Hello, I work on Pharo, an open source derivative of Smalltalk. Pharo is licensed under MIT hence most of my work needs to be licensed also under MIT.

However, time to time I have some projects in my free time that I made for my personal usage or for friends, and in those cases I am not OK with my work being used by for-profit project not giving anything back. I would very much prefer to use GPLv3 on those cases, but my understanding of licensing is very poor and I have been told there is a "virus" behavior on GPLv3 that may prevent people to use at all what I do, and that's not my intention.

Do you have any advice how to handle this?

Hello everyone!

I'm excited to introduce you to SprintLang, my first open-source project, an experiment born out of my own need for a more organized approach to project management. I realize it might be a niche solution, but I believe sharing it can lead to valuable feedback and, who knows, it might just be the tool someone out there didn't know they needed!

SprintLang is a Lightweight Markup Language (LML) specifically designed to simplify the complexities of project management. It provides a structured way to define and manage projects using plain text files, similar to how you'd use markdown.

The design philosophy behind SprintLang is centered on readability and writability, striving to maintain a balance between simplicity for human users and being easily parsed by computer programs. It sould be expressive enough to cater to the diverse needs project management while keeping the user interface as simple as possible.

Why plain text? The beauty of plain text is its simplicity and universal compatibility. It doesn't require any specific software and can be read and edited on any device. This makes SprintLang a versatile tool for project management that isn't tied to a specific platform or toolset. I plan to write some tooling around the format, but I don't want it to be required. It also suits my CLI first workflows.

SprintLang is open-source and licensed under the MIT License, one of the most permissive licenses. This means you're free to use, modify, and distribute SprintLang however you like, as long as you include the original copyright and license notice. I chose the MIT License to encourage the widest possible use and adaptation of SprintLang.

While SprintLang is currently in its early stages, I believe it has the potential to be a powerful tool for project management. I'm eager to see how it can grow and improve with community input and contributions. If you're interested in contributing to SprintLang, whether it's providing feedback, suggesting features, reporting bugs, etc, I would love to hear from you!

This software is easy to use thanks to its tags feature where all you have to do is click one button, enter the text you want displayed, and voila! Not only that, it also has wizards that make creating tables and other visual elements a breeze. It does have one drawback - no WYSIWYG, so no live previews of your html files.

So this is inspired somewhat by a question about somebody wanting to have a non-GitHub way of contributing to Lemmmy. I've really enojyed some other discussions on this community so felt somewhat inspired to ask this one too.

And whilst Lemmy is mirrored to a couple of alternatives (a self hosted Gitea and Codeberg) they can't really be anything more than a mirror and a backup. If one doesn't want to use GitHub they still can't realistically contribute without signing up to GitHub and creating issues and PRs.

So what would it take to actually get people away from GitHub and onto alternatives (GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut)? The situation seems to somewhat parallel the whole Reddit and Twitter thing. Both have/had a huge monopoly on users to the point where it just wasn't really worth using anything else, at least not if you wanted to be part of a decently sized community.

Other mass migrations

Obviously the difference with Reddit and Twitter is that they both have had their version of "the Event" which cause existing projects (Mastodon, Lemmy amongst others) to suddenly explode in popularity. Has it killed off the originals? No but it has made the alternatives actually viable with enough of a community to sustain them and encourage more to join, even if slowly.

GitHub has had its fair share of controversy, most recently surrounding co-pilot and code scraping but no particular widespread outrage to cause people to leave it in droves.

GitHub is the home of open source?

I think for many GitHub has simply become synonymous with open source. The sheer number of repositories and projects hosted there means that people just use GitHub alone for all of their open source needs and don't even look at other forges. Not to mention all the services offered - most of the alternatives can offer some of the same features but not all of them. Not only do you get space for your project code itself but you get access to their CI/CD platform, a forum through Discussions, a wiki, a project management tool, static site hosting which is an awful lot for smaller projects like GitLab and community non-profit projects like Codeberg to compete with.

There of course are some people that rely on their GitHub profile and their activity chart in order to get jobs and advance their careers - many of these people I suspect wouldn't want to fragment their profile by having to split their activity up over multiple profiles.

So why would anyone not want to use GitHub. Quite simply it isn't really in the spirit of open source is it? Not only is it controlled by Microsoft who haven't historically been the friendliest towards open source but GitHub itself is closed source. You can't host your own GitHub and get all the same features it enjoys. It does seem somewhat odd that the biggest vault of open source projects is itself proprietary and completely closed off.

What would need to happen for things to change?

