so, we have a winner, it seems: Proposal E I actually am rather surpr

so, we have a winner, it seems: Proposal E

I actually am rather surprised while at the same time being not surprised: this is the option that says "keep the status quo but call whatever you do 'responsible'". A very #Debian thing, indeed.

It even mentions that slop is probably breaking copyright (while at the same time carefully wording to not even actually state that).

(edited to add: if you look at the Graphviz result, you’ll see that, after this option, the pro-slop ones have landed over the pro-art ones; this (it’s preferential voting) makes me sad)

So, what does that mean?

No rage-quitting, at least. (This is very much in the interest of the users.) But also no improvement. But also no official sanctioning of slop.

I cannot believe I am saying this, but I’m actually rooting for… Helene Fischer, the GEMA, and the german Medienanstalten… to save us, by getting courts to recognise these issues.

I cannot believe I am writing the above. This timeline is bizarre.

The bubble is also already bursting, but not fast enough, which is raising the collateral damage each minute it has not yet burst. (Here I mean financial, trust, etc. but for #FOSS specifically, it also means that LLM-extruded digital asbestos gets added to more and more codebasēs in growing quantities, which will be hard to recover from.)

What I would like to know is why such an important topic has, what, under 40% voting participation. smh

(the preliminary automated report by the voting tool does not give the numbers; the project secretary will do so within days, so this is a guesstimate)

Practically, what can we do?

Pretty much only this:

Ride out trixie without rsyslog (and without backports) until the end of its #ELTS, grudgingly installing kernel security updates. Avoid LPNs (npm, composer, pip, cargo, go get, etc.) at all cost (this is not new but now more important than ever). Use third-party repos only after manually checking for slop policies for both the repo and the softwares contained within (I had to split my own repo, I added a non-free component for ensloppified tomcat9 but kept the last one from before in the component with the main policy).

Check out unensloppified OSes as alternatives in parallel (seems to have only NetBSD as contender, among OSes capable of running similar enough use cases). Prepare to switch to unensloppified OS at any time, around 2035 at the latest. Do not hope that by then all the slop will be reverted from core system components (if it is, I will be pleasantly surprised, but right now, #Linux is dying).

Reduce computers and compute in your life.

And, if you can, fight this on useful levels. Not copyright licences, they ignore these and consent anyway. But: On a political level, up to and including guillotines, if you must. On an educational level, with friends, family, and even pupils/students. The younger generations are not lost. Make a worthwhile future, including human art, craft, crocheting, knitting, music, painting, woodworking, what have you. Doesn’t matter if it’s not good: it’s yours. Read books (from before 2020 or so). Go out, make train trips, cycle, garden, including fruit and vegetables. Care for your cats and other loved ones. And say no to fashtech.