taanegl

Audacity is now basically part of the Muse family, which is a for profit venture, with it’s own - wait for it 🥁🥁🥁🥁 store front launcher

Nothing makes me hate music software (or games) more than yee old SaaS/DRM pile-on, especially when you add another goddamn launcher. I’m trying to lay low latency buffers here, not facilitate another UI stack and background processes. I nuke the printer spool, and you think I want more? I will download the cracked version, even if I own the damned software, to get rid of all that.

Jokes aside, considering the whole funding issue in the open source world, MuseHub (the “plugin boutique”) takes a fairly common route in the audio software world, since pretty much every single one of these DAW, plugin or sample pack outfits have a storefront - or use one, if not several.

If say the Audacity we know is still free, but the add-ons cost money, that’s fine. It’s very “freemium”, but as long as they don’t remove VST3 or CLAP support, it’s fairly harmless.

In regards to tracking, is it opt-out, opt-in, identifiable or anonymized telemetry? It’s contentious, to say the least, but if it’s a concern, you could always block domains - even though the average user would probably not concern themselves, and at that point I wonder if it’s better than other creepy freemium models that are even more predatory.

Though it could be the type of telemetry used in most modern DRMs to confirm ownership by using plenty of CPU cycles and network communication to validate identity.

Because DRMs is the worst technology segment invented in all of modern history, and it needs to die in a fire - I swear * TO GOD* you do not need to hit several friggin domain many times a day, once is enough - in fact, once is too much! You can take your iLok and shove it. I paid for this software, and if I put a Jolly Roger in it, it’s because your DRM drains my soul.

your launcher is bad and you should feel bad

I swear, this heckles my kekles sooo much.

This person, nay, this legend, has reached across language barriers and opened up entire new worlds to people who suffer from lacking or outdated documentation.

If you or your loved ones are afflicted by bad documentation, please voice your grievances to whatever ticket or email chain deserves to be told their documentation is absolute ass.

Yes, I can read the code API, now delete that old ass mess. If you don’t want to communicate it, let someone else have those search engine results.

Ffs.

Thanks Microsoft for spotting that, and thanks to Google and CloudFlare for blocking or redirecting Polifyll.io network traffic.

Credit where credit is due.

Namaste.

This is what corporate speech control looks like, kids. Not even once.

Here’s a careful reminder that “public domain” is not a worldwide thing ^^; in fact, very few countries have a public domain.

In some cases, if you try to publish something as “public domain” from a certain country, it is invalid - because their judiciary does not define public domain as anything.

It maybe considered public domain, until you die and someone wants that copyright, in which case the family takes precedent over the estate - full stop.

There’s a difference between countries that have common law (US and UK) and those that have civil law (the Nordics), so yeah.

But CC is valid license pretty much everywhere, with a few exceptions.

Primeagen?

When it comes to creative work, Creative Commons is the way to go. I know a guy who exclusively releases music under the Creative Commons license.

Here’s a “Chooser” wizard, that asks you some questions and then suggests a suitable CC license for you.

TL;Dr licensed firmware is garbo - open firmware ftw

This - is what we need.

The only ones who can really push the envelope on getting RISC-V into the hands of consumer, and indeed up to an IPC comparable to ARM, are companies like Deep Computing and Si-Five.

The biggest problem in the computing world, bar none, are not the predatory companies, vendor lockins, or proprietary operating systems, it’s always been licensing. This is why BSD existed in the first place, because a $1000 a month per seat to copy a file without pulling and pushing bits around is a bit too much, even if it was the 70s.

Similarly, in a time of green washing, eWaste and even planned obsolescence, one of the things that help to underpin all of these afformentioned evils is secret sauce firmware.

No matter what you say, if you don’t have access to the source code for firmware and bootloaders, you’ve got a lifetime set by the vendor based on how long they can actually support the hardware - because employees cost money. You can’t realistically expect a company to support something they’re not making money on anymore, and they’d most likely just want to sell you new hardware.

This is where RISC-V comes in swinging. I’m not saying that all RISC-V hardware will come with open firmware, but the ball is rolling and with it we can finally bridge the gap spanned by tech companies, where the average Jane or Joe can in effect easily modify their firmware code, albeit through security principles of course.

Unlike Open Source, Open Firmware is a bit trickier. Decades of industrial precedent, and indeed vendor lockins the OEM’s are beholden to, like proprietary BIOS, makes it that much harder to establish - especially when designing an entire ISA and getting it to prefab is a Lord of the Rings length journey. There is no griffin shortcut.

No doubt I’ll have naysayers. Just mentioning open firmware in the average matrix chat riles the gallery, as is the style, but even the likes of NVIDIA are opening up their code (thanks, AI) to the point where NVK is not that far from stable, untainting your kernel. Yay.

Everybody ♥️ open source, don’t they? But how about giving some love to Open Firmware? In the FUTURE 🐙 we’ll hopefully have vendors and foreign interests shoved tf out of our hardware, and good riddance, because they shouldn’t be in control of it in the first place.

I await your ire.

And shout outs to the libreboot maintainer. What in the ever loving Carmack is FSF up to? Libre ain’t a brand, it’s a philosophy.

The sponsor of this war is VODKA! Here in Russia, we feed it to babies, to make new orcs!

Oracle is horrible and deserves to lose Java.

Regnum Online, apparently. The link is to a Mastodon posts with a fair bit of comments ^^;

…are you okay?

In heaven there is no beer… but there is in VALHALLAAAAAAAAAAA

Oh you can promote your optimism for the future all you want, but I don’t respond well to optimism, and that’s because I’ve seen the light - or rather the darkness - of a market dependant upon venture capital in league with political elites, an unholy alliance forged in an attempt to try and recoup the losses for investments made in beanie babies. Oh sure, the cocaine, sex workers and ritualistic sacrifice are cool at first, as are membership points that come with it, which you can spend in the cabal gift shop for a sex slave to go, but I cannot in good conscience tolerate the terms of service because it requires citizenry in a supposed state.

And it because of one thing. Do you know what that thing is?

The op and article being sussy baka withstanding, we do understand how the markets work and how balls are pushed forward.

I however have been greenwashed to before thank you very much and have been jaded enough to consider a life of eco terrorism. I even keep a spare packet of fluoride to sha-shaaw people in the face with in case things get rough.

I’m watching you, op…

(PS: In case of mod, /s)

No! Now take this slave labour cobalt and partake in the market place of ideas… I said partake! *shakes fist*

Unless they’re called Microsoft. In that case, they care a lot. Also, PreSonus Studio One is getting ported, DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux, Bitwig, Lightworks has run on Linux for a long while, and we’re not even including all the Electron wrappers out there.

No joke though, vendors would have a bit more control - if they used Nix instead of Flatpaks or Snaps :P We could bring the NSIS installer and DRM on Linux in the worst way as well. But, still: DRM dees nuts.

Vendors can’t be locked in. Hard line.

I’m hoping this will make software publishers target Linux… just not with snaps. Please no.