Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 24, 2023
=> Events: LibrePlanet, FOSDEM, and foss-north | Programming Leftovers
=> ↺ Free software and fiduciary duty
Serial litigant Craig Wright recently won a procedural ruling in a London court that allows a multi-billion-dollar Bitcoin-related lawsuit to proceed. This case has raised a fair amount of concern within the free-software community, where it is seen as threatening the "no warranty" language included in almost every free-software license. As it happens, this case does not actually involve that language, but it has some potentially worrisome implications anyway.
Wright is known for, among other things, claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of the original paper describing Bitcoin, and for filing numerous lawsuits within the cryptocurrency community. In the case at hand, he (in the form of his company "Tulip Trading Limited") claims to own about $4 billion in Bitcoin sitting in the blockchain — a claim that, like his others, is not universally acknowledged — but to have lost the keys giving access to that Bitcoin after his home network was broken into. It is, Wright claims, incumbent upon the maintainers of the Bitcoin network software to develop and merge a patch allowing the claimed Bitcoin to be transferred to a key that he controls.
The various Bitcoin developers, it turns out, are unconvinced by Wright's claim to that Bitcoin and even less convinced that the Bitcoin miners would accept a software update that included such a patch. Wright, allegedly backed by some deep pockets with eyes on part of a $4 billion prize, has taken 15 of these developers (and one organization) to court. The case fared poorly in in its first round, but now an appeals court has issued a ruling allowing an appeal to proceed, saying that there are issues of interest to be litigated.
At a first look, this case appears to be a warranty issue, and many observers have seen it that way. Wright is asserting that a bug in the Bitcoin system is keeping him from getting his hands on his well-earned billions, and that the maintainers of that code owe him a fix. The code in question is covered by the MIT license, which explicitly disclaims the existence of any warranty; if the court were to find that a warranty obligation exists anyway, the resulting precedent could put free-software developers at risk worldwide. It is not surprising that people are concerned.
=> ↺ Luxembourg launches open source chat for officials and citizens
The Luxchat services provide end-to-end encryption and retain all messages in decentralised servers located in Luxembourg. Luxchat and Luxchat4Gov will offer the same features, but the infrastructures are kept separate, as the government version is intended for professional use in the public sector.
=> ↺ My experience going viral on Mastodon
I learned that you can’t keep up with your notifications when this happens (especially if you don’t check them that often). You just have to accept it.
=> ↺ First Release Candidate of PowerDNS DNSdist 1.8.0
We are very happy to release the first candidate of what will become dnsdist 1.8.0!
This release contains a significant amount of changes since the last major release, 1.7.0, which was released a bit over a year ago. We try to stick to a major release every six months, but this one took a bit longer than expected as we tackled a few challenges: [...]
=> ↺ Signal's new(ish) URI Scheme
Sadly, they've taken the same xenophobic attitude as GitHub and insist that only good ol' American letters and numbers can be used. No fancy accents, right-to-left languages, or Korean Hangul.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if this prompts a surge in Signal take-up. Especially important as Signal are dropping SMS support
=> ↺ First Release Candidate of PowerDNS DNSdist 1.8.0
Hello! We are very happy to release the first candidate of what will become dnsdist 1.8.0!
=> ↺ NASA and open-source software
From the moon landing to the James Webb Space Telescope and many other scientific missions, software is critical for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Sharing information has also been in the DNA of the space agency from the beginning. As a result, NASA also contributes to and releases open-source software and open data. In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, Science Data Officer Steve Crawford talked about NASA and open-source software, including the challenges NASA has faced in using open source and the agency's recent initiatives to lower barriers.
Software has always been a big part of NASA's work. Who hasn't seen the photo of computer scientist Margaret Hamilton next to a hard-copy stack of the Apollo software she and her team at MIT produced? The stack of code is as tall as she is. In 2016, the original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for the command and lunar modules was published on GitHub in the public domain. You can even compile the code and run it in a simulator.
=> gemini.tuxmachines.org This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
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