> Avoid Scheme/Lisp
>
> Scheme/Lisp should not be forced onto the user. It's error-prone and harder to read by humans, compared to Rust/TOML/Lua/...
I mean, any single language that's "blessed" for a plugin system will be "forced on the user," whether it's Lisp or Scheme or something else. So why specifically shouldn't Lisp be used that way? This phraseology betrays a bizarre, deeply unfair and wrong-headed double standard that views Lisp or Scheme as somehow inherently worse or more coercive or something to select as the plugin language.
> If upstream Helix moves to a Scheme-based configuration, this project will seek to keep a user-friendly alternative.
And sure enough, their second paragraph reveals this nonsensical view.
How in the world is Scheme or Lisp harder to read than Rust, a language that has almost as many complaints about its syntax as Lisp does and is much lower level and more verbose / complex?
How is Lua less error prone than Scheme or Lisp when Lua has all kinds of gotches around tables and arrays and is weakly typed?
And TOML is totally not sufficient as a plugin or extension language, and it's bizarre that they included it next to Rust and Lua. How in the world is it a fair comparison here?
Some people seem to have this weird, irrational hatred for Lisps. Just use proper paren completion like 99% of editors have and you'll be fine. And there are a lot of upsides, too.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised about that from Vim users, but still.
I agree with you, after working with Clojure for a while I started to really like the beauty of Lisp. But I also think the author can have their own preferences, and it is fine since it is their project, so they're free to do whatever they want.
Oh certainly they should be able to do whatever they want! I just think their framing of what they're doing, where they disguise a personal preference as a nonsensical and disdainful attack, is unfortunate.
Yeah, like I like Rust, but Scheme is the easiest to read language I've ever seen. The clarity is off the charts. It's even more pseudocode-like for my money than Python, if you ignore the parens (as you should).
Well I'm also a paying customer and I'm really glad they're doing this — this way I don't have to awkwardly piece together a VPN, a password manager, a mail client, a notes app, and a Google Docs alternative all from different places, probably paying separate subscriptions to each since I wouldn't trust free services. Instead I get a reasonably good suite of apps for everything privacy-related I need, all for $10/mo. The more they add, the more that money feels worth it and the more affirmed in my choice to pay it I feel.
I agree, everytime I think of migrating away from Proton, there's nothing that can replace the stack for the same price.
Maik + aliases alone are 6.5$, that's without including cloud storage or a vpn, you just can't beat it at that price.
Despite that, I hope you'll consider a "pay what you can" popup when downloading the browser, or a donation button built into the browser settings page along with a one-time reminder, or something like that. I don't think that would be monetizing your users in any negative, extractive sense like ads do, it would still essentially just be a donation, just asked for in a more obvious way and made easy and convenient to do as part of using the app, instead of a vague separate thing that'll take work to find and that won't occur to most people to do. Personally I think charging users for software (as long as it is also FOSS) is totally fine, it's probably the only sustainable model for software that isn't ads or corporate sponsorship, and it actually serves to align the incentives of the software's developers more closely with users, instead of doing anything bad, but I respect that line.
If they had kept the late 90s or early 2000s aesthetic, then most people would've assumed that it was sti one of those hobby projects more focused on a nostalgic (but not necessarily better in any actual way) technological aesthetic that certain tech people get really attached to, and not something that was meant for serious use and to be pleasant to use in the modern decade for people who prefer modern interface paradigms. Having a clean and well-designed website that's nice to look at and doesn't feel horribly outdated is a good move in my opinion — to me, it signaled that the project really has shifted its mentality and goals in a substantial way and is now looking towards the future instead of the past. As soon as I saw the new website design, I got excited because it confirmed for me that their mentality has changed and that this could be something that could really go somewhere.
Maybe you've learned to associate a nicely designed website that's pleasant to look at with short lived projects that are worth avoiding, but I think that's more your problem:
Maybe you should realize that most new things don't last very long and so of course websites that are designed in a new and modern way will often be for projects that don't live very long simply because new projects are more likely to use a modern website design, and they are also likely for unrelated reasons to only live a short time.
And that these exact same pressures and considerations would have applied back in the 2000s or 1990s, such that back in those days oldheads might have looked at something with a 2000s or 1990s design and thought that was clear evidence that it wouldn't last very long, because most new projects made back then would have been made with contemporary design styles, and would have also not lasted very long simply because they were new, same as in the modern day.