So realistically what could be done about it? What would need to happen in order to entice people off of GitHub? Something arriving in the hopefully not too distant future is forge federation - projects such as Forgefriends, ForgeFed and ForgeFlux aim to try and create a federation of software forges. One of the main issues about having to create different accounts for every single platform goes away as you just stick with the instance you like best (or host your own) and yet still be able to fully interact with software hosted on other platforms. This means that you should be able to interact with a project hosted on, say, Codeberg, from your sourcehut account. You should be able to see issues, PRs etc. just as if you were on the same website.

GitHub, I strongly imagine, would have no intention of joining in order to maintain and protect their walled garden. I just don't see a world where they would want to join in with federation.

Lastly I just want to add that I'm absolutely not judging anyone for using GitHub. The main project I'm involved with is also still on GitHub for some good reasons. Not only is it intertwined with their ecosystem but it provides services that we just need at this point. We still rely on some of GitHub's services so we don't spend our community donations on hosting stuff that we just don't need to. It lightens the maintenance on us whilst we are still in a very active stage of the project with an awful lot of moving parts. And the bit I hate most, we need to be visible to the community - we aren't big enough to go to one of the alternative platforms because what community engagement we have might well drop through the floor if people are suddenly forced to make accounts on other services just to log an issue or ask a question. I would love to move to a platform like Codeberg and any personal project I make would probably be hosted there but for a big-ish community project we just cannot justify it. So I am well aware of the attraction of GitHub and what keeps people there. What I want to know is what would be needed to actually break that inertia for projects, such as the one I mentioned, to justify a move away from GitHub - particularly people who may be far less ideological about the open source world.

tl;dr

• GitHub offer many nice thing
• Other places have not so many nice thing
• How other place make people change mind up to move from place with all thing and all people to place with less many people and thing?

We're happy to announce the release of BusKill v0.7.0!

Most importantly, this release allows you to arm the BusKill GUI app such that it shuts-down your computer when the BusKill cable's connection to the computer is severed.

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

Upgrading

You can upgrade your BusKill app to the latest version either by

1. Clicking "Update" in the app or
2. Downloading it from GitHub

Changes

This update includes many bug fixes and new features, including:

1. Adds support for 'soft-shutdown' trigger to GUI
2. Adds a new buskill.ini config file
3. Adds a new "Settings" screen in GUI
4. Merges kivy & buskill config files into one standardized location
5. Fixes in-app updates on MacOS
6. Fixes lockscreen trigger on Linux Mint Cinnamon
7. Fixes background blue/red disarm/arm color to propagate to all screens
8. Fixes --run-trigger to be executed inside usb_handler child process and communicate to root_child through the parent process

You can find our changelog here:

• https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/stable/changelog.html

Documentation Improvements

We've also made many improvements to our documentation

1. Updated the Software User Guide to include how to arm the BusKill app with the soft-shutdown trigger in the GUI
2. Added a manpage
3. Better documentation on how to build your own USB-C BusKill Cable
4. Better documentation on how to test the buskill app
5. Fixes in Release Workflow
6. Added some additional related projects to our documentation

Soft-Shutdown Trigger

This release now allows you to choose between either [a] locking your screen or [b] shutting down your computer when you arm the BusKill app from the GUI. By default, the BusKill app will trigger the lockscreen. To choose the 'soft-shutdown' trigger, open the navigation drawer, go to the Settings Screen, click Trigger, and change the selected trigger from lock-screen to soft-shutdown. For more information, see our Software GUI User Guide.

• https://docs.buskill.in/buskill-app/en/v0.7.0/software_usr/cli.html

BusKill Now in Debian!

We're also happy to announce that, with the release of Debian 12, it's now possible to install BusKill in Debian with Apt!

sudo apt-get install buskill

Testers Needed!

We do our best to test the BusKill app on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. But unfortunately it's possible that our app doesn't fully function on all versions, distributions, and flavours of these three platforms.

We could really use your help testing the BusKill app, especially if you have access to a system that's not (yet) listed in our Supported Platforms.

And in this release, we specifically would like you to help us test the new soft shutdown feature. Please let us know if it does or does not work for you.

Please contact us if you'd like to help test the BusKill app :)

I am currently in search of a reliable and privacy-focused alternative to Element Chat that can be used seamlessly across Linux, Android, and Windows platforms. Unfortunately, I'm experiencing some issues with Element Chat at the moment, and I need a trustworthy communication solution that prioritizes privacy, offers ease of installation and use, and ensures reliable messaging. If you have any recommendations or suggestions for an open source alternative that meets these criteria, I would greatly appreciate your insights.

Edit: I installed cinny and found a workaround for this issue I was having (https://github.com/vector-im/element-desktop/issues/1029#issuecomment-1612284909).

Hi!

