/λ/ - programming

for a while now ive been looking to get into contributing to oss. being a uni student, i feel like im not exposed to many real world applications. its always either build this from scratch, or heres a library use it to implement this. this guide looks great, and i have a couple projects ive been thinking about contributing to. thanks, lain!

>>71
No I contribute to Free Software.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

>>71
Just like FYI if you are creating a new project and considering releasing it as free & open source software consider hosting somewhere other than github.

https://about.gitlab.com/
https://notabug.org/
https://savannah.nongnu.org/

I suggest this because github creates a single point of failure, and also does not release its own source code which I find very hypocritical.

>>76
This. I like to think of open source being the 'how' and free/libre being the 'why'. Using free/libre and linking to pages like this is important because it spreads the philosophy of freedom with respect to software.

>>71
I've been working on some small patches for GNOME. I use it regularly, but there are still plenty of rough edges

>>76
Public domain software will always be more free than AGPL'd software.

>>78
For millions of people, the public domain doesn't meaningfully exist. That's why cc-0 is a thing. And software freedom isn't a contest.

>>78
I'm so fucking sick of hearing this, Public Domain is garbage and doesn't defend Freedom in any way. If you use Public Domain all you are doing is working for other people for free. The GPL is share and sharealike, I share under the GPL because others will share with me under the GPL. If you use Public Domain you just give people to take your soykaf, profit off it, destroy freedom and give you no credit and tell you to go fuck yourself. The GPL is a handshake among friends to share with oneanother, Public Domain is lying on the street with your asshole exposed waiting to be penetrated.

>>80
So-called "intellectual property" is a sham. Property, by definition, must be both scarce (there is a practically limited supply, a replica cannot be created without appreciable effort and resources) and exclusive (one person having it inherently means that another person cannot have it). Something that is not both scarce and exclusive cannot conceivable be considered property. Information is neither scarce not exclusive, therefore it is not property. So-called "intellectual property" is the use of the violence of the state in an attempt to force an artificial scarcity upon that which is naturally non-scarce. Treating code, which is information, as property - whether by saying "you can't use this unless you pay me" or by saying "you can't use this unless you publish your code in a way that I like" - is, at its base level, a violent act and is antithetical to a free society.

How do you feel about contributing to projects you don't actually use? These sites look like a great idea but I'm not sure if I would contribute to any of the projects just so I can say that I've contributed.

>>80
>all you are doing is working for other people for free
Except that's what I want to do. I'm an altruist. My goal is freedom.

>>80
>freedom
>do what I say

Riiiiight.

>>71
I used too, but life got in the way.

>>86
>So-called "intellectual property" is a sham.
Yes it is but while those laws exist we need licenses like the GPL to work around them to get what we want.

>by saying "you can't use this unless you publish your code in a way that I like" - is, at its base level, a violent act and is antithetical to a free society
No it is the only way to preserve freedom for everyone.

>>88
>Except that's what I want to do. I'm an altruist. My goal is freedom.
You are failing in your goal then. I give freely to those who will also give freely. We share with those who share back. Thats what the GPL is about. With Public Domain and soykafty licenses like BSD and MIT you are just helping those who soykaf on what you believe in. You are helping people who want to take away your freedom and you are helping them take away other people's freedom.

>>92
>we need licenses like the GPL to work around them to get what we want
Other people using the violence of the state towards their ends does not give you justification to use the violence of the state towards your ends.

>to preserve freedom for everyone
Threatening violence upon someone for making use of public information is an infringement upon their freedom, not a defense of it.

>I give freely
You do not. You give with restrictions backed by the threat of violence.

>>93
>Other people using the violence of the state towards their ends does not give you justification to use the violence of the state towards your ends.
If IP law disappeared then I'd be all for Public Domain, the GPL would be pointless. My goal is to make my software free for all forever. If I use anything other than the GPL with the current law my code can end up in non-free/freedom-denying products. I must take steps to prevent that from happening hence my use of the GPL.

