wiki_me

@wiki_me@lemmy.ml

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Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men ( www.researchgate.net )

Our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's [when their gender is hidden]. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

wiki_me ,

Obligatory mentions of the replication crisis and the Hierarchy of evidence.

Bias against women exists (I remember hearing various "insights" about women IRL from men) but i think something else is going on, reportedly even people who report they are men get "discriminated", maybe it's just people who are extroverted show their gender and that slightly correlates with lower quality?

Also i remember reading some woman saying she does not show her gender online to avoid harassment, maybe that also correlates (younger woman not having that insight that not showing your gender could be a net win for the preferences they have)

wiki_me ,

TL;DW?

wiki_me ,

This is another case where multireddits will be helpful, having a "positive information" feed when you feel too negative. even having a "public" multireddit people can discover and subscribe to.

wiki_me ,

Create proprietary software project , sell the software and give all the profit to starving kids in africa beside taking in a modest salary (say the US median salary) and call fair code, it's more fair then hashicorp CEO getting something like 100K a month in salary and stocks.

wiki_me ,

Following the links and searching around, I found this: Andrzej “vosen” Janik, the lead dev, says in his FAQ:

There is a fork which seems more active (see 1 and 2)

It should probably at least be mentioned on the read me of the original project.

wiki_me ,

I have been with multiple different communities that had GPL and other licensed code stolen for profit in proprietary programs. In all instances, the FSF, SFC and EFF were all contacted and nobody cared.

at least the SFC did some enforcing that worked, but i got the feeling these organisations are too "nice" , If the case is a slam dunk maybe it is possible to get a lawyer who will work by getting a large percentage of the earnings.

wiki_me ,

Fundraising is skill, and it needs to be learnt, I have looked at a fairly large chunk of open source project that are successfully funded and i think that is what sets them apart.

I think it is important that users should have a very clear understanding of how you are doing, if you need X money to keep doing this, there should be a pop up saying you need X money on the software and it should be very hard to miss on the website and read me.

Will some people not like that? probably but you can't please everyone and you shouldn't let a vocal minority determines how things happen.

wiki_me ,

At that point, you’ve become a business. So yeah, you need skill to fundraise.

or a non profit, and not surprising running a business or a non profit requires the skills to manage a business or a non profit, iirc the software freedom conservatory and maybe the SPI say the can help with fundraising, but you need to be modest and consider you might benefit from learning from other people.

Fuck the companies, they will always take and never give anything back. They won’t give you money anyways, so might as well shut them down.

That's just factually wrong, for example most of the contribution to the linux kernel are from companies, blender development fund is a good case study for this (see how much each corporate sponsors pays)

wiki_me ,

Calling it hate is an exaggeration , people are entitled to their opinion and informing other people by criticizing snap.

Another advantage not mentioned is that snap is a product of canonical (a for profit company talking about an IPO for years), flathub is managed by the gnome foundation (a US registered non profit, which should provide some legal protection).

wiki_me ,

paradoxically just because an organisation is a non profit does not mean it does not sell anything, it means that the people who "own" it are not doing it for a profit (e.g. voting members, board members , that is what is suppose to be legally guaranteed ), for example the wikimedia foundation (the creator of wikipedias ) sells access to data, MIT university for example is also a non profit.

and i feel like the profit incentive might cause problems for the snap store, flathub warns when an app is closed source so it might be risky to use it, snap does not do that and maybe that is because that could hurt profits.

wiki_me ,

My major problem has been the documentation of the project and how top contributors are unable to accept how bad it is. Discussions about improvements and attempts at improving it at regularly shut down or impeded. Coming back to the “harsh defense of perceived territory”, it distinctly feels like existing teams are supposed to be the only ones making changes to the things they own. Contributions from “outsiders” never exit nix review hell and are nitpicked to death.

I made a one time contribution to the nix docs, I also got the impression that managing documentation could be better but it did got accepted after a few changes.

With that said there are alternative projects that provide a form of documentation to nix.

wiki_me ,

Yeah it's probably not doing great, compare lemmy active user count to that of writefreely , it does a lot better, even the number of servers is increasing, the number of other projects starting that compete with lemmy (piefed, sublinks) is also not a great sign .

Not trying to belittle anyone, i just believe in the importance of negative feedback and defensive pessimism.

On a more positive note, the amount of donations lemmy receive (which i think should correlate with high quality usage of the platform) has increased moderately (see november 2 numbers when they started posting the numbers with current numbers) .

wiki_me ,

As you can see from the graph support for measuring monthly active users was added fairly recently, so some servers might not be reporting it and in general 6m active users is a better metric, in that case that's somewhere around 2.5 times bigger , pixelfed is around 63K 6M MAU and is also growing , two of these projects are comparable in size of use and manage to generate growth.

