To meet the demands of the European Commission's Digital Markets Act—slated to be enforced in March 2024—Microsoft must make its apps easier to uninstall, its default settings easier to change, and its attempts at steering people toward its services easier to avoid.

It includes Bing, default apps, Edge, etc...

It’s a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development.

RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start.

The solution has always been there: copyleft. Copyleft as in "Forbidding privatizing the commons". Here's why:

He also foresaw that if we were not the master of our software, we would quickly become the slave of the machines controlled by soulless corporations. He told us that story again and again.

RMS quickly pointed, rightly, that the lack of "freedom" means that people will forget about the concept. Again, he was right. But everybody considered that "Free Software" and "Open Source" were the same because they both focused on the four freedoms.

Pushing GPL and AGPL was not enough, because

all this work was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them.

We need more commons, because:

• young student are taught computer with Word and PowerPoint
• young hackers are mostly happy with rooting Android phones or using the API of a trendy JS framework.
• When an industry receives millions in public subsidies then make a patent, that industry is privatising the common.
• When Google is putting the Linux kernel in a phone that cannot be modified easily, Google is privatising the common.

Fighting back?

Well, the first little step I can do myself is to release every future software I develop under the AGPL license. To put my blog under a CC By-SA license. I encourage you to copyleft all the things!

Add a fifth rule to the free software: The obligation to keep those four rights, effectively keeping the software in the commons.

All of these sound good to me. The thoughts are in contradiction with some terms of the current IT developments and programming.

About the current state of the software:

• it is getting slower as demonstrated by the latency. A computer from 2015 is 2-5 times slower than an Apple 2e from 1986 just at reading a keystroke and displaying it on screen. https://danluu.com/input-lag/
• putting all-in-one software increase complexity, and maintenance costs. They become untrustworthy.
• they are more a liability than an asset

I take some quotes out of it.

Humanity didn't get good at building houses by building the same house a million times. We built lots of different houses and learned from each other's failures.

As a programmer, I've tried multiple times in the past decade to create services just for myself and a few friends. Each of them has fallen away after a year or two. And a big reason for that was the burden of keeping up with updates for all the tools they depend on.

My initial plan had been to create clones of apps for myself and take out lots of features. [...] I didn't expect to find myself wondering what a web browser for memory palaces might look like.

Solutions

• making forks instead of all-in-one software. It keeps them lighter.
• we can have a huge amount of softwares. It is ok. Prefer software with thousands rather than millions of users, that seldom requires updates, that spawns lots of forks, that is easy to modify, that you can modify.

A software that stores objects and massive amounts of data. An open-source version

#idea #project make it better

Coq est un assistant de preuve. Je commences à en entendre parler tous les mois. Il semble qu'il soit le meilleur dans sa catégorie.

So KeepassXC can be used instead: https://www.keepassx.org/start/index.html