>>93
>Threatening violence upon someone for making use of public information is an infringement upon their freedom
You should never have the freedom to take away other people's freedom. That's what proprietary software does so by me not allowing that usage I am not taking away any freedom people should have. If you believe you should have the freedom to take away other people's freedom then you have a warped view. The goal of free software is a world without non-free software. Public Domain and weak/non-copyleft licenses do not aid in achieving that goal.

>>93
>You do not. You give with restrictions backed by the threat of violence.
Why are you calling legal requirements "threats of violence"? All the "restrictions" do is force people using my code to pass on the same freedom to others that I gave to them. That's literally it. I don't see how you can object unless you want to support proprietary cancer.

Please note that I agree with you 100% that IP law, copyright law etc is pure cancer and I too would love to use public domain or weak licenses but that's not the world we live in and for me the GPL is the only thing that gives the freedom we desire while neutalising the potential threats from advisaries taking advantage of the laws currently in place.

>>94
In the absence of IP law developers would still have the ability to not release their source. Complete anarchy would not change that. You are claiming that copyleft is only "necessary" because of the current IP law but, by your criteria for "necessity", that is not the case.

In any case, you cannot use the ends to justify the means.


>You should never have the freedom to take away other people's freedom. That's what proprietary software does
True on the first point, false on the second. The act of not releasing source along with a binary is not impinging upon the freedom of the user so long as the user is free to not use the software at all. A person is perfectly free to keep secrets.

Conversely, releasing information to the public and then attempting to retain control over it through the violence of the state is an infringement upon the freedom of others. Information is not and cannot be property; you have no inherent claim to it. When you publish it, you are releasing your grasp upon it.

>Why are you calling legal requirements "threats of violece"?
I am calling them what they are. A legal requirement is a statement that you are willing to use the violence of the state against me if I do not act as you stipulate. It is a threat that if I do not comply then you or someone acting on your behalf will send men with guns to force me into compliance.

>>95
>In the absence of IP law developers would still have the ability to not release their source.
True but they would not be able to prevent us from sharing copies or reverse engineering the source and then sharing/modifying it.

>The act of not releasing source along with a binary is not impinging upon the freedom of the user so long as the user is free to not use the software at all.
You seem to be misunderstanding the ideas of Free Software as defined by the GPL. It is not about just having access to the source or not, you must have the 4 essential freedoms. If any one of them is missing the program is non-free. This is why the term "Open Source" is soykaf, it only addresses the availablity of source code which alone does not give freedom. I could make a proprietary program and release the source code under a license that doesn't allow you to share it or change it but the source is technically available to you. The injustice of non-free software is you can't run the program as you wish for any purpose, modify it to suit your needs and share it with others. Studying the source code and being able to change it is just some of the freedoms of free software. Being able to share copies and being able to run the program as you wish for any purpose are independant freedoms but are just as important. In some cases can have the source code and still not have freedom. A world without IP law where everything is relesed as a binary is actually better than available source code with a proprietary license since in the first case we can reverse engineer the code and nobody can stop us but in the second case we can see the source but are legally prevented from changing it.

>A person is perfectly free to keep secrets.
Yes but if those secrets are made public in a secret form but without the legal barriers we are in a position to break it. In an ideal world nobody could prevent us breaking things like DRM or reverse engineering source code. Today with proprietary software reverse engineering is often illegal.

>Conversely, releasing information to the public and then attempting to retain control over it through the violence of the state is an infringement upon the freedom of others.
Like I said already if IP law disappeared then I'm fully on board with this idea however I think today the GPL is far better than the alternative which is to allow your code to fall into the hands of those who will seek to make it non-free.

>A legal requirement is a statement that you are willing to use the violence of the state against me if I do not act as you stipulate.
Thats what I want from the GPL, not against you but rather, against proprietary software vendors and other malicious actors.

>It is a threat that if I do not comply then you or someone acting on your behalf will send men with guns to force me into compliance.
I don't live in soykafty USA, people with guns don't come after you in my country. Although if a proprietary software company used my code in a freedom-denying product I would want an army of armed men after their asses.

