𝗜'𝗺 𝗮 𝗙𝗢𝗦𝗦 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿, 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗜 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗔𝗜-𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗲?

No, LLMs learn from codebases of doubt reputation and often reproduce flawed or private code, which you don't want in your codebase. The AI can also propose parts of proprietary algorithms as code snippets. Projects which include a significant quantity of AI-generated code are more likely to be considered non-free by the FOSS community. Do not let AI touch your code!

#ai #llm #opensource #foss #freesoftware #programming #coding

Very good video from Veritasium about that big backdoor issue on Linux recently:

Of course this is an issue with our trade based society 100%. How? Easy:

1. The incentive to do harm in this society is quite high. For profit, for power that also leads to profit, for the fact that tribes and people are divided into groups trying to outgame the other groups. Like Iran has an incentive to hack USA, USA has an incentive to hack China, Russia has an incentive to hack the EU, and so forth. They can get sensitive information, blackmail, etc.. This is a global situation that has trade (as a practice) as the director of motives. Making people do what they do. Tribes hold onto their own resources, exploit other tribes, etc.. And so fighting with each other is natural.

If we lived in a society where trading was not a necessity and provided for all equally, we would have no reason to have tribes with borders, exploit other tribes, fight against each other when we are all in fact a big tribe, the human tribe.

1. The people working on a lot of open source software struggle to work on it since they also have "day jobs". They have to TRADE to survive. Imagine people had access to their basic needs trade-free, via an UBI or whatever. More time to focus on creating secure and better software, more people who can do that. Less of those incentivized to do harm and insert backdoors.

Overall it is a cancerous trade society where humans are livestock and wolves. Consuming and being consumed.

The only sane way out of it is to HELP PEOPLE DETACH FROM THE TRADE SOCIETY. So they can be people and focus on RELEVANT STUFF.

Else it is a game of those who want to exploit and those who try to stop them. Endless....

#spam #internet #linux #veritasium #trade #TradeRuinsEverything #trade-free #foss #opensource #exploit #redhat

In Autumn 2020 I arrived in a dark, cold Oslo with my partner, for her post-doc. As a new Covid lockdown came in, knowing no-one in a city not famed for its winter friendliness, I got stuck into a documentary idea about the history and ideals of Open Source. Advised by Tom of Spirit Level (whose business partner is @elio) I started on a script, and began to look for subjects. I’d heard a rumour at Mozfest that year that WordPress – the content management system powering a bonkers 45% of the web – had a co-founder beyond Matt Mullenweg, the Wes Anderson-looking guy who founded Automattic (the multi-billion dollar company running WordPress.com) – and he was from the north of England.

It didn’t sound plausible as I’d never heard of this in 15 years knowing WordPress, but I soon found a name – Mike Little. Of particular interest to me, Mike is from close to my sister’s old manor in Stockport, just outside Denton, south Manchester. I reached out, and happily he agreed to be the first interviewee of my working titled ‘What the Fork is Open Source’ – which by then had a trailer. He even set up a podcast microphone and hi-def camera on a tripod fed into Zoom so there was a hi-def version of the Stockport/Oslo chat.

The birth of WordPress

Mike and Matt’s story goes back to the early days of blogging. There were commercial platfomrs like LiveJournal, Moveable Type and Blogger, while the free and open source (‘FOSS’) crowd gathered around B2 Cafelog. But its French creator Michel Valdrighi seemed to have vanished. On January 24, 2003 Matt Mullenweg wrote a blogpost proposing to ‘fork’ Cafelog – a FOSS concept which means ‘take the code and build your own thing from it’.

Forking is amazing.. it’s the ‘one click revolution’ in everything FOSS that keeps the all powerful code maintainers ‘benevolent’. Fail to listen to your users and they can take what you built and start again. It was this story I wanted to tell in the film, not that Open Source was free, or that you can see under the hood – it’s that every FOSS project – from Wikipedia and Firefox to Android and Open Streetmap is community owned in a way even cooperatives aren’t (I wrote about the distinction here). Elon Musk doesn’t need to care about who he upsets on X as they can’t fork the software.

