this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
1053 points (98.8% liked)

Technology

73967 readers
3257 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 138 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (7 children)

This has been going on for decades. CDDB, IMDB, Redhat.

Anything you volunteer for will be monetized and you will get cut off from your own contributions.

Even here on Lemmy people post Twitter images and Reddit reader apps which only helps those platforms retain mindshare even if they aren't directly profiting with ads.

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world 39 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Google has a volunteer program to make their AI better. Fucking one of the biggest corporations in the world asking for free labor and apparently people do it?

[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 44 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You were/are doing it every time you solved a Captcha to prove you aren't a robot.

[–] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Google banned 4chan from using recaptcha at the time because everyone was just typing swear words in place of the scanned word that Google couldn't OCR

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Where did you hear about that? It sounds odd, because surely Google could've filtered out the swearwords, and at the end of the day users still had to solve the captcha correctly sooner or later if they wanted to post.

[–] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The old two word captchas were one word that Google knows in order to test if you're human, and one word scanned from Google's book scanning program that their algorithms failed to properly OCR, meaning for the second word you could type in whatever you wanted and you would pass the captcha

Sites were allowed to use recaptcha for free because their users were actually doing work training neural nets to read books better, if a large percentage of their users are saying every unknown scan is the n-word, I could see why Google wouldn't want them having access to it

[–] CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 years ago

Long live 4chan

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 31 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is a bit of "no true Scotsman" fallacy. If something you volunteer for hasn't been monetized you can always say 'yet'

FOSS is something people volunteer for and it mostly doesn't get monetized and cut off. Sometimes this means that the original is cut off but a fork lives on, so I would rather say that volunteering for a closed product is dangerous in that regard, not volunteering forany product

[–] BreakDecks@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 years ago

This is where licensing is important. If you want to contribute your time to something you think is important, make sure that your contributions are licensed to be open and free.

If a for-profit company violates the license, the contributors can fight back. If there is no license, you're just giving them free labor that they can exploit however they please.

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 28 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Hashicorp recently commandeered its community built products from thousands of contributors by changing open source projects to an ambiguous if not hostile BSL. Opentofu for any current terraform users out there.

[–] yuki2501@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform...

🤭 LOL @ the name change.

[–] skulblaka@startrek.website 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Reminds me of OpenMW for Morrowind being listed as "OpenMicrowave" on the Google app store

[–] jasondj@ttrpg.network 3 points 2 years ago

They didn’t want people think OpenTF meant they were DownTF.

They totally are DTF, they just didn’t want you asking about it.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago

And still being removed from the store

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Definitely in two minds on Hashicorp's license change. I understand why they did it, even if I don't agree. Other for-profit companies were screwing them and the community over by taking, competing, and seldom contributing.

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

I have heard this point of view and truly don’t understand it. There were companies making money with an open source tool. That’s what some companies do, and the license allowed for that. They weren’t taking; they were using a tool, and providing a service upon it. If anybody is taking, it is Hashicorp from their own community that contributed thousands of hours to their business for free.

And those companies you refer to tried often to push upstream but Hashicorp just refused contribution time after time.

That said I understand it too. Insofar as capital investment demanded the cornering of a market and miscalculated the likelihood of a well backed fork. As a result I think, they probably sealed their fate even if it takes many years. How many people remember Hudson?

[–] yuki2501@lemmy.world 21 points 2 years ago

Good callout. Even Twitter images shouldn't be hot linked but copied and pasted for preservation purposes; if a copyright takedown happens, then it happens. But at least we don't risk having access cut because of a corporate killswitch.

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

It never stops shocking me that people think they can trust corporations which are run by upper middle class entitled business bros who never worked an honest day in their lives.

[–] afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

Meh Rehat gets a pass in my mind at least. They give back to the community enough. We are never going to get perfect people or groups. Microsoft is a totally different story.