Just picked up 20 TB of storage on a black Friday deal.

Doing a huge upgrade from my 2TB NAS. I’m starting my personal media archive, music, movies, shows, anime, Ebooks, games, YouTube content.

It’s the only defense against the scumbag corpos. The will continue to take more content away without warning, and make what they allow us to still have, worse quality and more expensive to watch.

Storage is cheap, libraries are your friend, fight the power. ✊

Awesome if that ends up happening.

In my ideal world, IP and copyright wouldn’t exist at all, but obviously that won’t happen in my lifetime.

Neither would my suggestion of releasing any defunct software as GPL, sadly.

The codebase the would be a great start, even if it previously ran on proprietary tech, having the codebase at least allows engineers to pull out the proprietary hooks and rebuild them to work with something open source.

We need a right to repair but for software, sadly that also is a pipe dream in our current environment.

All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️

I know, right.

“People shouldn’t be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

In the same spirit, yeah. It has a pretty active community from what I’ve heard.

Absolutely chadified! ✊

Holy shit…it was him!!!

Oh damn…I’m gay…

Hey NYPD, his last name is Ligma!

…No…

Hell yeah!! Welcome, fellow penguin. 🐧

Do you think merely agreeing to something makes the arrangement acceptable? A mugger sticks a gun to my head and says, “give me your wallet or I’ll kill you.” I give him my wallet. Was that actually a real, consensual choice? Of course not, agreement is a necessary condition for a fair contract, but not a sufficient one.

If you’re doing the work, you’re entitled to the fruits of your labor. Slavery is the exact inverse of that, where you are entitled to none of the fruits of your labor.

Capitalism tries to split the difference, where depending on a complex set of contractual agreements of dubious legitimacy, you are entitled to some arbitrary amount of fruit for your labor.

There are degrees of severity of course, some relationships are far more exploitative than others.

There isn’t a magical number where a business becomes unethically profitable. The issue with Capitalism isn’t one of degree. It’s not like a bath that’s too hot, where the only issue is the temperature needs to be lowered.

If your business operates in a way that is undemocratic, it’s unethical. Doesn’t matter if all the employees agreed to it, doesn’t matter if they all signed contracts permitting it, doesn’t matter that the legal system allows the business to operate like that.

Now of course, as I said, there are degrees. A mom & pop flower shop that employs local high school kids as part time workers, pays them well, and treats them nicely, that’s not a huge issue. Unethical still, but not terrible. It’s like cheating on a middle school pop quiz, still wrong, but extremely minor.

You also brought up the issue of practicality. This requires a lot of depth to respond to, so would you prefer to pivot to that, or stay on the more theoretical questions about Capitalism and exploitation?