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Joined 11 days ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2026

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  • tl;dr: it’s about the timezone database which is “maintained by a group of volunteers. Originally founded by Arthur David Olson, the project is now led by Paul Eggert and Tim Parenti.”

    I know that this usually comes down to one person doing a lion’s share of the work. This applies to so many FOSS pojects, especially when their impact bleeds over into the non-FOSS world (and by now I think we can include Android in that). Yet the world of FOSS has never broken down even when one of these "one person"s quits. We know. But it might be scawy for people who live in proprietary la-la-land.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is important. But I find the article with all its dark javascript magic a little hyperbolic, sensationalist. Even the “plain” reading page is. Gigantic headers, large numbers etc.

    I will also add that the tz database isn’t huge, and it isn’t prone to constant change. It makes for great numbers but the whole issue is pretty pedestrian if you look a little closer.

    How many parts of closed systems that many people rely on are maintained by only 1 person (who would promptly be replaced by corporate if they quit)? I guess we just don’t have so much data on that because - surprise - they’re not Open.

    I could’ve written a similar article, but I would have written it differently.



  • A_norny_mousse@piefed.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Deleted
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    1 day ago

    Yes, we want to know how the sausage is made, just like with all FOSS.

    what does the community actually expect from devs

    Don’t flood the zone.

    It really isn’t so long ago when making an app required various stages of completion and testing, usually including other people. I expect from devs that they follow that well-established road and stop with the silly “who has the time” argument I’m hearing so often lately. Sorry, you didn’t actually say that.

    Not sure why we should be interested in the Polish though. Are you from there?








  • Answering myself wrt F-Droid:

    tl;dr: the situation appears very similar to what I describe in my OP.

    • They seem very focused on fighting Google’s recent shenanigans and getting funded, and FOSS of course.
    • I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their CoC
    • I found no mention of AI whatsoever in their list of anti-features, and this seems to be the biggest indicator to me.
    • Not in their Blog either (by title, going back one year) but my search engine gave me this article, which seems to have been removed since: Home much of F-Droid is LLM-generated.
    • There’s a forum post asking a similar question with some very predictable drama. Straight out the door some “contributor” ridicules OP’s reasonable question in that typical, passive-aggressive smiley emoji coder way. Just what I have experienced. Thankfully other “contributors” at least see the value in pondering these things. While the question is never fully answered, the thread contains some interesting links to how other FOSS projects position themselves.

    I found an important clue in the latter:

    the watered down "Open Source AI Definition” that Mufelli pushed through the OSI.

    https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

    Straight away I don’t agree with it:

    Why we need Open Source Artificial Intelligence

    I’m guessing this is to be seen as a quasi-official stance to AI that most F(L)OSS will adopt or at least base their own policies on…