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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • A major caveat I’ve noticed some people misunderstand: it’s corporate CLAs that are problematic. The Apache Foundation also requires contributors sign a CLA, but it’s to provide a legal fail safe and a way to update to say Apache 3.0 if need be one day. Apache’s non profit, open source mission aligns with respecting the rights of contributors and the community. Corporations, on the other hand, not so much.



  • CLAs can be abusive, but not necessarily. Apache Foundation contributors need to sign CLAs, which essentially codify in contract form the terms of the Apache 2.0 license. It’s a precaution, in case some jurisdiction doesn’t uphold the passive licensing scheme used otherwise. There’s also a relicensing clause, but that’s restricted to keeping in spirit, they can’t close the source.




  • After doing some Meta/Facebook VR development in my job the lack of popularity made increasingly more sense. In brief, they’re both incredibly incompetent and transparently greedy.

    I’m honestly baffled how they could spend so many tens of billions of dollars and have such bad software, it is completely bug ridden. You’ll hit a bug, research it, and find out it’s a major know bug for literal years they haven’t fixed. They care so little that they couldn’t bother to update the Oculus branding to Meta for over 3 years in various software tools and libraries.

    Their greed might be more salient aspect preventing adoption, though. They transparently wanted to be the gatekeepers to everything “metaverse” related, a business model that is now explicitly illegal in the EU after years of being merely very sketchy. They are straight up hostile to anyone else trying to implement enterprise or business features. Concrete example: fleet management software, aka MDM. There are third party tools that are cheaper and much more featured than Meta’s solution, but in the last year they’ve pushed hard to kick those third parties out of the ecosystem.

    I could go on, but in short nobody in their right mind would build a major business on their ecosystem. They’d rather let Meta burn billions in R&D and come back later. Besides, not even Meta is able to make money in the area now.








  • Architecture emulation for current gen games is exceptionally unlikely right now. At a fundamental level, wine/proton doesn’t change the instructions the code describes, rather it translates the input and output. It’s a reimplementation of the same instructions in Windows. For architecture crossing you’d either have to create virtual hardware, which adds tremendous overhead, or recompile the binary. Recompilation is theoretically possible, but for x86_64 to ARM64, for games no less, it’s beyond the realm of mortals. It’s like how some jokes can’t be translated between languages; the structure and vocabulary is just too different.


  • Recently got a Onyx Boox Ultra and it’s incredible compared to my previous Kobo. Basically, its 10" with stylus input and a keyboard case. The special sauce is it running Android, complete with the Google store. The display tech is advanced enough that normal apps, for instance Connect for Lemmy, work fine. I have mine setup with Syncthing, Home Assistant, Obsidian, it all just works, mostly. I’d recommend using a 3rd party launcher and not touching the Onyx account, though.

    I’ve had great experiences with Kobo, though. I literally went through 4 models because they kept upping their game. They’re less sketchy than Onyx and are very open; you can load your own books of nearly any format and modify it as it runs linux. You can even completely replace the OS.