Spectacle8011

I should have specified that the Audacity CLA allowed Muse Group to relicense Audacity from GPLv2 to GPLv3. Yes, I agree with you that not all CLAs are bad. While you keep the copyright to all your contributions, because the copyright is assigned to them (? I'm not actually sure about this), they can relicense it. The CLA agreement.

You grant MUSECY SM LTD, an affiliate of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar, (“Company”) the ability to use the Contributions in any way. You hereby grant to Company , a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such derivative works.

There was quite a lot of confusion and outrage about this at the time, so I can't recall whether Muse Group specifically said they wanted to include Audacity in Apple's app store or this was given as an example of why the CLA could be beneficial. My rebuttal was this is not a particularly noble cause. There was also the argument that the FSF requires you to sign a CLA for its own projects so it can reserve the right to relicense it if it benefits the project. My rebuttal to this was...well, it's the FSF. The day the FSF relicenses their software under a non-free license is the day they die.

All in all, I'm not worried yet.

I don't work with music at all, so most of this update doesn't mean much to me. However, it's nice to see the export window was improved—I want my single-click behavior, damn it.

The telemetry is limited to update-checking and error reports. Distributions will disable update-checking because they already handle updating Audacity. Error reports need to be manually submitted. It's possible that most distributions just disable networking altogether when building Audacity, if it even exists in their repositories at all. Fedora's package is waaay out of date. Arch disables networking altogether.

Audacity has still instituted a CLA. This is quite worrying. But nothing has happened yet.

That's a great explanation! Thank you, I get it now. I always did wonder what exactly IPC was about. Yay for Rust in the kernel.

This is the kind of high-quality technical discussion I don't understand a word of that rarely surfaced on reddit.

It seems like this issue is finally, actually fixed with the new driver release.

I haven't had a chance to try it out but the responses on the thread look promising.

Edit: Ah, I see you've already gotten the news. Well, good to hear.

I would be interested in seeing Mozilla invest in making Mojeek better. I think they could be a good match. An independent browser engine and an independent search engine. On the other hand, I don't want Mozilla to acquire them and kill them a few years later. Their short attention span is one quality I wish they hadn't cribbed from Google.

A search engine is an interesting idea, but:

1. it needs to be independent. Mozilla can't be depending on Google or Bing. After Bing got what they wanted, they started choking their proxies by pushing prices up substantially. Depending on Google is a similar folly.
2. they need to be committed to it. This isn't some project Mozilla can cook up in three or four years and abandon two years later. It needs to be a long-term strategy with hundreds of millions of dollars invested.

That's why I think Mojeek could be a shortcut. But either way, I don't think Mozilla has the bandwidth (or guts, frankly) to commit to this sort of project.

But you are right, they are still depending on the monster that is Google.

And as long as you're depending on them, you might as well take as much as you can.

They should make a search engine. If Kagi can do it, why can’t Mozilla?

The biggest provider of Kagi's results is Google. They are unique in that they have their own Tinygem and Teclis indexes to augment results, though. Mozilla could certainly operate a plain Google proxy like Mullvad does with Leta, but I don't think they'd be making more money out of it than just agreeing to Google's exclusive terms.

Building a search engine with an independent index is hard. Mojeek has done the best job of it, but you can tell there's a disparity in result quality even if they're improving.

15 years ago, I thought I wanted to make a game. Turns out, I didn't.

A few years ago, I sought out Linux. Learning to use it has made me so much more confident and excited about technology. I understood so much more. And yet, it feels like I don't understand nearly enough. So I'm learning programming so I can start looking through codebases for the projects I use, maybe seeing if I can add new features or fix some bugs that are annoying me. I've sort of accomplished that goal for one program. There are also some programs that don't exist, or don't exist in the way I want them to that I intend on developing.

I'd like to learn reverse engineering too...

Well, I guess I'm a programmer only by technicality. I haven't done anything serious and I'm certainly not decent at the art. I'm just curious. 🐇

Did your opinion of the teacher change at all after that?

It is! And OBS is awesome. But it is not proprietary.

Most games just work these days and it is only a handful that don’t,

To add my own experience, I play a lot of Japanese visual novels (it's a good 80% of what I play). Very few Japanese visual novels are released on Steam. But if they are on Steam, they're usually DRM-free or work in Proton anyway. However, most of these games are English-only. I play them in Japanese.

So I need to get my games from other places, like digital storefronts such as DLsite and DMM. However, I quickly found out that absolutely no games that DMM sells will work in Wine. This is because they are all encumbered with a form of DRM that isn't compatible with Wine. DMM is the largest digital storefront for VNs. DLsite sells some games with various kinds of DRM. PlayDRM does work in Wine, but the rest doesn't. They also sell DRM-free games. The selection isn't as large, but it's good. We recently got the DRM tagging feature in VNDB, so it should give you a good idea of what games are incompatible.

You can also buy VNs physically. Some games are DRM-encumbered but many are DRM-free. You generally don't know until you buy, though, and it can be an expensive mistake. Hopefully we can change that with the new VNDB DRM tagging system.

Even when they're not DRM-encumbered, though, you have a decent chance of facing issues with media playback. Older games using DirectShow you can probably get working with native DLLs using Winetricks. If it's a newer game that uses Media Foundation, you might not be able to get it to work at all. Worst case, the game crashes on the opening movie. I'm looking for a way to improve that section of the wiki since I know very little about Media Foundation for solving these issues.

There also tend to be a bunch of Windowing issues with older VNs like fullscreen being broken. Gamescope will solve those issues.

So, while you can play a lot of VNs in Wine, you need to be careful about it. Fortunately, only two of the VNs I bought are unplayable and they're both from DMM.

So it does! I didn't know that. Admittedly, I don't actually use that much proprietary software on Linux-based systems, so my knowledge is limited. It'd be interesting if Lightworks or DaVinci Resolve were one day distributed with Flatpak, although Blackmagic Design believes Flatpak can't handle DaVinci Resolve's needs.

But hey, a community-built Flatpak for Resolve exists already.