#free open source software

[qilin-r]

i bought a new pc and i'm currently going through the phase of reinstalling/reassessing what programs i use

I was about to pull the trigger on installing FL again but i've decided im going to try and learn a new DAW. my approach to music production this time around is going to be relying purely on FOSS and free vsts so I'm leaning towards Ardour. I have this vague idea that it might be cool to prove you can make interesting digital music without spending any money.

the only problem is: i don't know how to write interesting or good music in the first place lol, but we'll get there. music making is just a fun experiment for me either way.

anyway, on the off chance anyone with an interest in FOSS sees this, any recommendations? generally speaking too, not just in regards to audio. i've already picked up krita, gimp and libreoffice. even if it's highly specialised, i'd like to hear about it anyway; messing around with software i don't understand is all i ever used to do as a kid and i strongly feel it's one of the best ways to learn things.

[amalgamasreal]

FOSS IS LOVE

FOSS IS LIFE

[brynvivix]

The GNU mascot is just Richard Stallman's fursona.

[nuggetthefanloser]

Hey to the next reblogger I'm lazy and pathetic can you please explain why foss tools/operating systems are struggling? Like I feel like it's not just patents/copyrights or bad ux due to common users being good at navigating the clunk, I feel like there's some of both of those things but also more to it as well. But it feels so unfair and sad to see the most used, common, standardized tools be absolutely bonkers pricy and quickly moving to shoot themselves in the nuts with AI implementation

[sl33py-g4m3r]

FOSS Apps~~

ever just find apps and decide to switch evefything to them just because?

Cause i've been looking for some foss apps on f-droid; and fossify has an entire suite of them~~

Found the launcher and keyboard initially; they've got:

Calendar

Calculator

Clock

Contacts

Camera

Keyboard

Launcher

Gallery

Messages

Music player

Voice recorder

Phone

Notes

Whatever paint one is

Evem though you're essentially putting all your eggs in one basket, the apps seem to work really well~~

I hadn't called or messaged anyone with them tho as its so early~~~ or is it late??

But ye~~ trying to stay away from both google and samsung as they're both bad from a security standpoint~~

Hilariously still using a samsung phone cause too poor to buy a pixel and flash graphene, i checked and lineage probably won't work on this phone either as i chrcked support and didn't find mine

And don't want to go back to apple for simmilar reasons

So ye just switched everything i thought i could to FOSS alternatives on F-Droid

And i have 2 instances of group chat again~~lol

Why~~

And i seriously wish that fossify keyboard had a spell checker~~ i type so many woeds wrong as i'm used to samsungs or googles keyboards and idk how to match the keyboard height~~

Also why~~? Why all the wrong key presses??? Does this happen to everyone when switching to a new keyboard??

[kickair8p]

Let Software Freedom Ring!

[cynator]

Click Here

[khiatons]

Experimenting with Linux

From a buggy Windows update to a functional writing machine, thanks to Linux! It's got a learning curve, but the cost savings and freedom to use my favorite writing program make it all worth it. #LinuxLife #WritingCommunity #TechTips #SustainableTech

Linux to the rescue! From a buggy Windows update to a functional writing machine, thanks to Linux! No more e-waste here. It’s got a learning curve, but the cost savings and freedom to use my favorite writing program make it all worth it.

[madmwyrd]

Are you a fan of foss software?

i am BROKE so i kinda need to use it, but even then, its really good. i use shotcut for making videos, audacity to record audiobooks and other stuff, and firefox has been my browser of choice for over a decade now, so i would say yes!!

[hardyfellow]

twitch - tiktok - github

[kickair8p]

Also mentioning that there are free open-source alternatives to many paywalled programs:

Raster graphics: GIMP and Krita

Vector graphics: Inkscape

3D graphics: Blender

Office productivity suite: LibreOffice

. . . and more.

Not quite the enshittification-killer that was originally hoped, but still.

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@q3k@hackerspace.pl/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remote, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over and anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[zlywplyw]

does anyone know if there are any open source apps for tumblr?? i can't find any and its driving me crazyyyy

or maybe there isn't anything out there because of API restrictions? idk

[praxis-app]

join the praxis discord - sign up - github

[chimeaxolotl]

traffic cone cosplay

(he got hit by a car)

[sl33py-g4m3r]

Guess I'm using free and open source stuff as much as possible~~

Or going back to the iPhone i had at one point~~ but idk if apple is trustworthy either~~

Phone is a samsung A53 5g which isn't supported by lineage os

T_T.

Found apps for youtube in newpipe, breezy for weather (thank you whomever mentioned it~~ its better than the one I found (hello weather), use Firefox with ublock origin, Florisboard for a foss privacy respecting keyboard, installed f-droid, and Aurora store, and disabled what i couldn't uninstall from Google qnd Microsoft and uninstalled what I could

Tho unfortunately logged into my Gmail to use Aurora store~~ hope that doesn't make me an idiot ~~ but probably does~~

Use ecosia as search, or duckduckgo, start page~~~

Hopefully doing good enough but sometimes I worry I'm not going far enough ~~

Tho I think if I tried to log in to tumblr through a VPN or tor, I'd get the account blocked or deleted cause that happened to my sibling when they tried that and had to fight to get the account back

Lesser of two evils debate again~~ tho apple and samsung are both bad id guess~~ at least apples imessage is encrypted ~~

Legit typed google vs samsung again when I meant apple lol they're all bad as far as I'm concerned ~~

Want some good videos about privacy and security? TheHatedOne on youtube has many good videos; and how i fell down the rabbit hole to begin with lol

Tech lore, idk who else off hand~~

Also~~ I've disabled all the advertizing id and crash reports and the 'how to make our service better' things, google chrome history, location history, map data, youtube history, search history

Got to dig around and do more ~~

How can I uninstall the play store and chrome and Google? And will getting rid of Google photos or drive mess with anything? I'm assuming no~~ but idk

Hopefully uninstalling stuff that the phone only wants 'disabled' won't break anything ~~ if I can find out how to do it

Trying to do the best with what I got without totally dropping off the radar tech wise~~

Only things I use Gmail for is this tumblr account and signing up for websites you need an account for for some reason ~~ like nexus mods, or newsbreak cause mom kept sending me stuff and I couldn't look at it otherwise ~~ or logging on to games~~

[aro-culture-is]

Aro culture is, when forced to buy a Google phone cuz that's all you can afford, trying your damnest to use the invasive advert tracking to your advantage.

i.e. periodically typing in "I'm aromantic" to the chrome search bar & loudly saying it into the phone speaker in the hopes you'll stop getting jump-scared by an influx of dating app ads when forced to watch them in mobile games

,,, please. i beg of you. do not. for one, google doesn't recognize that as a metric, at best it places you into a queer category and targets you with ads that are promoted to queer people. They do not bother with granularity, because the advertisers are who are paying for categories or lack thereof. they also probably categorize you as single when you do that stuff, which again, defeats your goal. if you want to tell advertisers to get out here's actually a pretty simple thing to look for:

from there, consider:

install the firefox app (free), and use the uBlock Origin extension (best adblocker, free... and still works on youtube and twitch if you use the firefox app to load them)

i also recommend the breezewiki extension (free), because fandom wiki sucks on an ethics level, and this directs you to an identical, but ad-less page so they don't get money from you.

anyways my solution is stop seeing ads lol

related: install bitwarden as a password manager. it's free, well-established and credible, and you can use it on both android apps and firefox (as an extension) (also on any device in general). you only ever have to remember one password, preferably new, ever again. it's got the rest for you, stupidly well encrypted, and you can store data like security question answers, secure notes, and more!)