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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • From a non-lawyer perspective, it is not yet clear how such regulations apply to a non-commercial, volunteer-driven project like Debian, which does not sell software and provides it in a highly decentralized way. It seems plausible that obligations, if any, may primarily affect redistributors or commercial entities building products on top of Debian. In such cases, Debian would as usual be open to contributions that help downstreams meet their requirements, while keeping such features optional and respecting the needs of users in other jurisdictions. However, this is an area where proper legal analysis is still required.

    I found this part very reassuring. Being neither a lawyer nor having read any of the legislation (of which I am not a subject, anyway), the “it’s not our job” approach seems very reasonable. Facilitating downstream vendors who do want/have to comply seems like an exceptional effort to show good faith to local legal processes, while remaining, fundamentally, just people freely sharing knowledge.

    I hope their lawyers can make that work.













  • Just imagine the crowd of sycophants and scammers that surround these people, all trying to collect some little bit of the money that sheds off them like dandruff. That crowd is going to treat any voice-of-reason follower as a barrier to wealth and an enemy and work very hard to get rid of them. It’s got to be incredibly difficult for billionaires to access any kind of negative feedback or reality check, and spinning out into one’s own little fantasy world seems like an inevitable consequence, even if they start out ‘normal.’




  • I remember cataloging and transferring a bunch of a laboratory’s “Bernoulli” cartridges to Zip because they worried that they wouldn’t be able to replace the Bernoulli drive if/when it failed. Then to CD, because it was incomprehensible that optical drives would go the way of the floppy. Probably a decade of data, and I think it fit on like 20 CDROMs.

    For a while, I thought it was ok to just keep everything on multiple hard drives, but now it would take a special effort to get data off those IDE HDDs. And SSDs decay if not powered. It’s hard to keep electronic data for 100 years.