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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • So what is your argument? Who is responsible for the decision-making process that leads to “hand writing an inferior solution”? Why do you think that this at all acceptable and reasonable?

    You’ve been writing nothing but opinion-as-fact and resorting to wild rationalizations to justify your preferences, now you want to couch yourself under the questionable ethics of “it’s done this way and I can not fight it, so it must be the correct thing to do”?

    Let’s make a simple test: if you were in charge and had the choice between spending some $$ to dual license a GPL package or to pay for the development of a GPL-only system vs paying $$$$ to do it in-house because you did not find a MIT/BSD package that does what you need, what would you do?



  • There is no fundamental problem in working for free either. It’s second-order effects that we should worry about. Those who are “working for free” because they “just want have software being used by people” are diluting the value of the professionals and in the long term end up being as detrimental as professional designers or photographers who “work for exposure”.

    If you ask me, the reason that is so hard to fund FOSS development is not because of bureaucracies, but because we are competing with privileged developers who are able to afford giving away their work for free.






  • has many more options for clients,

    The problem of XMPP is here. These options are not uniform among the possible different combinations of servers and clients.

    The situation has improved a lot, but there was a point in time where saying “this is my XMPP handle” was far from enough to know if you’d be able to communicate with others, and you’d have to figure out things like:

    • Does the server support MUC?
    • Does the server support E2E? If so, which?
    • Are emojis supported on the server, or do they get converted to ASCII?
    • Can you use audio calls? If so, which codec?
    • If my client supports “share live location”, what do you see on your end?

    Not to mention that until recently there was no decent XMPP client for iOS. Even today, the best alternative is siskin, which may have its vocal fans but quite frankly is pretty barebones and has a UI that would be considered ugly even in 2010.

    Matrix as a protocol is technically worse than XMPP and Synapse is a resource hog compared to Prosody and Ejabberd? Yes, true. But at least I can tell non-technical people to download Element from the App stores and they will have a consistently-not-great-but-acceptable-and-improving experience.