I am building a Non-Custodial Bitcoin Wallet app in the Open. It is called Superlight and it is aimed to target users, that do not have a whole lot of knowledge about Bitcoin. Think online banking UX but Bitcoin is the network behind it instead of a bank.

Looking to build a community, feedback, users and contributors :)

Ads and open source. Is it possible to see them together?

Last update was in Jan 2023

cross-posted from: https://feddit.rocks/post/3214

So I created an open-source Lemmy bot to reply to posts/comments with YouTube links with converted Piped links to preserve your privacy.

Piped is an open-source alternative privacy-friendly frontend to YouTube. You can watch the same content from YouTube without connecting to Google's servers.

You can find the source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/lemmy-piped-link-bot

You can find Piped's source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

PS: I'm the author of Piped :P

seems like a very good alternative to searx and i think more people need to know about it

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/10175

#Travel season is here! Let KDE take you to the best spots, most beautiful #beaches, or even #Akademy2023: Check out the new "KDE for #Travellers" guide and... Bon Voyage 🚂✈️🏖️🚢🏛️🕌!

Support KDE!

Awesome app. It is somehow not listed on android-foss list so maybe someone didn't know about it.

Obtainium allows you to install and update Open-Source Apps directly from their releases pages, and receive notifications when new releases are made available.

GitHub page: Link.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1192887

Hi all. Wanted to announce our new release on Lemmy before that other place even if it's just a few minutes before :).

Survive, farm, build, explore, play with friends, and do much more. Inspired by a well known block game, pushing beyond.

How to play:

Download Minetest

• Navigate to https://www.minetest.net/ to download the client.
• Once installed, open and select the "Content" tab

Install MineClone2 from ContentDB

• Click "Browse Online Content" and filter by Games (select "Games" from the dropdown box)
• Find "MineClone2" (should be first on the list or on the first page)
• Click the [+] button next to MineClone2 and wait for download to finish
• Click "Back to Main Menu"

Create new world and play

• Click "Start Game" tab
• At the bottom click the MineClone2 icon (the 2 dirt with grass blocks)
• Click "New", give your world a name
• You can leave seed blank or put in a word of your choice
• Select your new world
• Click "Play Game" and enjoy!

Release notes: https://git.minetest.land/MineClone2/MineClone2/src/branch/master/releasenotes/0_84-the_very_nice_release.md

Source code: https://git.minetest.land/MineClone2/MineClone2

I'm not looking for a full PDF editor. Only to do tasks like merging and splitting PDFs, removing pages, or creating a PDF from a bunch of images.

https://www.ilovepdf.com is very handy, but I don't like the idea of uploading my documents to them, especially if they have sensitive data.

Hi everyone,

I'm pleasantly surprised and very thankful for the traction Plemmy has received in a few short weeks since its initial release!

The primary goal of Plemmy is simple: offer access to the LemmyHttp API in Python, allowing users to interact with any Lemmy instance using Python.

Plemmy's LemmyHttp object does just this, returning Python request.Response objects resulting from Lemmy API calls. All LemmyHttp functions have been implemented!

With release 0.3.0, Plemmy now offers a way to parse request.Response objects, extracting all information and placing them in easy-to-use Python objects. The design of these functions/objects closely mirrors the objects and data types defined in the lemmy-js-client.

These additions should make interacting with Lemmy in Python easier than ever. Check out Plemmy's repository for example usage (more documentation to come!).

Thanks for the continued support,

Travis

Education technology, or EdTech, is increasingly shaping and influencing the day-to-day experiences of students, teachers, and administrators. Recognizing the importance of education to the digital economy, corporations are capturing emerging markets in schools and higher education institutions through the process of digital colonialism.

Reposting from https://lemmy.ml/post/193809 now that lemmy has more users. :)

If you are familiar with software patents and would like to moderate an excellent database of campaign material against software patents, please respond below. This post will be pinned until ESP Wiki is sufficiently moderated.

ESP Wiki was created in 2008 as the main resource for activists, programmers, lawyers, and policy makers with the goal of abolishing software patents. In the past, it has worked as a community forum for FSF's amicus briefs to courts and has been cited by legal journals and articles. Lately it has gotten some serious updates: a new logo, a modernized theme, better categorization, brand-new custom wiki templates, etc.

It is not required to have a legal background, but you should be at least comfortable with reading legal information. You should also have a general understanding of basic legal procedure around patent law. But even if you don't know much, this is a great opportunity to learn some interesting details about this topic.

Do not hesitate to contact me at any point; this post will be up for a while.

You can read more about the End Software Patents campaign in the community's description.

Links:

• End Software Patents (main page)
• ESP Wiki