Yeah that’s a pain. I’ve also had Android kill Lemmy in the background while I went to my browser to check a spelling of a word… A draft feature would help too

When you say it becomes a need does this mean that not merging them would course the projects to fail?

Fail in what sense? It would definitely make consumer-minded people unsatisfied and most likely drive them away to another project/fork. For tech enthusiasts it would only do good (considering the contributions are enshitifying).

This means that if the option to merge the contribution didn’t exist in the first place (like non free software) the project would fail.

I’m probably missing what you’re trying to say, but since contributions come from companies, they would definitely be merged if the project was owned by the company making contributions.

Actual freedom is taking away peoples rights to make things worse. If you want an example of what happens when actual freedom is available look at the free market.

Strange to hear that while discussing free software but anyways freedom is not a static notion. Compared to feudal economy, free market is free, but it’s not free judging by our modern needs. And in fact it’s the exact thing I’m trying to go away from. Free, open and decentralised production I was talking about is its successor that breaks through the alienation and brings creative freedom to every individual.

Thanks! If I don’t lose Internet access which can happen where I live, I’ll definitely come back XD

Great expression, never heard of it before 😅

Io invece lo sto imparando! Amo la lingua e la cultura

This is so true… Like I literally can’t understand lyrics even in my native language

Very inspiring! I think you convinced me to give it a good try. Thanks for your story and the links!

This sounds almost as if you’re disappointed XD

So many people from Germany here on Lemmy! I wonder why that is. Maybe free software movement is a bit more popular there? There seem to be so many good German open-source projects!

Two native languages, cool! One or both of your parents are Russian?

Well native speakers learn the pronunciation first, so it’s harder for them to distinguish between different forms of the same sound combination

Che figata!

I totally get what you’re saying, and that’s a fair point. But I think I just have a different notion of freedom. To me, freedom is about the mode of production. I think people would be actually free if the very act of creating something were fulfilling on its own because of its creative manner. In that case you wouldn’t need anything in exhange, and distributing your work for free wouldn’t be a sacrifice, so there would be no problem if somebody decided to sell it. Now I know the areas where you can achieve anything serious that way are very, very limited yet, but still they exist, and I think in order for them to grow, it would be helpful to separate them from other, less creative areas of production.

So back to your analogy, allowing companies to sell your free vegetables doesn’t make sense, because farming is a tedious work, that is not fully fulfilling on its own. But allowing others to sing a song you wrote to just express your feelings - even at a paid concert with a big audience - isn’t that big of a problem. You might want money from that because you need money in general but not because writing a song was a sacrifice you want to compensate. Songs aren’t comparable to software, but with software you would also benefit if companies didn’t participate at all in its development and didn’t bring it to usual passive consumers because it would preserve its DIY manner.

But companies almost never do contribute?

Maybe compared to their passive usage, their contributions are small, but they still influence FOSS world a lot.

if your theory were true, BSD Unices would have much more contributions, better file systems, better real-time support, and much wider hardware support than Linux.

Why? I’m not saying projects would have more contributions. In fact, I realise there would be much fewer contributions which is a big downside and the reason why I called this question ambiguous in the first place. But, although my experience with BSDs is quite limited yet, I do think they are kind of “freer” than Linux (especially if you compare BSDs with most popular Linux distros)

Are you aware that software maintainers don’t have to merge the contributions these people are pushing?

Yes, I literally said that in the first line of the comment you’re replying to.

Are you saying that copyleft software is enshitififying because big companies are pushing too many (optional) contributions?

Yes. I’m not saying that always happens, but I do believe many projects enshitified a good amount because a lot of their contributors have become big companies. Or sometimes companies make an entirely new project that is enshitified from the very beginning but still gets included in other FOSS projects. Both merging a contribution or including a project are optional, but since FOSS projects get involved in this whole producer-customer relations model, where everything is done centrally by the developer and served ready-to-use to passive consumers, merging those contributions kinda becomes an actual need of users. So yeah, if you dig deeper, it’s ultimately the very involvement in this commercial centralised production model and not just companies, that causes enshitification, but I still think that letting companies just fuck off and do their own centralised thing separately from decentralised DIY-like development which, to my mind, is actual freedom, might help.

Bro calm down, I’m not trying to insult you. I’m sorry what I said made you so upset.

I’m not blaming the GPL of anything, I’m not saying license defines software design, I’m not proposing a solution and the whole point of my post was about the contradictory nature of the problem. You just seem to have missed my whole reasoning. Now, I don’t know why looking at the negative sides of the trade-off the GPL is making bugs you so much, but if it’s really not your thing, you should stop wasting your time on this self-contradictory mess and just be happy with GPL. Especially because I’m too small for my “corporate apologia” to be effective.

Oh boy, I got so confused when I was a beginner and some American kid told me “would of” is an alternative to “would have”

Oh wow, it’s so cool you speak Esperanto! Can you share your experience with it? Where do you use it? What good Esperanto communities are there? Do you find it actually useful? In what ways did it enrich your life?

Okay maintainers don’t have to, but they usually end up doing so as those contributions are still valuable. The key point is that even though free software is called “free”, a huge chunk of it is going through the same process of “enshitification” as proprietary software, because of being developped by companies and being a part of this corporate, non-free world. So separating that from FOSS by letting companies keep their work by themselves seems to help a little bit.

There’s no direct relation, yes, but centralisation and bloating are both things commercial software development tends to because of the nature of developper-consumer relations. And GPL forces companies to contribute their code which is often based on those principles back to the original project. So I think there is indirect relation.