Happy 250th anniversary of exchanging one overlord for another to all who celebrate.

I’m trying not to have expectations about My Little Pony FiM but “The Mane Six take down a cult” still caught me off guard.

The individualist, libertarian view of freedom as a purely negative set of freedoms that impose no greater obligations on people just... hasn't aged very well, has it? Uncharitably rewritten, the four freedoms of the FSF can be summed up as:

- You’re not the boss of me.
- You’re not the boss of me.
- You’re not the boss of me.
- You’re not the boss of me.

There's no concept of any obligation to anyone else anywhere, in the GPL, MIT, BSD, Apache or any "open" software license.

If they do make a Sonic 4 (please don't) I hope they go full Marvel on it. At this point they might as well make Sonic: Endgame with all the characters. Archie, IDW, Sat AM, X, every video game, every comic, every TV show. Scratch and Grounder with Cubot and Orbot. Snively and Stone. Boomer. Tangle. Antoine. Whisper. Sally. Rouge. Bunny. Silver. Tikal. Clutch. E-101. Chris. Elise. Sharah. Sage. And every iteration of Sonic and Eggman ever.

It would be absolutely terrible.

Sonic 3 is a movie...that exists.

Not much more to say about it than that. If you're a Sonic fan it's tolerable. Otherwise...it exists.

I guarantee that whoever designed this package art knew exactly what they were doing.

No matter how long I look at today’s date it seems wrong to me. The 23rd of June doesn’t feel like a date that should exist. No particular reason. Just a feeling.

I’m familiar with the term eusocial, but I have no idea what double eusocial would mean. Or what a double eusocial network is. Is that the term for some kind of non-Euclidean polycule?

Go home, YouTube. You’re drunk.

Today has been very much a "if nobody travels back in time to stop you it must not have been a bad idea" kind of day.

Chekov's buttplug

I saw Everything Everywhere All At Once and I may write more about it another time. For now, I feel obligated to say one thing...

Why did Steam suddenly change to another language? Fortunately it's one I can read so I could change it back. But...what?

So what open source is missing is solidarity. Everything is going to continue degrading faster and faster unless we move beyond the libertarian roots of open source and start applying a little collectivism. Open source needs better governance.

I'm not sure what form that will take. For certain, the benevolent dictator model cannot last. At some point an open source project has to be transitioned from being controlled by a single person to being controlled by a larger group. Responsibility needs to "move up" so that one person does not carry the weight of the entire project, nor can one person ruin it for literally the entire world.

This is fully inline with subsidiarity. If it's a question of "whatever a smaller unit can handle", the appropriate smaller unit will change over time.

Discussions must be had and experiments must be done.

Imagine if this rsync business is what finally inspired people to change the fundamentals of open source. Finally establish some good governance. Finally figure out funding. I'm not going to hold my breath. People seem to have generally forgotten how to organize collectively. I have certainly not been doing my part in changing things.

But it would be nice.

I recently read an interesting take on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas. The thesis of this post by Laurens Hoff is that "the Catholic Church wrote one of the better diagnoses of why decentralised social networks keep struggling." It's well worth a read for yourself, especially if you're interested in decentralised social networks.

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr164-the-pope-on-defederation/

Here’s another person with a take on rsync, this time related to funding. It’s an excellent point. If corporations paid even a fraction of what they pay for AI to open source instead the funding problem would basically be solved. Much like climate changing, individual action is not enough to solve the funding problem.

Also like climate change, that’s not an excuse to do nothing. Donate where and what you can.

https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/116692224643702369

Giraffes are actually demons who were banished to our realm long ago. Disney made a documentary about this. The documentary is framed in the journey of a human girl in the demon realm, which to be sure is an excellent story. It just takes its time getting back to the giraffes.

https://infosec.exchange/@jerry/116693586212825362

If you're still here, before I get off my soap box I'd also like to briefly mention licensing. I'm not a fan of the libertarian nature of open source licenses. I'd like to see licenses that respect the moral rights of developers and are protected by collective power, not law. I'll admit that moving projects into community maintenance may require "hostile takeovers" at times that would be hard to pull off without libertarian licensing. But at some point, we need something better.

I should mention the other thing that open source really needs help with: funding. Open source funding also suffers from subsidiarity without solidarity. Since I'm already advocating for collective governance I might as well also say that I think collective funding would be nice. But in the absence of that, please donate to the open source projects that you depend on.