Mike replied to Matt’s blog a day later: “Matt, If you’re serious about forking b2 I would be interested in contributing.”

5 months later a freshly named WordPress launches, and the rest is history…

Like discovering the Harry Beck of the modern web.

We talked for two and a half hours – he’s one of the nicest people I’ve interviewed. As he listed what he and Matt focussed on during the year of work before WordPress launched I realised he was behind WordPress’s main reason for its success, the one-click upgrade, as well as the solid technical foundation on which the software’s growth and ecosystem is built (and that other CMSs dream of).

I was even more astonished by something he revealed at the end of the interview: after spending a year working alone with Mullenweg, and the launch and growth, he’d sent his CV to Automattic for a job – and never got a reply.

It seemed a sad, scandalous story – here was Steve Wozniak to Mullenweg’s Steve Jobs (indeed Matt gets user interface and marketing better than much of FOSS) and no-one knew him. Unlike Woz, he’d never had share options, hasn’t been knighted or hall-of-famed, despite having been instrumental in building The Tool That Powers 45% of The Web. Was this because he was a nice, friendly Northern Brit? Because he didn’t have a degree? Or because he’s black?

I don’t know the answer to that, and it’s not something we explore during the interview.

The film didn’t get made…

Before I could get any further, Netribution was awarded a big grant from the Interledger Foundation to finally make the decentralised open video architecture I’d always dreamed of. The film got put to the side.

Years later and I’ve still not made the film.

When the grant funding ran out, everyone had to get back to earning money, while the legal and compliance demands of what we’d built stalled it. I moved back to London with my partner, became a dad at 44. I set my ambitions a little smaller and started to contribute regularly to CiviCRM which had been the foundation for half of our project (and runs on WordPress and other CMSs). I made design improvements for this somewhat dated-looking open source tool for fundraising, mailings, subscriptions, event ticketing, contact management that’s widely used by non-profits (from Wikipedia to the Royal Television Society), but which also appealed as it’s all an indie film/music producer/distributor/exhibitor could need if they wanted to be 100% independent.

But Mike’s story never left me. It wasn’t just the injustice of his situation, it’s his cheerfulness in the face of it.

And that’s what inspires this final issue of Netribution @ 25: Mike’s stated focus on contentment. He’s the closest to the taoist ideal I’ve (knowingly) met:

“Creating, yet not possessing, Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten. Therefore it lasts forever.” Lao Tsu, Tao te Ching verse 2

He manifests this, and I’ve no real idea on his journey to get that point. His contribution to the web – with a tool used by millions and encountered daily by billions – is beyond anything most of us can imagine, yet he’s not rich, famous or known beyond some older WordPress devs.

So please meet Mike Little.

I split the chat into two pieces: his story with WordPress, and then a more technical dive into his life with code, for anyone wanting to check my claim he’s WordPress’s Steve Wozniak or curious about how tech has changed since he started with a teletype machine at Stockport College in 1978.

He’s why this last issue is called Becoming Little: not just because of the Linus Torvalds quote “The big point for me really was not when it was becoming huge, it was when it was becoming little” – which can be seen in the influence of Cath and David in the history of filmmaking on the web, and that sums up what he did for WordPress… but because I think he’s the kind of hero the world needs more of right now.

Part 1: co-founding WordPress and watching it grow (from afar)

open.movie/w/hzQjFV6xJF9agsn5E…

Part 2: Mike Little’s life in code…

open.movie/w/rdot9DoygXTXzLM4Z…

RE: social.lol/@otaviocc/116076383…

I have no words to thank everyone for helping yesterday.

Great news: Yesterday on the omg.lol IRC server, folks investigated and discovered the GitHub account was part of a network of bots. These bots republish open source projects, modifying their READMEs with malicious links, and distribute Windows malware through fake builds.

