I think you accidentally posted this on the wrong thread, but it’s fine because I know exactly the thread you meant, and the word circumvention didn’t help the situation :D

It’s crazy to think this now (since I’m so heavily into free software) but I actively chose a Windows Phone for my first smartphone, and thought it would take over the market from iOS and Android.

To be fair, it did have some cool features: it let you aggregate all the different ways of contacting people into one interface (the dream of many a tech person since the beginning of time!), it had a connection with facebook so you could see status updates/photos from your friends (in the contacts app of all places!), and I thought the live tiles and design language were really cool.

Despite even my hatred of Microsoft, I still have fond memories of that phone.

I also fell for the Nintendo 3DS hype! I was 12 years old at the time, and I really believed the glassless 3D would be a killer feature and the next big thing in gaming, and I spent six months leading up to the launch date washing cars and doing odd jobs to scrape enough money together to buy it on day one.

I did still love the device and kept it for a long time, but the 3D was a gimmick and got switched off fast. I was sad to have spent all that time and effort saving money, only for the price to plummet soon after launch, but it taught me a good lesson :)

Yes! If it’s any consolation, I made almost exactly the same statement about the iPad too:

So it’s just a more expensive iPod touch with a bigger screen? No-one’s going to buy it, that’s pointless!

This would kill bridges like slidge. They authenticate to WhatsApp using the web interface and that token lasts about two weeks before you have to relink it. A limit of six hours would make it unusable.

They will use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Which means it’s not open source, and no-one else can sell replacement cartridges, parts etc.

It might still be a good printer and enjoyed by some, but it really annoys me when companies mix these terms up, almost certainly deliberately.

I for one would love to throw money at Mozilla, or any alternative, that has experienced developers behind it, doesn’t have conflicts of interest and acts on behalf of its users. This is why I donate to Servo, Ladybird and Dillo too (I know one of these is not like the others 😄).

I don’t think they’d reach their current levels of funding through donations, but it might be possible to get enough together to keep it on life support.

I know this wouldn’t be perfect, but surely better than losing it completely.

I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source - public money, public code! The only way to take down these giant US companies is to work together, and the most effective way to work together is to release everything in the open in such a way that anyone can build on top of it.

If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US. It wouldn’t increase productivity in the long run, it would instead substitute dependency on a few US companies for a few EU companies.

But, if they invest in open source software, it could spur innovation not only in the companies that are directly funded, but also thousands of other companies throughout the EU that would now have common infrastructure that they can build on top of.

That’s good news, in my opinion. If they’re allowed to just completely disregard copyright when training, then I should be able to completely disregard any attempted copyright on the output too.