Jesse is back from Trumpistan so it’s a full house again. KDE looks forward, TeamViewer comes to Linux, more Intel ME problems, HTTPS is winning, corporations try to avoid GPL litigation while Mozilla faces a suit from Yahoo, and Patreon has reignited the FOSS funding debate.
News
KDE’s vision for the next 3-4 years and its goal of Privacy
Intel’s cunning plan to get everyone to upgrade their processors and AMD might be capitalising?
66% of page loads are https up from 46% in January this year
Big companies join the compliance-first approach to GPLv2
Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath
Entroware
This episode of Late Night Linux is sponsored by Entroware. They are a UK-based company who sells computers with Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE preinstalled. They have configurable laptops, desktops and servers to suit a wide range of Linux users. Check them out and don’t forget to mention us at checkout if you buy one of their great machines.
Funding FOSS
Patreon have recently made some changes which directly affect this show and Ikey’s distro. We discussed the implications and alternatives, and asked for your opinion.
See our contact page for ways to get in touch.
Why not use good old fashioned bank accounts. I know it’s not common in the US, but throughout Europe (specifically Germany in my case) SEPA works great, is free and does support recurrence out of the box.
I’m using Patreon too, but if there’s an option to support someone via bank transfer that’s always my first choice.
I like to second that suggestion. I feel making small donations (i.e. £1 per month) is hardly worth it because the likes of Paypal, Patreon etc. take a relatively humongous cut (and will probably monitise my personal details as well).
Slightly related, a while ago you asked what would encourage listeners to become a LNL patron. For me, having a good idea of how the money will be spent is a major factor.
I 100% agree with hirnsushi. SEPA is great, and if your bank has even half decent online banking setting recurring payments up is really easy. Sure, on your end it will likely require setting up some kind of special account for donations that likely won’t be free – but that’s all the fees involved with that to receive money from everybody located in the EU afaik. Also, the banking system has proven stable in tremendous crisis. 😉
Aside from that, Liberapay seems philosophically less shitty than Patreon (which I use nontheless) F*** Patreon.
It looks like Patreon has backed off the change, but I will still respond to the question.
I am probably in the small minority of people who increased donations in response to the Patreon change. I had been doing $1 to several projects, but I bumped up my contributions so Patreon wouldn’t be taking 40% of the donation. I could do this because I just started using Patreon recently and hadn’t maxed out the amount I wanted to contribute (I had wanted to add more projects at $1).
Patreon doesn’t seem like that bad of an option. I don’t know how their fee structure works now or how it compares to other options, but it seemed like the change they tried to make had good intentions, they were very public about it, and then backed off when they got a negative response. In the past I have just made annual donations to avoid excessive transaction fees. Patreon should be able to get around transaction fees by batching them together, but this recent attempted change seems to indicate otherwise. Personally, I probably wouldn’t set up a recurring PayPal payment but Stripe or LibrePay would be okay. Bitcoin would be okay if there were a painless way to set up recurring donations.
I responded to Ikey’s licensing comment (that he mentioned in the feedback section) in the previous show’s comments.
I hope Patreon has backed off. The new system would be like shopping in the
USA where you carefully budget your purchases to match the $20 in your wallet only to find the sales tax added on at the till has pushed it over your limit. Next time you buy a bit to ensure you stay within your budget. That must impact adversely in the total donations received by projects.
I do not fully agree with your collective position that using Duckduckgo is a poor choice. At least to my knowledge they are the only major search engine offering their search via Tor hidden service.
Even if their legal position in the US is less than satisfactory they are still taking concrete and verifiable steps to help users increase their anonymity.
ps. I promise I will start giving the show recurring donations if there someday is a way to do it via SEPA -payments. You are a joy to listen to.
Cheers!
I had forgotten about Felim’s comment about DuckDuckGo. I can’t remember exactly what he said but it was something like the argument for using DuckDuckGo is baloney and that you should use StartPage instead because of FISA court jurisdiction. What I don’t like about this advice is that StartPage is still using Google, just through a proxy. That proxy might help if you are worried about the NSA asking Google to hand over your queries but it is still feeding data to Google which helps to perpetuate its dominance. I’d rather give my queries to pretty much any other option. Mayber there is another search provider with better legal protection than DuckDuckgo, but I haven’t found it.
Hello Joe and the other members of the podcast !
I would support you if I had the relevant informations about the bank account like IBAN, BIC and so on…
I dislike Paypal, Patreon and the like. I prefer a payment from bank to bank by far.
Best regards,
Serge
In the case of supporting projects I will use any means possible, as long as I can avoid the abhorrent Paypal and the sometimes despicable practices they have displayed over the years. On the other hand I would like to stress that this support comes with a demand, because one often gets the impression open source developers think they have “started for themselves” after leaving a traditional employer. They are however, like it or not, at the behest of the users now and that means they will have to follow clear short- and long-term directions from those benefactors. To that end they should make means such as these available:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130116002912/http://www.windows7taskforce.com/
As the archive.org link makes clear Microsoft cancelled that program while implementing only a handful of innumerable suggestions, as did Spotify and Todoist and many others with similar set-ups over the last few years. Just this week Mozilla managed to screw themselves out of the little goodwill they’d earned with Firefox 57, by ignoring many long-term wishes of users while racking up another short-term blunder. That kind of tone-deafness toward users and purposeful exclusion from the development process is the most clear and direct way to losing my financial support.
I really don’t get the derision towards KDE’s core application focus, because that is exactly the place where Linux falls down and what makes it impossible for me to fully move over from the dreadful Windows 10. Moreover, when Canonical announced the scuttling of their Unity desktop, one of the key areas consistently mentioned online as to where they should have put their focus instead was exactly that one. Why are big Linux players are spending so much energy redoing esoteric libraries and desktop environments, while making no progress on a core suite of competitive applications (with viable alternatives to software like XYplorer, Outlook, PDF-XChange Editor, Mediamonkey or SyncbackSE) as well as flawless out-of-the-box Windows (CPU and GPU) virtualization for the times that you still need to use work software from companies like Adobe or Autodesk? Instead they are wasting their time making Fisher-Price copies of top-in-vertical software like VLC or QBittorrent as well as letting other vital software like Thunderbird languish. It really makes one wonder whether these players actually want to succeed on the desktop or phone, so it’s good to see KDE taking this issue more seriously.