Fair enough. I wasn’t trying to pass explicit judgement. His reputation is just a lot better now than it used to be, whether earned or not.

Oh absolutely. I totally agree, but I’ve seen/heard of situations where talking about illegal activity has been targetted by authorities as “empowering” or “enciting” it. Silly shit, though the authorities haven’t gone full nuclear on piracy like they did 20 years ago.

FOSS has always been about “free as in speech”,

If you’re being pedantic, then yes, because Stallman coined “Free Software” as a term and that rolled into the acronym “FOSS”. If you’re talking about what we actually thought, then no.

FOSS vs. proprietary is tangential to the discussion over filesharing, anyway, because it addresses different issues. FOSS isn’t good because it’s zero-cost, it’s good because it respects user freedoms.

From a totally different angle, it’s good because it does more to empower innovation and creative expression than IP ever did, yet innovation and creative expression were always the stated goals of IP. Because of that, it’s a lot less tengential a discussion than things like filesharing, which also empowers creative expression. Cost-free, unlimited access to art is the best way to get art in the hands of everyone. And that is “free as in Beer”.

It’s funny, I’ve never met anybody who’d have that kind of experience and use the word “hacker” in this meaning simultaneously.

I’m slightly too young to use “hacker” the traditional old-MIT way. Maybe only by 2-3 years. I was a stupid kid playing with linux in the mid-90’s and I hacked into a stupid municipal dialup BBS and got root, then neither did nor changed anything because it was “cool” to prove I could figure it out. Then “Hackers” came out and I ran that movie on repeat for a few weeks and then moved on to actually learning to code.

I remember exactly the opposite, people being much more acutely aware of the difference, and Stallman being much more popular than now.

There’s those of us who were avoiding Redhat for shittier distros (like Slackware back then imo) because we didn’t want to buy anyone else’s beer for us to contribute for free. Maybe we were fewer than it seemed. I was that ugy giving out Ubuntu Warty CD’s having this weird pipe-dream of the tech world all going free-as-in-beer (yeah, I know they’re a for-profit. A lot of people didn’t get that back then and just saw a better Debian). Maybe again it relates to the exact date?

Clarification? Movies about Steve Jobs excluded.

Mr. Gates started back when “hacker” didn’t mean “hacker” (as you point out). He would pick up freely-given tech early on, and was then one of the first to start crying IP complaints and asserting his ownership of his product. Wherever you stand on the opinion, Gates’ Open Letter to Hobbyists started his really terrible reputation, since many hobbyests accurately alleged he built his business on tech they were using/granting for free. I never knew the facts of the 1977 BASIC case where he was sued over ownership of BASIC and won, but then in the 80’s he notoriously started his attitude of embrace, extend, extinguish. Everything from his behavior related to DOS, his ripping off Lotus Notes, etc. One could simply say “he was a good businessman” and they’re allowed to feel that way. If you say “hey, you can have as much of my water as you want for free” and I drain your lake so you have to buy water back from me, technically what I’m doing is legal. That’s basically what many people felt Gates did.

EDIT: And I don’t have good references, but I remember some quotes from him as his reputation got bad, that the hobbyists shouldn’t have been giving software out for free anyway. That the real problem was that they should have been demanding money for their work and/or keeping their ownership. One could argue his behavior was some of what spearheaded the carefully-crafted OSS licensing in the 80’s.

In fairness, I think it’s because the tech barrier of entry went down, WAYYY down. “Free Data” is an easy sell to people who were dialing into usenet in the 90’s, and us stupid ameteur hackers who would break into systems like they were puzzles because we thought it was cool and the maximum penalty was a fine and community service (the good old days, we all did it at least once and thought we were Zero Cool… unless we thought Zero Cool was lame, whatever). A lot of the people who think IP jives well with the internet were the ones who looked at me weird when I said I had online friends circa 2000, and who couldn’t understand how I couldn’t make some party because I “had to spend Saturday hanging out on IRC for my D&D campaign”

Even more technical folks now, they just never lived what made the internet beautiful when it was smaller. Back when “FOSS” was “Free as in Beer” and fuck that Richard Stallman with his “free as in speech” bullshit. They don’t remember how this dark storm of people’s hobbies turning into other people’s IP, people like Bill Gates stealing the foundations of technology to build his empire (for all the good he does now, he was truly evil to his core).

Ok, old-fart rant over.

