Tag: Open Source

Bookmarked Google Photos is so 2020โ€”welcome to the world of self-hosted photo management (Ars Technica)

Our perhaps unsatisfying conclusion to this seven-app showdown exposes an important truth: the photo management software world is too complex for a one- or two-person dev team to properly handle. Unless we see some of these app-makers start to pool their resources together, it could be a while before we get a truly excellent self-hosted option to pry many of us away from Google.

Alex Kretzschmar takes a dive into the open source alternatives to Google Photos. Might be something to tinker with in regards to Reclaim Cloud, especially Nextcloud Photos.
Bookmarked Home Assistant (Home Assistant)

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.

An open source alternative to apps like Google Home. Might be something to try with Reclaim Cloud.

แ”ฅ “Troy Hunt” in Troy Hunt: Home Assistant, Pwned Passwords and Security Misconceptions ()

Liked Death of an Open Source Business Model by jay โ€“ Jay Hoffmann (jayhoffmann.com)

Mapbox found themselves in a similar position to Mongo and Redis: they were subsidizing R&D for a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants.
In the Death of an Open Source Business Model, Joe Morrison laments at the new licensing restrictions of Mapbox, a reversal from the companyโ€™s previous business…

Cloud didnโ€™t kill open core. Capitalism did.
Liked The Right to Read- GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (gnu.org)

Lissa did not report Dan to the SPA. His decision to help her led to their marriage, and also led them to question what they had been taught about piracy as children. The couple began reading about the history of copyright, about the Soviet Union and its restrictions on copying, and even the original United States Constitution. They moved to Luna, where they found others who had likewise gravitated away from the long arm of the SPA. When the Tycho Uprising began in 2062, the universal right to read soon became one of its central aims.

via Ian O’Byrne
Liked When Every App Crashes (Anil Dash)

we have to demand of our technology what we have of our food, clothing, medicine and other essential needs: visibility into how theyโ€™re supplied & sourced, understanding the workers & working conditions that shape them, and accountability when the system has failures. When the supply chain for Tylenol was vulnerable, the manufacturer addressed the issue directly. When consumers wanted to know their tuna was dolphin-safe, companies responded.

That raises a few key questions: Who makes your apps? Where are they sourced? Which apps do you use that were made by people you trust?

Liked WordPress and Wix Are Fighting About Open Source Software (CMS Critic)

So WordPress and Wix are fighting one another โ€“ and I’m not talking about them competing for customers. Instead, the two website building heavyweights are having a brawl via the blogosphere. Here’s everything you need to know: Matt Mullenweg Calls Out Wix A few days ago, WordPress’ Founder Matt Mullenweg took

Liked Itโ€™s always the little thingsโ€ฆ (Discours.es)

Iโ€™d love to see a lot more money poured into Free Software to solve some of the problems Iโ€™ve outlined above. A lot of it is due to a combination of:

  1. The massive mismatch between the number of developers working on Free Software projects, compared to the number of designers.
  2. The increasing amount of vendor lock-in, and decreasing interest in standards of interoperability .
  3. Duplication of effort and fragmentation across the Free Software landscape. Some of this is political, some social, and some (to be quite honest) because of ignorance.

We can do a lot better than this. Iโ€™d like to help, but right now I have more problems and questions than I do answers.

Bookmarked Twitter’s Project Bluesky by Ben WerdmรผllerBen Werdmรผller (werd.io)

The time is right for tech companies to make the shift into open protocols, in a way that allows businesses to make money, users to own their data, and a thousand new social networking interfaces to bloom. And I think that’s a progressive move for the web.

Responding to Jack Dorsey’s announcement that Twitter would be funding an independent group to would develop an open standard for decentralized social networking, Ben Werdmuller discusses his own attempts at decentralised platforms through Elgg and Known. The challenge, according to Werdmuller, is balancing business and community interests.

The key will be rapid iteration in the public interest, repeatedly testing not just the feasibility of such a protocol (whether you can build and maintain it at scale), but also its desirability (user risk) and viability (business risk). In other words, it’s not enough to make something work. It also has to be able to win user trust, serve as the foundation of an ecosystem, and allow businesses built on the platform to become valuable. As yet, open standards processes have not shown themselves to be capable of this kind of product development.

Doug Belshaw is sceptical about what is being proposed and feels that it focused on investors and regulators.

Ultimately, Twitterโ€™s announcement is a distraction to the important work of building viable, interoperable alternatives to Big Tech. The thought of Dorsey and chums building an alternative to ActivityPub sounds a lot like the Rainforest Alliance. Given the mention of blockchain, I should imagine there will be a โ€˜tokenโ€™ or cryptocurrency angle in there, too. And Iโ€™m not sure thatโ€™s in the long-term best interests of humanity.

For Stephen Downes, this is a response to the rise of distributed networks.

The sceptic in me wonders whether Twitter is merely trying to undermine existing distributed networks who have been bleeding traffic from the centralized social network.

I think that Michael Bishop captures my feelings best in a short post on his blog:

This is a note Iโ€™m posting to my WordPress blog that syndicates to Twitter. If you heart it, it will show up on my blog too. Open standards.

Liked Sandstorm is winding down and some other options to begin exploring for self-hosting web apps (edtechfactotum.com)

say, there are options. And I suspect there will be more open source options emerging in the future as interest among both organizations and individuals looking for more self-hosted cloud-like options that put the emphasis on privacy, data sovereignty, and local control grows.

Liked A changing of the guard by Malcolm BlaneyMalcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)

It took me many years to join the FSF as a member, even though I have considered myself a supporter of Free Software for as long as I have written code. I’ve only been a member for a year, but today I emailed the FSF to cancel my membership. This makes me very sad as I really believe in the Free Software movement, but I refuse to contribute to an organisation that supports RMS and the views he is currently sharing.

Replied to HyperDocs: Evolution, Purpose & Intention – EdTechTeacher by Stephen Downes (EdTechTeacher)

This is part Google rolling a great new service and part Google taking one more step to destroy the open web. The concept of ‘HyperDocs’ emerges from the tools GSuite provides enabling teachers and students to create using Google Docs. Greg Kulowiec doesn’t define ‘HyperDocs’ directly but instead talks about the ways student and teachers can interact using Google Docs. What would be really great would be an open web designed with that capacity – much the way Tim Berners-Lee intended it in the first place. Maybe something like that is coming. In the meantime, we can use Google Docs.

I find the whole ‘HyperDocs‘ thing interesting Stephen. I think that the online nature of GSuite has led to the association. However, as Alan Levine has shown with thinks like SplotPoint, the answer does not always have to be Google. The challenge is the ease of use, especially in regards to the ability to copy a template. I am not sure if this is what Doug Belshaw is trying to achieve with Moodle.net?
Bookmarked Whatโ€™s wrong with the Raspberry Pi by nachoparker (ownyourbits.com)

I really think that the Raspberry Pi has been a very important event in the history of SBCs but today it falls behind in terms quality, performance and transparency. There are other affordable alternatives out there where developers have given more consideration to those issues.

A technical dive into the Raspberry Pi. Although some of this is a bit beyond me, it does provide an interesting insight into how things work and some of the choices that have been made.