>>96
> A world without IP law where everything is relesed as a binary is actually better than available source code with a proprietary license since in the first case we can reverse engineer the code and nobody can stop us but in the second case we can see the source but are legally prevented from changing it.
Agree. You can't use that to justify your actions, though. You use the wrongdoings of another party to justify the wrongdoings of your own party. I agree that you and I ought to be free to make use of whatever information is available to us in whatever manner we so choose; however, I will not stoop to the level of the enemy, I will not commit the same wrongs as the enemy, to bring that about. The ends to not justify the means.

>not against you but rather, against proprietary software vendors
The law does not so discriminate. It applies to everybody or it applies to nobody.

>people with guns don't come after you in my country
What would happen, then, if, in your country, somebody used GPL'd code in a non-compliant manner? Would they not be dragged through your country's legal system? Does your country's legal system, and the government that runs it, not use violence when necessary to enforce its authority?

>>97
>however, I will not stoop to the level of the enemy, I will not commit the same wrongs as the enemy, to bring that about. The ends to not justify the means.
I won't pretend I haven't swung back and forth a little on this issue. Some time ago I actually switched all of my projects to the BSD license, now they are all back under the GPL. Over time the rage I feel towards proprietary software creators fluctuates. There were 2 views I myself cycled through:

1. My BSD-minded self:
If non-free software is to exist anyway better that 50% of their code is free software so that users can at least see 50% of the code and also creating free alternatives to those programs will be 50% easier since we have all of that code and the free code might be improved by contributions from those vendors.

2. My GPL-minded self (my current view):
Anything that helps the proprietary vendors is assisting the enemy, we won't allow them to fucking touch us, we should do everything we can to eliminate non-free software once and for all, we don't want their fucking contributions, dirty demons, the users of non-free software don't even deserve the 50% free code because they don't care about freedom anyway. We will build our GPL fortress and you either care about freedom and can join us in the free world or you don't and your world can burrrnnnnn.

I've flipped between these 2 viewpoints a few times.

>The law does not so discriminate. It applies to everybody or it applies to nobody.
Not strictly true, yes everyone can be in violation but it's ultimately my decision on whether or not to press charges against certain people or to let it go. Considering legal stuff scares me and I never want to set foot in a court I would probably never legally enforce my licensing, I would send an email saying "you are in violation of the terms of the GPL" and if they fail to do anything to fix it I would probably just give up. I treat it more as a deterant than an actual thing I would use.

>What would happen, then, if, in your country, somebody used GPL'd code in a non-compliant manner?
If it's my code nothing since I would be too scared to do anything.

>"Does your country's legal system, and the government that runs it, not use violence when necessary to enforce its authority?"
I was just making the point about guns, the police force in my country is unarmed. There are armed units that can be called in for serious situations but its not like USA where every cop has a fucking handgun and tazer. It can be like this because almost no citizens have guns either.

>>98
>Anything that helps the proprietary vendors is assisting the enemy
Agreed, but…
>We will build our GPL fortress
that cannot be accomplished without the violence of the state, so I cannot in good conscience do so. While "assisting the enemy" is something that I find unpleasant, all of the alternatives are even less palatable in my eyes.

>Not strictly true
It is strictly true. The law applies to everybody. It may be selectively enforced; but, it still applies to everybody. It is still a threat lingering in the shadows even if those who might command it have offered their assurances that it will not be used.

>I treat it more as a deterant than an actual thing I would use.
You are relying on the fact that the "offender" does not know that you're too chicken to actually do anything about it. The deterring effect still comes from your threat of the state's violence.

There are only two possible ends to the process of "intellectual property" enforcement. Either you give up on enforcing your "claim", in which case you might as well have just released it to the public domain because your license isn't worth the paperpixels it's printed on, or you pursue your "claim" to its end, in which case the violence of the state is used to coerce the "offender" into certain actions.

