cross-posted from: https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/952648
TEXT VERSION: https://thelibre.news/trump-cuts-funding-to-foss-projects/
Imagine trying to explain FOSS to this fucking administration.
If it’s free, then why are we paying for it?
I see what you did there… but freedom costs $1.05.
Freedom isn’t free as in beer?
I can hear ypu americanness from behind the screen darling.
Free means freedom not “no payments” it takes huge money to develop and maintain software and infrastructures like these. So they need funding to survive.
You sound like a smug a-hole.
Sorry, I was writing that in Trump’s voice. I am an American who loves and contributes to open-source :)
I didn’t know that the government was funding these things to begin with, but I don’t know many things.
Because foss projects like tor are regularly used by the agencies. It’s little money for a lot of work they don’t need to do.
Sounds like it may be time for some creative licensing
I also didn’t know this, but really we should all be putting money behind FOSS (myself included). We don’t need billionaires.
If you use these services, please donate once or regularly if you’re able. They are free as in puppy, not beer - dev work costs money. I would guess many people using Tor/privacy tools are tech savvy enough to have financial comfort due to a good career. If you do it you’re doing an everyday act of rebellion for the sake of progress!!!
Puppy?
“free” when you find it on the side of the road, but expensive to actually maintain without having it die on you.
The download is free, but pay for it or it’s going to die.
So I guess funds were cut, but then the courts ruled the president doesn’t have authority to do this himself since the funds were allocated by congress, and so as of now they have been restored, although congress needs to approve them every year and there’s concern they might not do so for next year.
Until Trump ignores court orders and cuts funding anyway.
Supreme Court will probably rule that while congress has the power of the purse, the president has the power of canceling the credit cards in the wallet, because fuck you that’s why
Well, this is what the relevant part of the video says:
USAGM disbursed $7.5M to these entities, in “what seemed to be an effort to delay the hearing or woo the judge”. Regardless, the latter has sided against USAGM, and just a few days ago, the agency has decided to back off and release the funds for the 2025 fiscal year.
Urgh this is so backwards.
Governments need to fund more FOSS not less!
Hopefully the EU can increase its support to compensate.
Foss is free, and this guy is all about making the American people pay more money to his rich buddies
He’s doing a suck job of it. The things he’s gutting are pennies towards his dark-souled oligarch masters. Cutting small government projects like the NEA, PBS or like FOSS grants is only used as an appeal to fiscal responsibility conservatives that aren’t willing to cut into old-people benefits like Social Security and military sacred cows. Not because gutting tiny projects does anything useful, rather it gives the vibe that representatives are doing something.
This is an appeal to the imbicile MAGA though the tech bros might have specific FOSS projects that compete with their own commercial offerings. Not enough to cut all FOSS grants, though.
In essence he’s trying to bankrupt the whole country so he and his circle can buy it all up. He’s trying to do the same thing that was done in Russia when the ussr collapsed.
Or China! Open source is basically digital communism so maybe they’ll step in and support it like they did with the World Health Organization
Yeah… Because China is big into encryption
A great opportunity for China to get into open source
They open sourced deepseek and the US government banned it 😭😭 even universities are barred from using it
Funny reading westoid commenters here bashing China for being “authoritarian” when it literally open sourced a groundbreaking innovation a month ago. Washingtobot crackers
Why does that exclude the Chinese government from being authoritarian?
China is authoritarian just like every other state in the world. Except that it’s also a whole-process people’s democracy unlike the W🤮st
> just like every other state in the world
Really? Let’s talk about Tiananmen Square. Or how about Uyghurs. Let’s use a picture of Winnie the Pooh. Is it really “just like” every other state? I’d say it’s a little bit above the average. People’s democracy my ass. Just because trump turned USA authoritarian didn’t make China less authoritarian.
Let’s talk about Tiananmen Square.