I feel there’s still a difference between hosting it directly vs the federated nature of the platform meaning that the content is copied so it can be served to an end user

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. If you “federate” a server with CP for example, you are hosting CP. If it’s not brought to your attention, maybe you have a safe harbor exception (and maybe not), but if it IS brought to your attention, you are required to act on it to not be liable. And I airquote “federate” because as I learned Lemmy’s architecture, I’m not sure “federated” is the best word to describe it. When I think of federated, I think of something like an orchistrator. A tool where you are directed to the authoritative cluster for content, but not required to join in on it. In such a world, there would be three states - (1) I have a copy of this data, (2) I don’t have a copy of this data but link/index it, (3) I refuse to index this data

Lacking #2, I believe, really creates a lot of liability.

And that’s an issue, and suggests some flaws with Lemmy’s architecture. Lemmy UI’s should be indexers, no more. This is probably why we keep seeing the push-and-pull of “we must create a giant web” vs" fuck that, small is better". Each lemmy instance is a full-fledged forum solution, storing a copy of the entire network of all other forum solutions we’re interested in. Of course it’ll never succeed at either.

And now that Lemmy’s reached a more critical mass, I’m not sure it could pivot to a better design. Which is a shame. Because it’s still better than reddit, but it’ll never be what many people loved about what reddit (and digg) used to be.

EDIT: It’s not all doom and gloom. I think there’s a space for self-hosted apps or clients to make up for that gap, and we already have search indexers to find communities cross-web. I think when we have better multi-user integration, we’ll have a lot of opportunity. Like if I had a lemmy.world user primary, and it had a authorizing key, I could maybe have a user on dbzer0.com that has the public key for my lemmy.world and still effectively sign that account in a defederated instance. Enough people have been demanding something like that, I’m sure it’ll drop eventually.

For sure. If I didn’t burn myself every day programming, I would totally have blown a few weeks on Minecraft mods that would either have been really popular or utterly forgotten.

Ultimately, gamedev scared me off, perhaps fortunately since if I’d jumped to that as a career I’d be broke ;)

Really hating lemmy.ml here because direct-links are broken. I can’t see what you replied to, but I’m guessing it’s the dinky little BYOND game I took part in making.

I’m guessing more people used your dfhack mod than played the game I worked on :)

As in “could hire another”.

The best place for unions is commoditizable skilled-labor jobs. You CAN be devalued, but you have inherent value that should be maintained by not letting yourself get dragged into a race-to-the-bottom with powerful companies.

I can’t count how many times I have to explain to people that etymological roots of words are not a foundation for an argument. The term “Piracy” was adopted by movie studios back when it wasn’t really illegal… the same ones who also tried to make used media illegal (and eventually succeeded in a way).

Your Shakespearian example is very clearly theft

Except it’s not, nor was it ever. Here’s my metric. Anyone more property-focused than Adam Smith is wrong by default. If you’re more capitalist than the founder of capitalism, maybe you have a problem. It’s like Marx looking at someone and going “OMG is he too communist for me”.

You probably never heard of game I worked on (House of Morte). It only spiked to 50 players at its peak. I’ve heard so much about Space Station 13, but ironically never tried it. I actually got sick of BYOND really fast but had ironically fallen for that one game before that happened.

Copyright though also protects creators and deems their work valuable. For what reasons might someone write a book or a song if it were of no value?

People did it all the time, and there seems to be no correlation with improvements or motivation with the protection of modern copyright laws. The opposite side of the coin is that emlpoyees voluntarily invent content all the time (above their job description) that is immediately the property of their employer. The people who are going to be inventers STRIVE to innovate, regardless of money or lack thereof. A weaker Copyright model would not stifle innovation, but might even bolster it. At least actual inventors would likely have more opportunity to gain from their inventions.

The average salary for a Script Writer is $64,000/yr. If you’re simply looking at the value they produce, that’s bloody peanuts.

And you say they’re replacable, but you could say the same thing about electricians, and they have a union and strike. Of course, the Electrician produces less value but makes on average $10,000 more than the average Script Writer ($75,000).

I’d also like to remind you to separate the end product from the quality of the Script Writer. They do a skilled job and work hard, and they are only one cog in a machine. I have had this exact conversation with managers and execs in my own field who wanted to hold individual contributors accountable for things that simply were not their fault.

As someone who grew up in the “golden age of piracy” who remembers those stupid FBI warnings on VHS tapes, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that point of view. To me, it’s always been propaganda that creates this so-called anti-piracy morality.

The idea that piracy is stealing is so foreign to me. Stealing/theft is a very specific behavior. Nobody called it Theft when competitors followed around Shakespeare and made copycat plays. Nobody STILL calls it theft when we see stupid copycat movies come out. Nobody called it theft if you got a “copy painting, signed by actual painter” before modern copyright law. Now they call it things (not usually quite theft).