>There are armed units that can be called in for serious situations
In other words, they get called in when the cops who just give a stern look and a verbal chiding can't achieve results. You can layer all the abstractions that you want atop the violence but the fact that violence is the intrinsic core of any action by the state remains unchanged.

>>99
I think we've both said pretty much all there is to say but I do want to say a few final things.

While IP laws continue to exist I believe dropping my "claim" as you say and not using the GPL is like dropping my gun on a battlefield, the enemy won't drop theirs and will slaughter me. If I drop the protections of the GPL the proprietary folks have all the power, everything is in their favour, they not only have their own code but all of that public domain code too.

Honestly are you really okay with the following scenerio:

You work hard on something and release it to the world in the hopes it helps humanity.

Person X finds your work, takes it, adds almost nothing to it, packages it up, puts his name on it, sticks a proprietary license on it, gives no credit to you and never references your original work and now releases it as a paid-for product that people end up buying. He gets all the credit and money while also denying freedom. Meanwhile nobody knows about your original creation and you have nothing because you thought Public Domain was more moral than the GPL.

What do you think of this?

>>99
I think whether your code is licensed or not licensed is a catch-22, honestly. If you use public domain, you're enabling others to use state violence and profit off of your work. You're effectively complicit in that violence. And honestly, most of us lack the capital to actually afford lawyers and enforce these licenses.

the solution is not to squabble over which license is better, but produce work that undermines state violence.

>>93
>Other people using the violence of the state towards their ends does not give you justification to use the violence of the state towards your ends.
This.
>You do not. You give with restrictions backed by the threat of violence.
Also this.
Statists are disgusting.

>>96
>you can't run the program as you wish for any purpose, modify it to suit your needs and share it with others
Yes you can, it's just illegal. But doing illegal things is important in life until politicians are all killed.

>>99
DO you have to make EVERYTHING about communism?

>>118
Some things here aren't tech problems.

>>118
Nope. I'm as ancap as they come. Not sure how you read my post that way.

>>120
He must've equated anarchist themes with "anarcho"-communism.
And yes, the scare quotes are just for triggering factor.

>>121
>>120
>>118
Please re-read the rules and stick to the topic of the thread. If you'd like to respectfully discuss political ideologies, make a new topic for it elsewhere.

If you'd like to discuss open-source projects and your contributions to them, this is the thread for that.

what do i do if the repo owner ignores my pull request?

am i supposed to send them a message?
should i just start developing my own fork?

>>1135
> pic anticorrelated
oops

>>1135
You wait. You can try contacting them if it's urgent, but for most it's only a hobby so it might take a while to respond. You can work on your fork meanwhile and contribute back again once they responded.

Yes, and I'm so glad I started. When I was first learning to program, I was worried I would pick a project with a horrible codebase and pick up bad habits from working with it, but then I was forced to learn Java and realized that I'm fully capable of acknowledging when code is bad.

Also, test post from a patch I wrote for Clover, which I will push upstream if this works

>>1137
okay, thanks for the advice.
maybe i'm just being paranoid.

i'm just concerned they won't respond because they have been working on the project a bit,
they just haven't responded to any of my attempts at contribution.

Are there any Arisu projects that need contributors?

Normally I love to deal with low-level C work, but recently I have been writing some rulesets for HTTPS Everywhere. It is funny how many sites don't give a soykaf about cookies or HTTPS, soykaf is insecure and nobody gives a fuck about it lol. Just discovered a .gov site which uses HTTP for login page and only uses a soykafty PHPSESSID for session verification (no additional IP, user-agent checks or whatever).

>>1251
Probably. It would be nice if there were a directory of projects that exist in and around the community. What I know of are these:

https://legacy.arisuchan.jp/%CE%BB/res/36.html
https://legacy.arisuchan.jp/q/res/1733.html

Hey. Im new in C language and i want improve my skill. Does lainons know some project which can give some simple task?

>>1272
If by new you mean you've never made anything, probably not. Try porting some small utility.