Captain Beyond

You wouldn’t download a car

Being proprietary is enough of a reason to refuse it. On top of that, being owned by Facebook is another good reason.

With proprietary software the developer is in control, and in this case the developer is known evil.

This is an ad

The problem is the works they didn’t pay for. “Copyright infringement” is quite the anodyne term for “theft.”

Other way around. Copyright infringement is the alleged crime. “Theft” is the entertainment industry’s spin term for it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft It is best to call things what they are and not buy into this silly narrative.

HAL 9000 has entered the chat

This

I’ve been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don’t think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don’t care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it’s usable again.

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn’t stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don’t like Midjourney as it’s a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It’s probably worth noting that Disney didn’t actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

Pidgin is still around, and you can even use discord with it (no voice, mind you).

I would like to bring the multi-platform client back.

I don’t think the ffmpeg maintainer is complaining that Microsoft is using ffmpeg, rather that they are opening “high priority” bug reports based on customer complaints. This might be a high priority problem for Microsoft but that does not make it so for ffmpeg.

The license allows Microsoft to use ffmpeg but they aren’t entitled to demand free labor from the project. Really, no one is entitled to do so, but Microsoft being a large company who can definitely afford to put money or talent on the problem makes it only that much more egregious.

edit: I would note that asking for help or reporting a bug is usually welcome, the problematic part is demanding help because it’s a high priority issue for YOUR customers.

xkcd 743 moment

They can, but their very existence increases the Chromium engine’s market share and therefore Google’s control of the web, allowing them to do stuff like this. Once this is implemented in Chrome then these browsers will just become “Chrome but it can’t play netflix/access bank websites/etc” or whatever.

Translation: “no”