mononoke

The allergy to CLI is always strange to me. Computers didn’t always have mice, or GUIs, and people had to learn them when they came around. It’s like saying “I want to ride a bike but I don’t want to learn how.” After a certain point, I don’t really know what to say to something like that. You have to learn how to do anything that is new to you. That doesn’t make it bad, or even necessarily difficult…but anything you don’t know will be unfamiliar, and one just has to be OK with that for a while until it’s not anymore. I think the usability of most mainstream distros is right where it should be. GNOME and KDE have done a very good job of it (edit: barring some very important accessibility concerns, which the GNOME and KDE teams have both shown to be open to learning from and improving on).

Honestly, I am with you. I will stay with X until some technical need makes me switch, which hasn’t happened yet. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this.

Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.

You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is “none of those things,” actually, and you don’t get that by voting harder because as you’ve just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never “less genocide,” it is “no genocide.”

Some years ago I got in touch with one of the primary maintainers of that fork in the interest of continuing the project after realizing it was so stagnant, and I was essentially warned that doing so would open myself to immense harassment, and that harassment was why everyone involved stopped with the project in the end. So…what is all of this about “if you don’t like X, fork it” if that is what will happen when one does? Seems pretty rotten advice to give if it’s just going to be sabotaged anyway. Someone I know still uses the outdated Glimpse regardless.

There is a reason nearly every software corporation out there is allergic to GPL code, and similarly why they love MIT/BSD/Apache code. I urge you to consider why that is. Licenses do affect how software is used, that is literally the purpose of them.

Given the current world we live in I do not want anything that I create or contribute to itself contributed to an exploitative corporation’s bottom line (at best) without my consent or their assuredly begrudging reciprocation. This should not be controversial. The GPL accomplishes this. Nothing more lax or permissive does or will. You are not a cool or chill guy because you don’t care what someone does with the code you write. You are handing all of those who would sack you the keys to the castle, ushering them inside. That is not abstaining, it’s letting your opponents win. No thanks.

I use permissive licenses not because I’m a pushover, but because I really don’t care what you do with it.

The point of all of this is that you really should, no matter what it is. I’m sure there is something you would object to having been a part of; protecting your labor from contributing to that only makes sense. If you really have no problems with that, then that is simply terrifying.

No more than can be accomplished with the first sentence of my original post.

No.

GIMP is a very powerful and important piece of software that I wish they weren’t so obstinate about giving the worst name ever. I know it’s just an acronym, but it is in effect the name of the project. I’ve taken to calling it GNU IMP instead.