Sometimes it is better to look at trends and not the current market share, because that might be the result of historical circumstances that are not related to how a project or business is managed, for example writefreely already had a strong open source competitor (wordpress) and lemmy basically got a free marketing campaign due to reddit API fiasco.

wiki_me ,

Look at the decline of lutris in term of revenue (around 2020), it seems to be inversely correlated with the growth of competitor like heroic game launcher and playnite.

What you mentioned is one possible scenario, but the negative one is that lemmy userbase will continue to decline and there will be less feedback/income/contributions to keep the project going, the resources spent on basic development on sublinks and piefed could be used to make lemmy even better and developing experimental addons and gathering feedback on this kind of experimentation (e.g. in the form of surveys).

I am also not sure we are at a point where starting to experiment is the best option as features that seem to have more of a consensus are not yet implemented (e.g. multireddits, the issue with the most "thumbs up" on github).

With that said lemmy did manage to overcome previous open source competitors, If i would have to estimate probabilities like in the good judgement project i would say there is a 40 percent chance lemmy would decline and a 60% chance it will maintain its resources or grow.

wiki_me , (edited )

Mastodon seems like a better comparison. It has more than a dozen forks and clones, and plenty of donation income.

Is mastodon a good case study?, his 6M active user count , server count, and income from patreon seems on the decline , and this isn't a project that made a large dent in existing market share like wikipedia/firefox/blender, compared to twitter and facebook market share it is still less then 0.1 percent. and when compared to it lemmy is not as established with a income that is about enough for just one developer.

Sure it would be good to have more contributions in Lemmy, but as these projects are made by volunteers they will do what they are most interested in. Nothing we can do to change that. And if they add new features which prove useful, they can also be added to Lemmy.

Maybe, but i think the problem with lemmy is that feedback does not effect prioritization enough (that is the common criticism it seems, iirc one of the justifications for creating the new projects), peertube probably created ideas.peertube to prevent this problem, when i compare sublinks and piefed development statistics to lemmy (in term of contributions this month) it indicates they are already equivalent in term of development resources despite being much newer and not really usable. Better prioratization processes might encourage more people to contribute rather then go there own way.

I know planning and prioritizing is not a particularly appealing or enjoyable activity ,but 65% of businesses fail during the first 10 years , I imagine running a non profit competing with industry giants like meta and twitter and seasoned business men is going to be harder then managing the average business .

wiki_me , (edited )

Talk about a blast for the past.

Might be worth mentioning that that is a project that maintains the source code release of descent 1+2 .

steam , wikipedia.

wiki_me , (edited )

the distinction between big and small companies is artificial , a big company can still have a small product with low profit margins, and both big and small companies can be managed by the same mutual funds and pension funds (vanguard , blackrock, fidelity etc).

wiki_me ,

You realize that the owner could be a truck driver for texas? that's what mutual funds and pension funds do, they manage assets.

and taking a fixed price is like having a grocery store where all the products have the same price, businesses do a cost benefit analysis (estimating stuff like costs and expected income), having a single price does not make sense.

Redlib: Open-source, privacy-focused frontend for Reddit without Reddit's ads, trackers, and bloat. A fork of Libreddit. ( safereddit.com )

The purpose of this post is not to endorse the use of Reddit ( https://shields.tosdr.org/en_194.svg), but rather to inform users of a privacy-friendly approach in case they need to utilize the platform....

wiki_me ,

Isn't this a lawsuit waiting to happen?

wiki_me ,

My country has non profits that lobby for citizens , I wonder if there is enough motivation in the community to set something like that for FOSS, I don't think existing non profits (FSF, OSI) will want to deal with that kind of stuff .

wiki_me ,

It's missing a few features from RES, i opened issues about them , that should make using the platform a better experience. for example i would like to tag open source maintainers so i could prioritize helping them, or just people who contribute more to the community (that i can see i have given several upvotes to).

Also tbh some people here sound like russian or iranians propagandists or bots , if somebody writes something completely unreasonable (like making a terror group sound like the "good guys") I would like to tag him so i could know which submissions to examine more carefully.

Also having something like a "superupvote" like in tildes.net where you can only give it once in a while (e.g. top post this hour/day/week/month/year/decade). Our information diet is very important, consuming content with great "mental nutrients" is a worthwhile goal.

wiki_me ,

How is that not a security theater? , you just need to :

  • publish a good snap
  • change it to malware after it is approved
  • profit

The extra cost added to override this is fairly small, i don't think it will help.

wiki_me ,

At least this prevents impersonation of well-known publishers or their software

how?

wiki_me ,

verifying the submitter is a member of the project

That's a different requirement as far as i can tell (When you do that you get the "plus" sign next to the name on the store).

the software name does not conflict with a well known name,…

It should conflict, the point is that some random dude can create a package and people could use it.

