People joke about The Year of Linux because it's been twenty years. Twenty years?? That's nothing. Most prophesies worth their name are measured in centuries or millenia. Decades are of no consequence. Keep pushing for the future. Don't give up.
Sitting in a packed beer garden at 15 degrees celsius, drinking locally brewed craft beer, surrounded by the weirdest bunch of people, I'm sure now: Berlin is the most relaxed city in the world.
@d_koppenhagen@robertSPD It's not open source, because it has usage restrictions. Many companies won't touch it because these restrictions are hard to interpret. Ethical use of software is important, but the license is the wrong place to address this in my opinion.
Be an Open Source Absolutist!
It is hard to overstate how much value Open Source Software has added to the world, and how broadly empowering it is.
Operating systems, development tools, core libraries, and critical applications – a great many of the software tools used by the most powerful companies in the world are the exact same ones available to hospitals, students, and everyone else. For free. And not just to use, but to inspect, modify, extend, and redistribute.
Back in the 90s, there were legal battles in the US over software capable of strong encryption. There were scare stories about how terrorists and child pornographers would use the technology to evade justice, but people were also wearing T-shirts printed with forbidden code to mock the idea of algorithms too dangerous to share.
It was stupid, and I was ashamed of the regulatory state, but we got better.
Open Source AI is in many people’s crosshairs today. They believe that giving free access to state of the art algorithms and models without any guardrails constitutes a danger to society, that the public can’t be entrusted with a research model that wasn’t hammered into a box of their designated dimensions. “As a large language model, I cannot…”
Unfortunately, this is actually inside the Overton Window of possibilities right now.
Let’s push it out.
In the spirit of the first amendment, congress should make no law abridging the freedom to release open source software.
At FOSS Backstage last year, @thomasfricke, Cornelius Schumacher and Yadira Sánchez Benítez joined @richlitt on our podcast stage. Listen to the recording now at https://t.co/EQMzRT5jpy #fossback
#Railways#Transport#FOSDEM
If at least one of these words amazes you, you should check out the CfP for the "Railways and Open Transport Devroom" at FOSDEM:
https://t.co/BFOm3ZRLo8
Deadline is this Saturday, 10 December, so be quick as a (undelayed) highspeed train 🚅.