137877480
submission
DuroSoft writes:
The folks over at the Software Freedom Conservancy have posted a public letter to Microsoft urging them to cease their membership in the RIAA over the recent spurious DMCA takedown of youtube-dl on GitHub, highlighting the many legitimate uses of youtube-dl as e.g. a tool for journalists and archivists which notably does not include any infringing material in its source code.
For the past few days the takedown story has rocked the open source world, dominating the front pages of Hacker News and Tech Dirt, alongside news of recent massive DMCA takedowns of millions of potentially fair use video clips on Twitch.tv without the ability for streamers to appeal.
Will Microsoft embrace their new role as conservator of GitHub and huge swathes of the open source community, or is their relationship with the RIAA more important than "microsoft 3 devs"?
100839250
submission
DuroSoft writes:
Earlier this week an article ran about how Microsoft's multi-year refusal to rename its terabyte-scale Git extension "GVFS" (Git Virtual File System) had drawn the ire and dismay of the GNOME GVfs project (Gnome Virtual File System) which predates the Microsoft project by years. Thanks to Slashdot coverage and community pressure, Microsoft has now officially promised to rename GVFS to something else, and is asking the community for suggestions for a new name. Is this an official sign that MIcrosoft is finally listening to developers (albeit with a Slashdot-level of negative attention), or are they simply trying to appease the crowd while they are still in the news due to their acquisition of GitHub?
100775638
submission
DuroSoft writes:
It has been over a year since Microsoft unveiled its open source GVFS project, designed to make terabyte-scale repositories, like it's own 270 GB Windows source code, manageable using Git. The problem is that the GNOME project already has a virtual file system by the name of GVfs that has been in use for years, with hundreds of threads on stackoverflow, etc. Yet Microsoft's GVFS has already surpassed GVfs in Google and is causing confusion. To make matters worse, Microsoft has officially refused to change the name, despite a large public backlash on GitHub and social media, and despite pull requests providing scripts that can change the name to anything Microsoft wants. Is this mere arrogance on Microsoft's part, laziness to do a quick Google search before using a name, or is it something more sinister?
90686947
submission
DuroSoft writes:
For myself and the vast majority of people I have talked to, this is the case. Any attempts we make to estimate the amount of time software development tasks will take inevitably end in folly. Do you find you can make accurate estimates, or is it really the case, as the author suggests, that "writing and maintaining code can be seen as a fundamentally chaotic activity, subject to sudden, unpredictable gotchas that take up an inordinate amount of time" and that therefore attempting to make predictions in the first place is itself a waste of our valuable time?