- Tank Man (now with more raw footage)
- The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
- Columbia Journalism Review: The Myth of Tiananmen
- 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
- A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
- Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
- How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning
.
Or how about Uyghurs.
.
Let’s use a picture of Winnie the Pooh.
Not censored. You can buy Pooh-branded toys, watch Pooh Disney films, and ride Pooh-branded amusement park rides. Nobody has a problem with this adorable meme.
People’s democracy my ass.
- Most in China Call Their Nation A Democracy, Most in U.S. Say America Isn’t
- Long-term survey reveals Chinese government satisfaction
- Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says [UN] Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding
- China’s Energy Use Per Person Surpasses Europe’s for First Time
- At 54, China’s average retirement age is too low
- China overtakes U.S. for healthy lifespan: WHO data
.
If you want to talk about a fake democracy, look no further than the US. Previously:The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Ok, let’s talk. Trump never really changed anything about “authoritarianism”. Every single state is by nature authoritarian. Where in the West do you see a democracy? Almost all media in the US is controlled by 6 corporations. What kind of democratic process can there be if the only candidates that get mainstream attention are Trump and controlled opposition (Kamala)?
Again, here’s some Chad Lenin:
It is sheer mockery of the working and exploited people to speak of pure democracy, of democracy in general, of equality, freedom and universal rights when the workers and all working people are ill-fed, ill-clad, ruined and worn out, not only as a result of capitalist wage slavery, but as a consequence of four years of predatory war, while the capitalists and profiteers remain in possession of the “property” usurped by them and the “ready-made” apparatus of state power. This is tantamount to trampling on the basic truths of Marxism which has taught the workers: you must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, it’s historical conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the “state” and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another.
Because only one type of government can be bad at a time don’t you know. Only Imperialist western powers or Imperialist eastern powers never both.
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Still, all you got is whataboutism.
We have hundreds of Marxist works. Let me quote some Lenin:
The “free people’s state” was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. This catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic, Engels was prepared to “justify” its use “for a time” from an agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it amounted to nothing more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and was also a failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a “special force” for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people’s state". Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.
How much does Pooh pay you to write that stuff?
Millions of xibucks
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The Scheidemanns and Kautsky’s speak about “pure democracy” and “democracy” in general for the purpose of deceiving the people and concealing from them the bourgeois character of present-day democracy. Let the bourgeoisie continue to keep the entire apparatus of state power in their hands, let a handful of exploiters continue to use the former, bourgeois, state machine! Elections held in such circumstances are lauded by the bourgeoisie, for very good reasons, as being “free”, “equal”, “democratic” and “universal”. These words are designed to conceal the truth, to conceal the fact that the means of production and political power remain in the hands of the exploiters, and that therefore real freedom and real equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population, are out of the question. It is profitable and indispensable for the bourgeoisie to conceal from the people the bourgeois character of modern democracy, to picture it as democracy in general or “pure democracy”, and the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, repeating this, in practice abandon the standpoint of the proletariat and side with the bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels in their last joint preface to the Communist Manifesto (in 1872)[A] considered it necessary to specifically warn the workers that the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made (that is, the bourgeois) state machine and wield it for their own purpose, but that they must smash it, break it up. The renegade Kautsky, who has written a special pamphlet entitled dictatorship of the proletariat, concealed from the workers this most important Marxist truth, utterly distorted Marxism, and, quite obviously, the praise which Scheidemann and Co. showered on the pamphlet was fully merited as praise by agents of the bourgeoisie for one switching to the side of the bourgeoisie.
It is sheer mockery of the working and exploited people to speak of pure democracy, of democracy in general, of equality, freedom and universal rights when the workers and all working people are ill-fed, ill-clad, ruined and worn out, not only as a result of capitalist wage slavery, but as a consequence of four years of predatory war, while the capitalists and profiteers remain in possession of the “property” usurped by them and the “ready-made” apparatus of state power. This is tantamount to trampling on the basic truths of Marxism which has taught the workers: you must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, it’s historical conditional and limited character. Never share the “superstitious belief” in the “state” and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another.
