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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • The EU will already have projects in development as far as my experience goes.

    What I do not know though but think applies: Such an act is legally binding for all member states. If they fight these things, they are allowed to propose at the EU court for adjustment in order to be aligned with the national law. This can postpone the national implementation for a few years.

    But it can only be revoked by a new act of the EU council.

    And they can simply ignore any new suggestion of the EU parliament if they like to.


  • The Debian community not already maintains a Chromium fork. How much does that cost?

    I honestly can’t and wouldn’t judge: Time, Resources, implicit know-how etc. are unknown to me.

    The human time needed should grow with the number of patches that need to be applied to the upstream code base, …

    jupp

    … because some will fail now and then.

    Forks are done due to different reasons. Therefore it depends why to fork. It could be possible that one feature diverges so much that applying patches isn’t enough. Especially patches in a debian sense, neither .diff/.patch-patches.

    This is what I refer to as “fatness” of the fork. The more patches, the fatter. It should be possible to build, packege and publish a fork with zero patches without human intervention, after the initial automation work.

    For a brief period, until something rattles on the build system. Debian patches are often applied to remove binary blobs due to licensing - Imagine upstream chooses to include M$ Recall into the render engine. You would need to apply extraordinary amounts of work. Maybe even maintaining a complete separate implementation. This would also imply changes on the build systems, which needs to get aligned continiously between both upstreams, now.

    Maybe I’m missing something obvious. 😅

    With each version you have to very carefully review every commit if you want to maintain compatability with upstream, in order to merge patches into your fork.

    When there are 50 devs working on upstream and you need to review every commit to assure requirement X, this alone is a hard path. If you need to also apply workarounds compatible with future versions of upstream, you need PROFESSIONALS. Luckily these are found in the FOSS community; But they are underpaid and worse: underappreciated.

    // plus I could imagine that things like chrome may even not be coming with the full test suite. The test suite of a browser are surely so huge I can’t even comprehend the effort put into it. And then bug tickets… Upstream says: Not in my version. Now the fork has to address these themselves! :)


  • It does not depend in how fat the fork is. You provide some reasons on your own.

    Your assumption appears to be that open source software can be maintained with minimal costs by the community and sofware-aid assures an ongoing bug prevention of some sort.

    In the end you still need at least a few full-time devs on it. It would be fair to pay them accordingly if they are maintaining behemoths of software.

    Funfact: Infrastructure costs are x-times higher then IT Personel in my organization. A big chunk of it is energy and space; But its less then licensing costs…







  • Ugh, okay Meredith, let’s pretend it’s impossible to handle this with user experience that makes the user acknowledge their conversation with a WhatsApp user is not secure. Meanwhile if the only viable way for this conversion to occur is to have WhatsApp on both ends, the situation less secure.

    It is a privacy concern, not a security one.

    So according to Meredith, the choice is between less overall security or not having conversations with people who don’t use Signal.

    Could you cite this please? Because I do not see this beeing said or implied.

    That could makes sense for her salary but it surely is a net negative for Signal users some of which will have to install WhatsApp since they won’t be able to afford not to have those conversations.

    Entirley different conversation, accusations and projections. So dropping this.