To me, piracy just lacks all the hallmarks of stealing. Hell, I’ve been in lawsuits. In every other realm, the Law draws some very clear lines between real damages and potential ones, and in many cases if I have to sue somebody, the law might even PREVENT me from seeking the latter. So what’s so special about piracy that so many people’s headspace have this attitude the “how the world works” goes out the window and it’s really stealing?

To me, it’s always going to be a matter of propaganda. Very successful propaganda. And I think your last sentence backs that. The big media IP owners started pushing the bubble of “it’s stealing” to libraries as well, and only backed off when it didn’t work. They were somewhat more successful with “used games” and have largely succeeded in killing the used game market off in some domains. I consider it stealing if a game company locks a physical product behind a single-use code so that they can seize part or all of the product if you purchase it used.

But here’s my counterpoint to all of the befuddlement. The companies don’t call these things products anymore, but licenses (so they can seize them at will from people who paid for them). How can you steal something that you can’t own in the first place?

If I would buy it, I consider it unethical to download it to save the money. If I wouldn’t, my Utilitarianism side is kicking in and it’s actually MORE ethical to pirate than not. I also see no ethical problem with trialing something even if it’s indie.

I something is “I don’t like enough to buy, but would play if it was freeware”, that’s the grey area for me. My Utilitarianism side says pirating it is the correct decision, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t agree.

I’m iffy on those, though. They were both availableish in my day. Hexchat looks like a port of Xchat. The other was an old kde chat client. I’ve used both. Didn’t love either. But obviously that’s just me personally

Oh god you’re making me feel old. I can’t see the “at that time” context because lemmy.ml is screwing up backlinks for me right now, but I’m assuming it’s either when I got into the net (early 90’s) or when I was all-in on IRC (late 90’s). This wil be a bit of a cluster of answers to both :)

Back when I got into IRC, there was quite a bit. It’s hard to keep track of exactly what I started using when. Back in the early 90’s, those of us online ended up on IRC or places like Delphi Forums. I lived on Delphi and it reminded me back then of Lemmy now. Arguably, the biggest problem with back then is that either a group had some technical following, or you just didn’t see much about it. Interested in some fringe philosophy? If you just looked at numbers I swear you’d think Discordianism or the Church of Subgenious were the world’ majority religion back then.

Otherwise, there were lots of Bulletin Boards forums. Google may be advanced, but it also spiders orders of magnitude more pages than existed back then. Yahoo was surprisingly good for the smaller web. Otherwise, honestly, things felt very similar to me.

Everything was simple, though. Had to be. 56k modems were real, really did make that crazy noise, and downloading a movie was genuinely an investment of time and effort. Everyone knew somebody who would sell them something like “Everything Metallica” on CD for $5, usually to pay for pot money or whatever. Why? Because even if you had access to everything metallica online, it would take you days to download it and clean that shit up.

Ironically, I think messengers were more used/useful back then. Perhaps because there were fewer, so you could talk to all your messenger-using friends by just running 2 or 3 on your computer? I STILL remember my old IQC number, and was always proud it was only 6 digits! I never got into AOL, but I had AIM for one or two friends, Y! for one or two friends, and IQC for 20-30 friends. Most of them were people I never met or would meet (super nerd). But it was great because you’d get to KNOW the people you got to know. I had a buddy in Norway who had so little in common with me, but we hit it off so good he ended up getting me into Melodic Death Metal and one of my still-favorite bands Theatre of Tragedy. Early side of that window, about 20% of IRC rooms were something between piracy, sex chats, or RPGs. The rest was a random mishmash. Later on, I swear there were more RPG chats.

I could probably talk for weeks on it. There’s a few products that came and went that I swear should have been the “next big thing” but failed due to bad business. There was a community game engine I worked on a game for called BYOND that still runs with a couple thousand players. It would’ve ended up on a front page if the founders either had more business savvy or just open-sourced it. Then there’s Digg. Talk about a mirror image of the reddit bullshit, but Digg was smaller AND fucked up bigger than redit did. None of us were happy to go to reddit, but digg turned to shit. We knew reddit was crap (nobody ever thought their leadership was ok) when we went there, but there were no other options anyone took seriously.

That about gets us to the end of “the good old days”.

Is it really still the best IRC client in the world? I stopped IRCing 15 years ago but nobody came close back then.

Fun Fact. I’m fucking old. Every time someone says something like this, it’s like “aw shit. I was on IRC when this person was in diapers”