• 48 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Since when are we getting so heated debates about fascism? Trump has ICE, and no one discussed if he wasn’t facist before that. Learn to see the cues. Elimination of competing political rivals is just one aspect.

    Plus, if we were to look for a definition, might as well take one that accounts for understanding that facist regimes are, beyond all, a process. See for example the text by George Orwell: ‘What is Fascism?’ (1944)

    By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

    But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.











  • For context, and to help with the semantics, allow me to add that 1 million seconds is 12 days. Meanwhile, 1 billion seconds is around 31 years. So, fairphone CEO can hardly be a billionaire. They do have profit, sure. We all make a living, their is way higher than average but still far from those ‘unicorns’ we call billionaires.

    Ps. I’m with you since your first comment. You just got downvoted because it was being too snarky. Thankfully other user replied showing all the bad things Valve has (while, as we all know, having 1 tangentially-nice thing which is that they used Linux for their products)


  • Some GPLv2 projects monetize by selling: support, extension via custom features, or simply the permission for a commercial use. This is possible, and it’s what I called “the legalese package”. Imagine ffmpeg being able to charge every year any amount they want to the biggest clients, like GAFAM. Yet you’re still able to use it non commercially… To be fair, there’re some middle uses, that get the disadvantage of having to break the license or ask for permission. For example, if you create anything with ffmpeg, then as an indie dev you’d need to launch your product breaking the license or paying them… But even so, situation is manageable (e.g. ffmpeg could spare you and/ or give a 1 year permission to small businesses)