The bourgeoisie are compelled to be hypocritical and to describe as “popular government”, democracy in general, or pure democracy, the ( bourgeois ) democratic republic which is, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the working people. The Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Austerlitzes and Renners (and now, to our regret, with the help of Friedrich Adler) fall in line with this falsehood and hypocrisy. But Marxists, Communists, expose this hypocrisy, and tell the workers and the working people in general this frank and straightforward truth: the democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly, general elections, etc., are, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for the emancipation of labor from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replace this dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
They are in order to get away from American products
ikr, i can’t believe this administration did something backwards this time.
I thought the EU was reducing funding to FOSS projects and investing more into AI. I could’ve sworn I read that somewhere last year.
Edit: https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/17/foss_funding_vanishes_from_eus/
I think it was this event that I read.
EFF should GTFOutta US and set up shop in a safer region.
We need them here now more then ever unfortunately. But yeah, stay safe and spread out for sure.
They’re the only thing I wear tee shirts for, have stickers all over my gear, and talk about way too often. Underappreciated champions of the people and nobody outside of these kinds of circles knows who the hell they are.
I was going to suggest Canada or Greenland…
While it sucks that FOSS projects will have their funding sapped, let’s remember why the open source model is used in the first place: it can’t be bought. If it goes down, someone will just fork the last known repository and have it up and running again.
Yep. All the funding they’ve already put into it will stay put. You can’t uncode FOSS.
Lets encrypt could run a patreon and stay funded. Plenty of people with money depend on them.
Oh course not. They stop people spying on you.
FLOSS projects can only be sustainable if their are enough shared interests able to support it through contributions of all kinds. Fortunately the code is free so that constellation of support can change over time. It’s a shame this particular line of government funding is coming to an end but others can help.
I really appreciate that there’s a text version for those of us who can’t or won’t use videos! Thank you so much for sharing it, too. 💙
That would be good for government to cut funding. Users should give away their own cash to support the projects.
Funders of any project can influence decisions, but users giving from their own personal money can keep open source software free from any influences.
But sadly in reality it means these projects will most likely go underfunded
One of the expressed reasons for cutting funding to PBS and NPR (via the Corp. for Public Broadcasting) is because they can’t influence what is being said by those entities.
One cannot influence what no longer exists. *tapsforehead
PBS and NPR do sell a partisian message, they are not for anybody and everybody to speak. NPR and PBS only allow presentations from those who have the correct opinions and views.
Source?
His butthole, NPR has been a propaganda tool for the Gen X liberal forever.
Does this government funding really ever result in a hands off approach. In the case of Tor I wouldn’t be surprised that funding comes with backdoor access.
TOR fundamentally cannot be backdoored. The US government funds it because more traffic on the network helps mask the traffic coming from CIA agents and the like
Showing my ignorance here, but would genuinely like an explanation - aren’t/weren’t compromised exit nodes a thing?
No system can be proven to have no exploits, but a backdoor is when there is a hidden prepared exploit planted on the inside (in this case presumably because they were funded by the government they assume they would get this in return, even though if that was the case they would do a crypto transaction and not openly fund them)
I’m not going to outright disagree with your opinion but I honestly have my doubts.
Go look at the code, then.
Yeah whatever. Sorry you got butthurt.
Look, you either check for yourself, or trust people who have. The only other option amounts to building your own parallel reality.
Let it go buddy.
You can also take an intermediate approach, actually. Usually I can tell from just the developer docs or whitepapers if something has a way of producing the guarantees it claims.
Backdoor access to what?
The last reply I will make.
