We need to start Forking Software more!

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by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

As pointed out in my last article, the developers of UPBGE ( a game engine I use for my game ) decided to include slop-code into the software. And starting with version 0.5 it is "tainted by Ai". After that post I found a small repository on codeberg, which lists various other programs that are also sloppy. At first I sunk in with the feeling of dread and a desire to give up. Even the Linux Kernel was mentioned.

But then I realized something. The Linux Kernel itself was "tainted" already long time ago, when Linus Torvalds failed to stand his ground against invasive proprietary blobs code. It was a different issue. But that issue was somewhat mitigated by a fork of the kernel called Linux Libre, which maintains a blob-free version of the kernel.

In the repository I mentioned above Firefox is also mentioned, but as an alternative they list Libre-Wolf, a fork of Firefox that removes the problematic parts.

So forks work. And what we need to do is to campaign for:

- Normalizing forking.
- Encouraging more forks.

The more choice we have, the better.

Happy Hacking!!!

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  Troler c:0


AI is good, we need to support AI. If not for it, the code quality would be higher and the technological debt would accumulate slower. We need AI to make the internet a living nightmare. We need AI to present AI as solution to the problem.

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