They can review and check that the URL in the manifest used to build or install the package is from upstream, but that can later be changed, it would be better to have some system where you need to whitelist URL's i think.

wiki_me ,

Phrononix’s forum is known for having some of the most toxic individuals in the open-source ecosystem

I think the quality of a discussion platform correlates with the quality of it's users, and the forums are not as good as reddit and lemmy.

wiki_me ,

I think that could be said about a lot of specialized communities , you can do a wikipedia search , that's better then just repeating the descriptions of software whenever they are mentioned.

wiki_me ,

Yeah it's easy to fall into a negativity bias instead of doing a risk benefit analysis , the company could be investing money and resources that could be missing from open source projects, especially professional work by non programmers (e.g. UX researchers) which is something that open source projects usually miss.

You could probably figure it out by going over the contributions.

wiki_me ,

Their fiscal host is confusingly "Open Source Collective" and not the "Open Collective Foundation" .

wiki_me ,

You can use KDE discover and GNOME software to read reviews , they use the same review database (ODRS), there is also flatstat.

A decentralized option is librate which is still in development.

wiki_me ,

Would be really useful to steal a few features from the steam store:

  • show ratings based on review in last X period of time (month/year etc)
  • show the highest upvoted reviews from that period (sort by usefulness)
  • filter by how many hours they used the software (opt in of course).
wiki_me ,

As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that’s not a bug, it’s apparently a new feature in Lemmy…

I made the feature request to add incremental reading , but the method they use seem like non of the methods i suggested (I think it highlights all comments after X minutes) and I think that is a way that is useful to no one, If the instance owners of lemmy.world think it is not good maybe they could provide feedback on the issue, or at least request an option to disable it, the owners seem like they are in a good position to collect feedback.

wiki_me ,

You can download a csv of the market share from 2009, it shows it reached 3% for the first time in jun 2023, there might be some kind of rapid growth in popularity here.

wiki_me ,

it's basically the non profit software in the public interest that is governed by a board elected by open source contributors. From it’s website:

Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular project will be distributed to the projects that are currently affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI’s own expenses.

Maybe there is a place for non profit where donors elect a board of director that decides how to fund things, giving non programmers a way to influence the development of FOSS (and non programmers could have a lot to offer).

There is also tidelift which does something similar.

Distributor of donations?

Does anyone know of a way to distribute donations to multiple open source projects at once? I would like to donate more frequently and broadly but because of the large number of different projects it would be laborious and inefficient to donate small fractions of what I can afford to each of them manually....

wiki_me ,

Non profits might be good candidates, in particular the software in the public interest is governed by a board elected by open source contributors. From it's website:

Donations to SPI that are not marked for a particular project will be distributed to the projects that are currently affiliated with SPI as needed, and/or used for SPI's own expenses.

wiki_me ,

There is a link to the bounty on polar at the end , it's 20 dollars.

wiki_me ,

What do you "can fund" ? , it's already funded, and iirc from reading the polar website 50 percent goes to the project and 50 percent to the bounty hunter.

wiki_me ,

What "political linux distributions" exist? I use debian and used Ubuntu before and don't remember anything political about it (At least by going by the how most people perceive something as political, That is the state should do X or not Y).

wiki_me ,

If somebody asks about anything , X happened in north korea is probably not a useful answer.

wiki_me ,

Part of the reason is that people are still finding out about it, Project has no marketing so it grows organically, in the last year the number of contributors grew by 25 percent.

Another problem is that it still needs polish in term of ease of use, for example it takes me forever to search for packages using the nix-env command but using the website it takes less then a second, That's a basic feature that still does not work correct, Plus their documentation is still not great in my opinion, I actually helped improved it and the improvement they made is still not really good IMO.

MEGATHREAD for fully FOSS lemmy apps without any ads, tracking or any other anti features.

**>- If any app ( regardless of the platform they are in ) you know of that is fully FOSS and doesn't have any ads , tracking or any other anti features that didn't make the list it is a mistake and you can dm me and i will add it. The same goes for apps that are not really FOSS or have anti features , Even though i have tried...

wiki_me ,

There is awesome-lemmy and the lemmy-apps megathread, I don't think there is a need to duplicate efforts.

wiki_me ,

Yeah, but i don't think these are meaningful differences.

uhrbaan , to Fediverse
@uhrbaan@mastodon.social avatar

@fediverse Fediverse user growth jumped to ~50'000'000 users. What happened ?
The FediDB Fediverse User Growth graph shows a significant jump in user count in February. Software distribution is also 81% other, and the biggest server is fediverse.hanbitgaram.com with 39 million users ! What happened ?
https://fedidb.org/

wiki_me ,

This shows nothing, probably some kind of glitch.

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