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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • An interesting customer base might be small communal organisations. At our local scouts troop I had a discussion with a friend, who is also in IT. His idea (not fleshed out) was to provide small local organizations with a stack of already configured open source software to support the typical needs of such organizations (like a wordpress website, a nextcloud for file storage and common calender, limesurvey for surveys and event registration, mailman3 for mailing lists,…). Depending on the needs you could sell the initial setup process (your personal work in setting up and skill transfer) or ongoing support. Though such organizations normally don’t have much money to give away. So probably its not really worth your time financially (though probably really appreciated in the community).






  • Which then wouldn’t be a legally full verification of your age, thus the legislation would probably require some other means. We currently have a similar discussion in the EU regarding porn sites. Verification methods could be showing your id card and your face to a webcam, or showing up at a verification office in person (at least in germany we have this with our national postal service). Of course the porn sites don’t want to implement this. And I cannot really blame them. Nobody would give a random porn site their real identity and it would still be very easy to get porn without verification.

    Age verification on social media is very similar.




  • One big problem that I see with the current system is, that - like everything in capitalism - it works with the attention economy. Big projects with many functions (like computing platforms) get much attention, especially from companies, who donate and contribute for their own good. But there are many small projects, often small libraries, that are developed by single persons for free, but used everywhere. If I remember correctly the disaster with log4j was such a case. Real developers surely know even better examples. The funding of such widely used software can effect the security of our whole IT stack.


  • The average user only uses what is already in their devices or very easily obtained and already known by them. On PCs you got Windows and Microsoft of course pushes their products (Edge, MS Office, OneDrive,…). On Smartphones you have Apple and Google controlling the devices way more than with PCs and being Gatekeepers through their appstores and preinstalled apps. Why would the average user try to research to find FOSS alternatives in that big pile of proprietary and monetized apps or jump through hoops to actually use them (keeping things FOSS is not easy on smartphone due to policies from google and apple)? The big players are controlling the market and they try to only allow FOSS when it benefits them.