when you are linking articles, stuff like the "utm_source" and "fbclid" sections allow people to track where you got the link from and how you are spreading it. this allows cops & corps to map out social groups.

while you can remove that stuff by hand, there's a firefox/chrome addon called "neat URL" that comes with an existing blocklist that automatically cleans off a lot of that stuff.

As of yesterday #Microsoft's #DRM server is gone. If you have any ebooks through their store . . . bid them adieu ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Users will be given refunds but the books themselves will no longer be readable. If you made notes on the titles, you'll get $25 credit as a, "we're sorry you'll no longer have access to the notes you took on all those books. Here's $25 and we'll call it even!"

#DefectiveByDesign is a campaign run by the #FSF to combat Digital Restrictions Management and they work to prevent this exact kind of thing from happening.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/

Courtesy of Karl Fogel, there will be a Benefit Concert for the Software Freedom Conservancy: Schubert's "Winterreise" on Thursday, 7/18 from 7–8:30pm in Portland at Classic Pianos! Hope to see you there!
http://calagator.org/events/1250475882

Are you in Portland (Oregon) this week? Do you like chatting with folks about #freesoftware? Join us at the Broadway McMenamins tonight at 7 for Conservancy pub night! We'll have snacks and there will be non-alc and alc drinks for purchase. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/jun/28/june2019RU/

I forget who asked this question earlier, but I'm at a conference with a company that provides a "Green" hosting solution. https://greenhost.net/ has a server bank powered by hydro and wind.

By far the most common request I get is for alternatives to Google's Re-Captcha.

The situation is so unclear that I haven't done an alternatives section on the site.

Do you have suggestions for re-captcha alternatives?

(I know this has come up before, but the discussions are scattered across many threads which people are failing to find.)

#Google #Captcha #ReCaptcha #Alternatives #DeleteGoogle

How can you reduce the amount of social media you're consuming?

Is anyone working on open source Duolingo / Memrise? Or any floss social language learning software?

Design people,

Any suggestions for what could be the cover photo on switching.social's profile page?

It looks a bit messy with text on text 😕

#OpenStreetMap is looking for admin help to keep infrastructure alive
https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2019/06/21/help-the-owg/

#selfhosting #OSM #server #GIS

RT @EFF@twitter.com

Instead of enshrining Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft as the Internet’s permanent overlords and then striving to make them as benign as possible, we can fix the Internet by making Big Tech less central to its future. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/interoperability-fix-internet-not-tech-companies

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1149431057264988160