If you are interested to help building an anonymous, taxable payment system using modern cryptography all being #FreeSoftware #OpenSource here information about the next funding round by @NGI_Taler

https://www.ngi.eu/opencalls/#ngitaler2nd

Hello Mastodon! We are a collective of #students and staff from #Amsterdam University College who care about #OpenStandards, #FreeSoftware, and #OpenData.

Every week, we get together to explore, study and organize our way out of the corporate lock-ins that we face at our #university and beyond.

Next to our website, this account will be our main channel to communicate with the world.

We hope that we can connect with others that share our ambitions to push for a free and open digital world.

> […] the trade-off between convenience and freedom is rarely so binary.

Worse, this binary is completely arbitrary. There is nothing inherent in #FreeSoftware that opposes it to convenience.

Rather, the parties who *are* opposed to #SoftwareFreedom, need some way to overcome people's natural preference for freedom.

And they hit upon something powerful: Our drive to reduce effort, to reduce friction in our interactions, to find things that *just work* for us.

That's a *good* drive.

As Cory Doctorow puts it @pluralistic

> The problem with Google isn't that it lets you find things. The problem with Facebook isn't that it lets you talk to your friends. The problem with Uber isn't that it gets you from one place to another without having to stand on a corner waving your arm in the air. The problem with Amazon isn't that it makes it easy to locate a wide variety of products.

We can have convenient, user-needs respecting, #FreeSoftware. But not with monopoly.

"You have to understand, we’re responsible for taxpayer money here. We can’t just make a donation to your open source project."

— a national government who relies on #Matrix when being asked to support it financially

Read more about the problem and some initiatives that are responding to it:

https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-service/

#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS #funding #xz #sustainability

Open Source Infrastructure must be a publicly funded service.

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications

^{Matthew Hodgson (matrix.org)}

if at least developers used #GPL / #AGPL, the corporations at least were forced to contribute back in one way or an other, but due to the rampant use of MIT and BSD licenses, they can literally get away without doing anything beneficial for the wider ecosystem while using other people's code (those other people let them do it).

I think the proliferation of MIT and BSD licenses really made the #FreeSoftware free rider problem much worse than it should be.

I think that the huge rate of burnout in developers that cause issues time and time again can be traced back to this attitude of "I will license it permissively to get it into everything". When the code gets into everything without compensation, the pressure of responsibility mounts, and bad things happen.

It is my personal belief that one's mental health doesn't worth the "bragging right" of one's code getting into a wide range of proprietary garbage.

#FreeSoftware #GPL

Excellent article: I am NOT A SUPPLIER!
https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/not-a-supplier

You are all on the hobbiest maintainers turf now
https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/open-source-hobbyists-turf

This guy nails it. If you want me to be your supplier then pay me. Period. Most of this comes from a pathological corporate mindset where sociopathic greed is considered normal. Plus a failure to read the licenses in first place: #gpl: software supplied with no warranty of fitness, not even implicit.

Focus more on #FreeSoftware and less on Open.