From September 19 2024
“In response, the Tor Project acknowledged that one user of an outdated application called Ricochet was likely deanonymized through a “guard discovery attack.” However, they emphasized that this vulnerability has since been patched in current versions of Tor software.”
but that wasn’t his last reply
Excuse me? Are you saying using guard discovery is a backdoor someone gave to the government? I mean, you can think whatever, but the technology isn’t really… backdoorable? It doesn’t make sense in the context. Where will the backdoor lead? It has no where to go.
(I am a different person, not arguing anything about this particular vulnerability or the government’s funding of Tor.)
I think you’re defining backdoor too literally. I get your point, but colloquially it just means to get something nefarious in. If someone is saying “the government has a backdoor in an encryption algorithm” it would mean they believe the government has a vulnerability in that allows them to easily break the encryption, not necessarily a separate “door” or something.
Yeah the government has an institutional thing I forget what it is called, with massive amount of known exploits. That’s not backdoors. A backdoor is a “planted” exploit, not a discovered exploit. It makes no sense to call all exploits backdoors.
Okay buddy keep it going as long as you need to. You might enjoy Reddit more, it’s a safe space for people who cannot change their opinions. Bye.
Why? I am trying to understand what you mean so I can change my opinion. I’m not changing it because you are fuming and escalating the aggression, in fact, that has the exact opposite effect
we shouldn’t need the government also we have made it fairly far
Why was the US funding FOSS projects? That strikes me as weird, inappropriate and suspicious.
Not that unusual. e.g. TOR started as a governement project. it was invented in the U.S. Naval Research Lab.
internet too
gps too
Internet2 too
If US uses FOSS software in its operations (it does, everyone does) it has a vested interest in keeping these projects alive.
Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.
FOSS is already stale for a long time by large corporations (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, X, etc), all of these with own developments of FOSS, these are not affected by this cuts for OpenSource proyects, but small startups, individual devs and small companies and oprganisations. It’s not against FOSS, it’s about control and clear against freedom.
Fuck the US https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/eu-oss-catalogue
Do they use for browser for something?
Use it? The US invented it. The US has historically funded it as part of their human rights initiatives. Like I said:
Also many of the sponsored projects help people circumvent authoritarian government overreach, which is something that until recently has been considered “good” for the US. The more freely information can flow the harder it is for authoritarian regimes to exert control.
Given the nature of the Tor network, it’s likely any “official” use within the US government would probably involve things like communicating with people working undercover / informants, etc., and not be something broadly discussed.
Oh cool, that’s a good idea for them to do.
Why was the US funding FOSS projects? That strikes me as weird, inappropriate and suspicious.
A mixture of the elements within the US that actually believed the stuff about personal rights and democracy still existing behind the more sinister realities, as well as it being in the same pot of funded projects like Radio Free Asia, Radio Liberty and the likes, which always were a mix of just outright propaganda organs, but also providing the scaffolding of free media access for some regions in the past.
So, it’s complicated, ultimately rooted in a mix of the cynical US wanting to support dissidents in other countries, and the idealist US also having people actually believing in personal freedom and privacy, even within their government/state structures.
Also, just in general, a lot of FOSS projects get funding from governments, US or otherwise. If I remember correctly ReactOS got a lot of funding from Russia, for example, because they saw a potential way to get away from Microsoft in it.
From what I gather, there was no open influence wielded over those projects, I at least don’t remember the OTF forcing a backdoor onto Tor Browser for the CIA or something like that - thankfully the open source structure makes that easier to control - but the weakness becomes apparent now, of course, because funds could now be withdrawn, as the government turned fascist.
Solid answer! Guess I’m a cow patty for even asking, but you came to the rescue.
If it makes you feel better (or worse), thr NSA has contributed a great deal of work to the Linux kernel. In fact, they created SELinux, which you may be using at this very moment.
It’s not surrounded by a ton of corporate bs. I know the us govt has their own openstreetmap setups (like this basic unclassified one) and wiki sites (intellipedia) because it’s a proven framework to set up and add your own information.
Holy shit, we have our own SCP archives? That’s sick