> Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.

I think the better analogy here would be to tidy the public park for free. It's about doing something for other people, being generous, making the world better with your genrousity. I think that in itself is something worthwile to try.

I don't think it is this novel anymore though. Which easier and cheaper distribution, the same thing is starting to apply to other creative endeveours like music, art, or writing, where the costs of publishing start to get negligible, while there is an ever growing base of creatives who want to ofer their work to an audience. And maybe we should treat Open Source more like other art forms, where you get patronage, or get small payments per download like in the shareware model.

While I find speculating about different models besides capitalism a good exercise, I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.

I am not sure what you mean by "this novel". It is a fundamental difference between all digital products (software, music, etc) and all other physical (non-digital rather) products. It doesn't have to be a novel difference to be important. This distinction in itself is enough to produce the effects we see on the economy. I mentioned the ever changing pricing strategy of such products as an example.

> I also don't think these things are wholy incompatible with our current societal structure.

Wholy incompatible? By no means, this industry is making tons of money. Surely it is compatible.

I think of it more like a handbreak. Yhe current capitalist societal structure is putting a hard limit to our potential as a society to fully leverege these technologies to better our lives. Open source is just a glimpse of what can be accomplished when money doesn't get in the way of our work exchange. And imagine what our humanity could have achieved if 1000x people did open source without having money issues.

The problem though is, using undocummented communication channels on private phones by people not technically inclined. That Signal is an american company and subject to NSA scrutiny while the users a politicians of a foreign goverment only makes this worse.

So, national messengers, controlled by experts, that archive communication and run on trusted hardware, would be the best solution for the work of democratic goverments I would think.

Of course, the possibility of software quality and security experts in service of the goverment is probably just wishful thinking.

I think the law is actually pretty clear on that front, that it is not ok, but in the meantime, all the big publishers do it and make so much money, they actually don't care much about fines, especially given the chance they might get levied against a competitor first, at which point they can quickly change that behaviour.

As so often, the biggest GDPR problem is missing enforcement.

The bundestags president, Julia Klöckner, was recently a victim of phishing on signal. While there could be different motives behind her suggestion, I think they are just another facet of her not really understanding technology and security practices.

She thinks she was "hacked" on signal, and now wants to switch to something which is clearly better! Let's wait where she will want to go once she gets "hacked" there too...

While there are valid reasons for germans not to want their politicians to use private messenger apps on their private phones for official business, and american ones at that, this switch would of course change nothing about all of these problems. But at least they can claim they did something, right?

<< While there are valid reasons for germans not to want their politicians to use private messenger apps on their private phones for official business, and american ones at that,

Personally, I am starting to think we should ban politicians from using smartphones altogether possibly followed by other technological restrictions. It is part of my: "They Will Hate it: Good" portfolio of ideas to improve the world or at least make it a little more funny.

I think Win2k already had that. As far as I remember, the explorer sidebar, the white box with the colored line under the heading, already being HTML. I loved hacking on that back then to customize my windows experience.

Yes, it was called Active Desktop and it was much older than Win2K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

If you changed the colour scheme on Windows 98, none of the cloud images were transparent in Explorer (they assumed the background was white) so you'd end up with these weird clouds/sky fading into a white background and then a hard line into whatever colour you'd set your background to.

The desktop was very sluggish if you added an active desktop to it, as IE4 had to run; at least it was on my underpowered machine. Additionally it came with a screensaver that you could interact with, which was odd because normally moving the mouse dismissed the screensaver.

Active Desktop was a different thing, on top of what I was talking about.

But the post parent to yours was correct about HTML being in Win2k: https://imgur.com/ncvvBY0

That infopanel on the left is HTML.

Ah ok. Unfortunately I cannot look at that page on imgur as I am in the UK and it's blocked here.

that is insane. why is that blocked in the UK? or is it imgur that blocks the UK? everything is weird these days.

I've been using FairEmail[1] for some years now as a replacement and find it superior to the gmail app. Of course, depending on your needs and tastes, I could also understand calling it a bit clunky. It is FOSS, but has a one time pay premium option for some advanced features. But really, it's also just fair to support the dev by buing the app. My only complaint would be, that there are to many updates, but of course, you can just ignore them and do them every few months instead.

[1] https://email.faircode.eu/

And the pandora took years to arrive, got constantly more expensive while waiting, while the hardware got pretty long in the tooth. Still, it was a greadt device! But when it arrived, it was already a curiosity from another time and I feel this even more so for the Pyra.

I had a similar idea a few years ago and tried to set it up, but failed at making it easy to connect to. I wanted the phone to prompt you like when connecting to wifi hotspots where you have to accept some T&Cs before you can connect to the internet, but to then just show you the local services instead of actually offering internet. Honestly, this can't be that difficult, but at the time, I could not get it to work reliably.

I think they just confused bavria with munich. It was the city who had their own linux distribution (LiMux) and the move of the headquarters where part of microsoft efforts to change that, because it means more tax income for the city (Munich is not part of the disctrict Landkreis München).