• 34 Posts
  • 363 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • They are users not developers. An academic or civil engineer who uses a CFD simulator usually has not enough programming knowledge develop such a complex application. The employer has not enough funds to pay for developers (see, they use a pirated software). Paying for developers is still more expensive than buying an already developed product.

    Just look at the state of FOSS CAD software. There are some, but they are very-very limited compared to proprietary alternatives. Most people don’t care, they just want to get the work done. Not everyone is a programmer, even if it looks like that from our lemmy bubble.


  • In the Register article they didn’t copied from the source that the scientists were from Egypt.

    Flow3D has different academic and research licenses: https://www.flow3d.com/academic-program/

    • There is a free research license available, but it’s only for 4 months. It’s short, researches can take much longer than that.
    • There is a free teaching license, but it can have limitations for using the software outside education. It may be forbidden to use outside classes, so it’s possible that they had a teaching license, but they couldn’t use that for research?
    • There are licenses for full departments, but it’s available for selected countries only.

    It’s strange that they went after these scientists. In 2nd and 3rd word countries software privacy for work is still common. Everything is cheaper, but software prices are the same as in the US, so they pay relatively more for the same tool. I found that a normal license for Flow 3D can cost USD 100k. According to a quick search civil engineers get USD 2000 yearly in Egypt.

    Usually American software companies don’t really care about piracy by individuals in these countries. The rationale is that it’s better for them if they use their software without payment instead of using a software from another vendor without payment. They go after bigger companies, at least that’s my experience.

    That’s why this story is strange to me, or at least something else should be behind it.




  • AUR packages ending with"-git" or “-svn” always pull the latest commit from source. The version number means that was the last time the packager had to change something on the PKGBUILD script, not the actual version which would be installed.

    Where should I look? Where were these talks? I’m interested.

    Edit: I found the whitepaper about hole punching: https://research.protocol.ai/publications/decentralized-hole-punching/

    It says it connects to a “Hole Punch Coordination (DCUtR - Direct Connection Upgrade through Relay)”. So for NAT traversal to work, you need a third party, this relay. As I expected. I guess you can self host this, but than you could just host a wireguard server. I guess if you are on a locked down network where you cannot connect to any relay (e.g. how the Chinese Great Firewall works technically they could block it) you can’t initiate a connection behind a NAT.

    Nonetheless it seems interesting, but no magic here. Maybe the big difference that the relay servers are distributed, so no central authority to block easily.



  • Grab is just one of the corporate contributors of OpenStreetMap, Grab’s “own map” is not theirs, it’s ours, “OpenStreetMap contributors” is the copyright holder, and copyright managed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

    Grab is a Gold corporate member of the foundation, it means it pays EUR 15000 annually. You can see other corporate members here.

    The license of the data is called ODbL, they call it open source in the article, but software licenses don’t work well outside the software world, it’s a database license. ODbL has one requirement: If you display the map, or any extracted data, you have to display the attribution text, which reads “© OpenStreetMap”. In the article there is a map, and they don’t display this attribution, so this article does not comply with the license of the map it tries to advertise…

    This whole article sounds like an ad for Grab. More technological info about how Grab employees contribute to the map on the OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Grab

    Edit: One more thing about Grab: they bought the Google Streetview alternative Kartaview in 2019 from Telenav. Kartview had a FOSS Android client, its old version is still on Fdroid. After the takeover Grab still published source changes and releases to Github, but Fdroid compatibility was broken at one point. In 2022 they changed the license of Kartaview, it’s not open source anymore…

    So it’s the classic corporate take on open projects… if they could they would close down OSM and their data, but it seems like at the moment they get far more for that 15000 EUR. The wording of the article hints this, they call it “their” map…

    While they support the project financially and contribute back and build nice things on top of the open data, the relationship can remain healthy between an open project and a big, for profit company, there are a lot of good examples for that. But the history of this company is a bit shady in parts, and we have seen things go wrong multiple times…








  • Civ 7 is in final stages of development, it will be released in 3 months, so I think you are a bit late about your suggestions.

    I saw in an interview with Sid Meier, that they have a one third rule for developing new civ games. One third remains the same, one third is related, but works differently and one third is totally new. So it has a chance that your requests would be implemented in 7. Civic tree was a new thing in 6, so it’s possible that it will be changed in 7. The barbarian system will change, they will be merged with city states and they will be called independent powers, here is a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XCmZzKo9RcU