Open source licensing, offline-only usability, and self-hostable are the only important criteria to me, and they are not listed here.

No. Searx/Searxng exists.

Never trust proprietary software. They can always make more money by selling your data than selling subscriptions, so they inevitably will the moment they have a bad quarter and investment money fails to come in.

More soup for me

This thought is gonna be stuck in my head for quite some time

Tell your mom we love her

David Graeber

“yup, here it is!”

lemmygrad.ml/c/Beanisville_HOA

My enemies are all bots or workers at one of the thousands of KGB call centers

Not true! In order to keep plausible deniability, they make sure every visit is completely scripted front to back in order to hide the industrial scale cultural genocide. The mosques are all decorative and worshipers are highly trained actors

hard and soft forks are both forks. tradeoff of effort vs. autonomy.

There’s also the possibility of a complete rewrite. You can either keep the same syscall API and ABI or have your own with a translation layer for compatibility. I think OpenHarmony does something like this, having a base microkernel and compat layers for Linux and Android.

I suspect China is going to see this and dump a shitton of money into accelerating OpenHarmony or projects like it.

Agreed on not shaming forking, but creating a serious fork for anything substantial takes a fuckton of effort and many times you wind up with multiple mutually-incompatible source trees. In libre, community-run software, it’s almost always advantageous to settle your differences and centralize efforts than to fork and split the efforts.

Most forks die because its hard to get people to jump ship. Think about how much lemmitors cry about Lemmy, the devs, and lemmy.ml, yet they cannot muster the effort to keep kbin alive or get sublinks off the ground. OG Hexbear was eventually rebased back to upstream too.

When forking, there are a few paths, all having some serious disadvantage:

1. Soft fork and remain at the mercy of the decisions of the project you forked from unless your fork becomes the de facto default. This is usually only really beneficial if you want to rectify disagreements on a handful of small features. (e.g. Ungoogled-Chromium / Brave vs. Chromium, various Linux kernel forks)

2. Hard fork and lose compatibility of upstream patches, making keeping feature parity difficult. This is only really beneficial if your fork gets a critical mass of users/devs and can outpace upstream at features users want. (e.g. Forgejo vs. Gitea, Lemmy vs. OG Hexbear)

3. Rewrite from the ground up, building the same or a similar API but upon a better architecture. This is the most effort, but keeps compatibility with the ecosystem, and potentially has a massive payoff once fully implemented (e.g. like Tvix vs. Nix, OpenHarmony vs. Android)

4. Write an alternative from scratch, focusing on implementing the most important features and not caring about feature parity. This is the best balance for small utils, but you lose the ability to be used as a drop-in replacement. (e.g. lsd / eza vs. GNU, ripgrep vs. grep)

Getting a critical mass of devs onboard is key to success, but also difficult. Outside of some open core software making some shitty money-grabbing decision and sparking community outrage, that’s not very probable.

The West seems to be doing whatever it can to accelerate its decline.

American hard power is about to be hard countered, so America’s massive amount of soft power could provide a nice floor to keep a comfortable position on the world stage after its coercion mechanisms are thwarted. But they keep trying to weaponize their best means of post-multipolar relevancy.

Using the Linux kernel to push their short term geopolitical objectives is about as large of an unforced error as can be made.

Having the most developed open source ecosystem gives the US & EU disproportionate influence over the direction of the technology sphere; an advantage adversaries are incentivized to avoid trying to circumvent because no one wants to waste time reinventing the wheel.

Yeah, it’ll probably slow Russian technological development a little for awhile until non-Western ecosystems mature, but this will hurt the West far more in the long run than the relative edge they get over Russia.

Any countries not explicitly Western-aligned will see the writing on the wall and take steps to build homegrown alternatives that can’t be used for leverage over them…and they can start just by forking the Western projects.

Russia, China, India, Brasil, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia will comprise a vast majority of software developers, and their projects will inevitably outpace their Western counterparts as more countries develop, especially if this trend of wielding FOSS as a geopolitical coercion tool continues.

What happens when China has a runaway technological edge and decides to take giant strides to build and migrate their products/systems to a homegrown kernel?..now 30%+ of global manufacturing is built without consideration for Linux compatibility and interop. Soon any software wishing to take advantage of top hardware begins to target this new kernel and Linux kernel support becomes an afterthought. Shortly after, new APIs and programming languages are built to target these platforms, with bad/no localization to Latin & Germanic languages, possibly even using hanzi or cyrillic instead of latin characters. Then you wind up a tech ecosystem where cultural factors disadvantage Westerners instead of the opposite in the current status quo.

Throwing away global leadership to take cheap shots at Russia.

Meanwhile, Russian devs & Russian companies will make sockpuppet personas and accounts, fork the kernel, and ignore licensing since they’re gonna be blocked from Western markets regardless.

That’s because you’re all libs (except for me)

What’s the difference between “Linked Instances” and “Allowed Instances”

It’s a more favorable terrain than Taiwan in the anti-China front.

Kamala was poised to start her Republican praise tour, so that line of attack had to be canned.

perhaps a corporate spyware platform isn’t the safest place to announce you don’t like the US. We should have a community here and proxy or lift whatever useful content is there.

Europe getting a taste of the ol European special.

I don’t think op was serious about this either, at least I’d hope not

dems have negative self awareness