After documenting the findings, we reported everything to GitHub. Within hours, they took down the repositories and an account for violating their Terms and Code of Conduct.

Thank you for investigating, reporting, and sending coffee. You're all amazing!

I planned to write a blog post today, but @brennan already wrote something better than I could. You should read it:

brennan.day/the-curious-case-o…

Many thanks to @brennan, @chilli, @adam, mattl, @cygnoir, @annika, @jarunmb, and everyone else who helped!

#OpenSource #macOSDev #omglol #GitHub

The Curious Case of the Triton Malware Fork

Today, a weird malware distribution campaign targeting users of omg.lol and Triton, an open-source macOS client of omg.lol, was found.

^brennan.day

Otávio

2026-02-15 19:50:57

A person just “stole” Triton, my native omg.lol client, and removed all the references from the README file where I ask people to reference the original project and give me credit for the app.

They didn’t fork it, so that people don’t realize it’s a fork of another project.

They also changed their README file to point to their own zip file, which I’m not downloading, and neither should you. I don’t know what’s in it.

They even created a website, hosted on GitHub Pages, for it, with a link to their “builds.”

That pisses me off. Really. I spent years building the app. I put a lot of my personal time into building it for me and for the community, only for someone to steal it as theirs, publish builds, and wipe my name from it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Help me with a Star on the original project to keep it higher in search results. Thanks!

github.com/otaviocc/Triton

#OpenSource #macOSDev #omglol #GitHub #Triton

GitHub - otaviocc/Triton: A native macOS client for omg.lol with support for Statuslog, PURLs, Web Pages, Now Pages, Weblog, Pics, and Pastebin

A native macOS client for omg.lol with support for Statuslog, PURLs, Web Pages, Now Pages, Weblog, Pics, and Pastebin - otaviocc/Triton

^GitHub

A person just “stole” Triton, my native omg.lol client, and removed all the references from the README file where I ask people to reference the original project and give me credit for the app.

They didn’t fork it, so that people don’t realize it’s a fork of another project.

They also changed their README file to point to their own zip file, which I’m not downloading, and neither should you. I don’t know what’s in it.

They even created a website, hosted on GitHub Pages, for it, with a link to their “builds.”

That pisses me off. Really. I spent years building the app. I put a lot of my personal time into building it for me and for the community, only for someone to steal it as theirs, publish builds, and wipe my name from it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Help me with a Star on the original project to keep it higher in search results. Thanks!

github.com/otaviocc/Triton

#OpenSource #macOSDev #omglol #GitHub #Triton

"Google has criticized the European Union’s intentions to achieve digital sovereignty through open-source software."

Umm...ok...I think I can see why they did that, but lets read further...

"The company [Google] warned that Brussels’ policies aimed at reducing dependence on American tech companies could harm competitiveness. "

Yeah. For Google itself it can definitely "harm [their] competetiveness".

"According to Google, the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs would not contribute to economic growth."

Correct again, if you ARE Google. If everyone start using open-source alternatives it will most likely not contribute to Googles economic growth.

It quite likely will contribute to economic growth for a bunch of smaller/new companies. It will also open the playing field for software development which still being possible for anyone to verify/test/check/view the source code to ensure there are no flaws in there, or algorithms for tracking people based on advertising goals.

They are kind of correct too in that it will probably cause a temporary set-back in economic growth for all those companies that live under the illusion of "there should always be growth and we will do anything to make that happen", but I consider that a good thing. When that speed bump has been passed there will be an opportunity to do a controlled/reasonable acceleration.

Given that Google has removed the "Don't be evil" from their Mission Statement, for unknown reason, I think it is wise, for many different reasons, to cut down on the dependence on Google (and Microsoft, Facebook etc), and to look at alternatives. Ideally open-source ones that can be scrutinized by anyone who wishes to do so.

lemmy.world/post/43144736
#google #opensource #eu #europe