DrWeevilJammer

I.E. Daddy IBM wants more

My solution to this was to run my own private instance. It’s very easy with docker-compose.

if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

In my opinion, the point of many open source licensing models is not to protect the author, it’s to ensure that useful modifications to the code are able to be incorporated back into the original software. The licenses accomplish this by requiring those who fork/modify the original code to make their code/modifications public.

This improves the source code and makes it better for everyone.

You can’t take an open source project protected by a GPL license, make improvements, pretend that you did all the work yourself (i.e. not acknowledge the source project on which yours is based), and then attempt to monetize the original code + your improvement.

For example, take Truth Social. Not understand (and/or caring) about the license attached to the Mastodon project, they forked the code, made changes, and then did not acknowledge that they did so. Mastodon had to threaten to sue before they acknowledged that they’d built their platform on open source software.

It’s not about protection of a single developer or even a group. It’s about cooperation to build on the work of others in a fair way.

Open source licensing is responsible for a lot of really useful things that are integral to the daily lives of billions of people. The Linux kernel alone is a massive example. Without that license, there would be no Android, or SteamDeck. Without the BSD license, they would be no OSX/macOS. Without GPL, there would be no AdBlock, no uBlock Origin, no Git, no MySQL, no Ansible, no ProtonMail, and millions of other projects. Most internet servers would probably still be running Windows.

Most of these licenses explicitly say that you can even sell products based on the code - all you have to do is acknowledge the source project, and make your own source code public and available under the same license.

Here’s what Linus Torvalds said about people making money from Linux back in 1993:

The fact that others make money by selling Linux is something that I find mostly amusing, and something which does my ego no end of good. Frankly, I wouldnt want to bother personally, so if somebody else does it, it doesnt hurt me. Its also quite legal by the copyright, and so far I havent seen any major developer stand up and say he doesnt like his code being sold, so I dont see the problem.

If you know anything about Stallman, this makes perfect sense.

Netplan is 100% a solution that didn’t have a problem to begin with

This does not surprise me from a company that, well… * gestures distastefuly at snaps *

You can self-host Newsblur, and the app is available on F-Droid

I’ve found that Krita is pretty easy to use and does most of the things I would otherwise have to use Photoshop for.

Check out Photopea

If you can’t rollerblade to a public phone to use your bluebox so you can call your granny for free, are you really a phreaker?

“The customer is always right” mindset, except that doesn’t work with open source when they’re using something they downloaded for free.

You’ve put your finger on the thing that was bothering me about the tone of the original post - it’s very similar to a Nextdoor post.

We had a good solution…

Did we? Do you know why it was removed in the first place?

Someone has already submitted a PR with the changes the dev recommended. The captcha stuff is in a new db table instead of in-memory at the websocket server.

However, from one of the devs:

One note, is that captchas (and all signup blocking methods) being optional, it still won’t prevent people from creating bot-only instances. The only effective way being to block them, or switch to allow-only federation.

Once people discover the lemmy-bots that have been made that can bypass the previous captcha method, it also won’t help (unless a new captcha method like the suggested ones above are implemented).

The root of the issue seems to be that they’ve removed websockets, for the following reasons:

Huge burden to maintain, both on the server and in lemmy-ui. Possible memory leaks. Not scalable.

I can understand them wanting to make their lives a bit easier (see "huge burden to maintain) - Lemmy has exploded recently (see “not scalable”) and there are far bigger issues to fix, and an even larger number of bad actors (see “possible memory leaks”) who have learned about Lemmy at the same time as everyone else and want to exploit or break it.

Is this a collective undertaking by a community of multiple stakeholders or is this the Dev’s individual project and they don’t have to listen to anyone?

Devs, especially extremely busy ones “listen” via pull requests. Instead of badgering the devs, put together some devs of your own, get some code working, and submit it as a PR.

If they don’t accept it, you now have code that does what you want, and it would be easy to create your own fork.

Really glad to hear it! Feel free to ping me if you have questions.

Edit: The Deconz is a good starter device, but it doesn’t support nearly as many devices as Z2M. I got an Aqara Pet Feeder that Deconz doesn’t support, but Z2M does, which is why I switched. You can’t use Z2M with the ConBee.

This is the video I used to set up Z2M to work with the new controller.

It’s a lot easier and cheaper than you might imagine. A used Dell 7040 for $120, a ZigBee controller for $30, install Home Assistant OS on the Dell, plug in the controller, and you’ve got a really powerful smart home hub that can control any ZigBee device you have locally without ever needing any “cloud” services.

Since you don’t need cloud services, you don’t need to worry about firewalls or networking or VLANS, because the controller replaces the “required” hubs that manufacturers say you need, that force you to use their servers.

With the controller, Home Assistant becomes your hub, and the ghost of Orwell will smile and nod at you approvingly, maybe even give you a cheeky thumbs up.

Have you looked into what Home Assistant has been doing with voice lately? This is what I’ll be using to finally turn my Echos into muted speaker targets:

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/using_voice_assistants_overview/

You can even turn old analog phones into HA “microphones” - just pick up the BatPhone/hamburger/banana phone, say “It’s movie time” and hang up, and HA will convert your voice to text and run your “movie time” automation.

It’s not a jetpack, but it certainly FEELS like living in the future…

No, I am currently using a TubesZB Ethernet controller, but before that I used a Deconz ConBee II. There are others available as well.

I used the hue bridge before setting up HA, but after setting up and configuring the other controller, you can unpair your hue bulbs from the hue bridge and pair them with the new controller instead. You can then unplug the hue bridge, because the new controller is now handling the hue bulbs.

This is possible because devices that comply with the ZigBee protocol specs must accept properly formatted commands from a hub/controller after a successful pairing.

So if you have one of these controllers, AND the ZigBee device you purchase is compliant with the protocol AND the device is supported by the controller, the controller will be able to control the device locally, and you can throw out the “required” hub from the manufacturer that sends your data to that company’s servers. This is why you need to plan things out ahead of time, to ensure that what you get will work with what you have. Every controller has a list of what devices are supported. For example, here are the devices supported by the ConBee II, and here are the devices supported by the TubesZB device, which uses Zigbee2MQTT.

Bonus: with one of these controllers, your smart home stuff will now work just fine if your internet goes out. As long as your local network is up and running, all of your HA stuff will work as well.

Everything became very easy for me once I decided to go all open source. In my opinion, the problem is all of the different proprietary “hubs”. I got a ZigBee controller that can control all ZigBee devices without requiring a hub (there are several options available).

Lights: ZigBee Hue. Plugs: ZigBee Innr. Motion sensors: ZigBee Aqara. Cameras: Ethernet Amcrest. NVR: Frigate.

Everything is local, no data leaves my network, and everything is controlled directly from Home Assistant dashboards via the ZigBee controller, and I never have to open any proprietary apps.

Care does need to be taken to plan the network at least somewhat in advance, but that doesn’t take too long, and everything is very stable and super reliable.