Notices by Strypey (strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz), page 102

@lynnesbian I remember #DougRushkoff talking about how weird it was to him that within a couple of generations, US Jews have gone from being an excluded target of #WhiteSupremacy, to being included in the "white" category (Doug is Jewish). I imagine US folks of Italian and other non-WASP ethnic descent must have noticed this too.

“When people talk about the Paleo diet, that’s not paleo, that’s just non-carb,” Weyrich says. “The true paleo diet is eating whatever’s out there in the environment.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/neanderthal-dental-plaque-shows-what-a-paleo-diet-really-looks-like/518949/

The other solution, suggested a trust in Aotearoa who deal with e-waste is to make importers and manufacturers pay a waste disposal levy for every product they introduce into the country. The money would go into a pool to fund waste management projects, and the levy would reflect the real cost of disposing of a given product in an eco-friendly manner.

I've got a solution to the recycling problem. Pass a law that says that every company has to accept back any products they provide, when they reach end-of-life. So, for example, retailers would have to accept packaging waste back from customers, and the wholesaler that sold them the product would have to accept it back from them. Internalizing the cost of dealing with waste would motivate companies to make less disposable stuff, and find ways to make it easier to recycle:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/

@AmarOk would you say that improving Jami, and especially fixing race condition bugs on platforms you don't have access to, would you be easier if you had more testers on a more diverse range of platforms, giving you feedback? Is there some way we could organize this that would be more helpful than random feedback via email, posts here etc?

@noorul

@aral no worries ;) It was my first experiment with a new way of writing blog posts that stops me from over-thinking and especially over-editing them as I compose. I'll chuck that rant up on the #Disintermedia blog sometime this week.

@z428
3) advertising is and has always been a dodgy way to fund anything. Chomsky and Herman's book #ManufacturingConsent (and the documentary of the same name) explained that in detail back in 1988, before the web was invented. I agree with #AdBusters that anything we can do to disrupt the ad business is a legitimate and necessary form of activism.
@pootz @sophia

@z428
2) your comment severely understates the benefits of #AdBlockers. My laptop used to crash *constantly* until I installed #NoScript. Had I not been using an adblocker, the web would have been completely unusable for me.
@pootz @sophia

@z428 two things on this,

> using ad blockers again tries to fix things conveniently on the consumer side

1) #FreeCode licenses and #copyleft try to fix things conveniently on the consumer side as well. Waiting for some kind of regulation like #GDPR or #AntiTrust suites to stop companies from abusing #Adware as #Spyware would be about as effective as waiting for states to enforce protection of #SoftwareFreedom through regulation and court action. Still waiting ...

@pootz @sophia

#FreeAsInFreedom is back! In this episode of the #OggcCast, Bradley and Karen discuss the new wave of non-free licenses with #FieldOfUseRestrictions:
http://faif.us/cast/2018/dec/31/0x5F/

@aral you hit the nail on the head. See the rest of the rant ;)

@noorul intriguing. Maybe the Jami devs could learn something from the way Tox handles text chat, and the Tox folks could learn something from the way Jami handles audio/video calls? Maybe a shared standard could be put together that uses some protocols from each, and puts uses of both in the same decentralized chat network?
@AmarOk

@lilo I agree. I figured it out in the end, but the documentation only gave me about half of the information I needed to do so. Not having links in the documentation to the relevant pages where the sha512sum files and .sign files could be found was annoying.

In summary, it was an honour and a privilege to be part of the efforts by #CreativeCommonsAotearoaNZ (now #Tohatoha) and #NZOSS to bring NZGOAL and its Software Extension into existence, and to contribute to the consultations on them. Now that we have a new, more public-spirited government, it's time to start campaigning for 2.0 versions that maximize public access to publicly-funded works *and* their derivatives.

Failing that, I'd like to see Apache 2.0 replace "MIT" as the recommended laissez-faire license. NGGOAL-SE quite rightly points out that NZ patent law doesn't allow #SoftwarePatents, and that public service agencies are not #PatentTrolls anyway. But that doesn't stop outside contributors to publicly-funded #FreeCode licensed under the "MIT" license, from enforcing software patents on anyone using that code in other jurisdictions. Apache 2.0 explicitly prevents this.
https://opensource.com/article/18/2/how-make-sense-apache-2-patent-license

I'd still prefer a #copyleft license (GPL, LGPL, or AGPL as appropriate) to be the default recommendation. I don't see why we ought to allow companies to build proprietary software on top of publicly-funded #FreeCode. Why not oblige them to make their source code available to their users, and allow their fixes and addition to be incorporated back into the upstream versions maintained by public service agencies or open source communities?

The situation in NZGOAL Software Edition is somewhat better. Public service agencies are advised to license any modifications to an existing codebase under the license the upstream codebase uses, even when they're not legally obliged to (ie a non-copyleft license). When licensing new software, they're advised to use either #GPL (v3+) or "#MIT", and to consider #LGPL or #AGPL where appropriate.

Sadly, and perhaps because of the political circumstances, the default suggested in NZGOAL is #CCBY. This laissez-faire license means, for example, that map companies can sell corrected maps based on the publicly-funded NZ map data shared under CC BY by #LINZ (Land Information New Zealand), but LINZ would need to ask permission to incorporate those map corrections back into the public dataset (used in #OpenStreetMap). This is something I'd like to see fixed, by changing the default to #CCBYSA.

During the NZGOAL consultation process, I argued that the appropriate default license to recommend would be #CCBYSA. When any work is created at public expense, its public service maintainers ought to be allowed improve it by incorporating any fixes or additions made in derivative versions, especially commercial derivatives. I argued for GPL as the default license recommendation for NZGOAL-SE, for the same reason. As did #NZOpenSourceSociety President Dave Lane.

Getting an extreme right-wing National government to approve the #NZGOAL framework was an amazing achievement. NZGOAL officially advises the public service to release publicly-funded works under a #CreativeCommons license, and later software under a #FreeCode license in the Software Extension to NZGOAL.