Dave Lane @lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz

One of the most desperately sad things I can think of is that there appears to be a market for evangelical Christian television (currently almost all channels in NZ showing it). Sooo depressing.

but there're still many useful battles fight. Mostly against those who "get" #FOSS, and don't like the equity it promises. They only see how they can use it to exploit others. They're the ones we need to neutralise.

Right - time for bed.

100% of the top 500 high-performance computers (supercomputers) in the world are Linux-powered. All of them. The fringes are where the innovation happens, and the fringes are owned by #FOSS. It gives me great hope that we'll see a much fairer world in the future, given the exponential rate at which things can and do change. I think we've already reached a tipping point in everything but the marketing machines...

Similarly in the mobile phone/table space, internet connected consumer devices, home automation, autonomous vehicles (e.g. drones), automotive computing, and Internet-of-Things (IoT). All open source OSs, development stacks, and development toolchains. There're only a few contexts where proprietary software is still holding strong... Even many of those are being commoditised by #FOSS - take video conferencing - Skype's being superseded by WebRTC slowly but inexorably.

I recall when there were thousands of proprietary CMSs on the market (see cmsmatrix.org). Similarly proprietary software dev stacks (remember Cold Fusion? People still development with Delphi? Visual Basic? Silverlight? Heh heh). Free and open source software has commoditised those markets. 60% of all CMS powered websites currently run(#FOSS) WordPress. 15%ish of the remainder is Joomla & Drupal. Similarly software stacks: Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, C/C++, Go, Rust. The growth is #FOSS.

If you've somehow avoided seeing this previously, I recommend you drop everything immediately and learn how to write a hit pop song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV2s0UIPOQY #BrettDominoTrio

Not a bad morning in Canterbury...

Nice effort, @georgemoonnz@twitter.com! https://georgemoon.nz/the-kea-database-a-new-citizen-science-project-dfbc8c7fb21e Keep up the good work - #FOSS and conservation go very well together.

Like Git, CouchDB is both incredibly cool and useful, while being obstinately annoying.

When someone tells you that your principled suggestion "isn't practical"... it's a good time to dig deeper into that person's commitment to your principles... Because expedience is the enemy of principle. It is also the absence of principle.

We cannot always move immediately from "what is" to "what should be"... but if we value our principles, we must always be moving incrementally closer. We should never move backwards and give up gains we have made, especially not in the name of "being practical". That is effectively capitulation.

@RMSPN@twitter.com if you want to get a picture of NZ's involvement in the #TPPA, you could worse than this article from Jane Kelsey, who's one of the few principled, informed, and independent voices on the topic in NZ: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/25-01-2018/labour-progressive-tppa/ Here's she's commenting on the folly of the new (Labour-led) Gov't's decision to fully reverse its anti-TPPA campaign rhetoric following its election to power (in a coalition with the Greens, who're anti-TPPA, and wildcard NZ First who don't really have positions)...

@ninetonoon@twitter.com - predicted this IRD failure... https://davelane.nz/ird-how-avoid-catastrophic-failure wish I wasn't right because we' NZers are the ones paying for the IRD's fundamentally flawed approach.

Being practical is fine, unless it's related to your core principles. Keep in mind: if you make the practical choice in that case, you're basically just saying your principles require more effort than you're willing to give.