And that your association of long-lived products with 1990s and 2000s design aesthetics might simply be survivor bias: most long-lived software projects today 1st started in the 90s or early 2000s, at the very least, because that's just the first set of decades that are long enough ago for projects that were started then and still survived today to be considered long-lived. And so, of course, most long-lived projects you are familiar with in the current decade will have aesthetics from decades ago, because that's simply how longevity works. And so you've learned to associate longevity with an old aesthetic, but there's nothing really about the aesthetic that talks about or portrays a mentality that makes projects live longer. It's simply that longer-lived projects will be from an older era of aesthetics. But there were plenty of projects that were designed with 1990s and 2000s aesthetic sensibilities (and whatever magical philosophy you attribute underneath those) that didn't survive long at all, just the same as projects that were designed with modern sensibilities that don't last long, you're just not aware of them because they didn't last and so they didn't show up in your sample.
Edit: It occurs to me that this comment probably comes off as overly hostile and confrontational for no real reason, so I do want to apologize for that. I'm in a very grumpy mood today. I think my reasoning is correct, but I do want to clarify that you're totally allowed to prefer 1990s and 2000s aesthetics. Personally, I like both modern and 1990s aesthetics (in websites specifically) roughly equally and for their own unique reasons. ,the reason I made this comment is just that I find the cargo culting of ancient technical aesthetics[1], as if they are not only indicators of good software in and of themselves, but also of some moral purity and improved moral fibre on the part of those who use them, very tiring. There are many things wrong with our modern technical aesthetics to be sure, but I think there is an almost equal amount wrong with the sort of older technical aesthetics that people tend to worship, like the Unix philosophy and its associated tools and development environment, and things like that. They are just different kinds of wrong.
This is really awesome. I deeply admire what they're doing and hope it works out.
What I'd really love to see with this is some kind of monetization model outside of just relying on sponsors to a non-profit. Although I'm not a huge fan of their specific license, I think maybe the FUTO model might be something to look at: The user is fully free to inspect, modify, and redistribute copies of or modifications of the source code of the application, and the full features of the application are available at all times to all users, but there is a way to "pay for the application if you like it" built into the interface that is easy to access and convenient to use, that gives people some kind of "lifetime license" that just adds a rewarding cosmetic thing to their account or something. Maybe with a one-time notification reminding the user to pay after a certain amount of time using the application that can be permanently dismissed with a button that's part of the notification.
Agree with this. Similar to something like Frame.work, this kind of product will never have universal interest and is unlikely to take more than a couple percent of the market, but that’s Fine. Pick your audience, build them the product they want, and charge them money for it. I’ll happily pay for an open-source standards compliant browser with no conflict about who it’s building for.
Yes, I think that's at least one thing that the FUTO model shows, which is that there is actually a substantial proportion of people willing to pay for goods software that respects them as users. Whether that's enough to break even with development costs is another question though, but I certainly hope that would be the case.
Ladybird is explicitly forgoing any monetization. They will live of donations only. They are happy with a non copyleft license. Some people prefer this. They don't want a tit-for-tat, they just want to give unrestricted.
> The real FUTO model is that a billionaire is funding the dev though... They are likely not making bank with the "pay what you want" model.
That's fair, but Ladybird can emulate that through the sponsors of its non-profit foundation. So it can be partially funded through shareware-like stuff and mostly funded through sponsors keeping it funded. Maybe I'm just crazy here, though. I really don't know what would make a viable funding model.
A funding model that I really think would be great and I wish people would use more is only providing source code and the tools and documentation needed to modify it and build it yourself for free and charging money for access to pre-built or packaged binaries. I judt don't tend to go around suggesting it because I feel like a lot of people would be pretty resentful of this with our current culture around software, even though I think it's probably the best model in our ideal world.
I think that cryptocurrencies get an undeserved level of hate, and that it would be perfect for monetizing a project like a web browser. Yes, there are scam coins, but there are also legitimate use cases for it.
IMO the Basic Attention Token used by Brave is a good way to do it. Users have the option to earn BAT by watching "privacy-friendly" ads, or exchange fiat into BAT and skip seeing ads. They can then use the funds to support websites they visit, or the browser developer. I'm not a Brave user, but this always seemed to me like the best way to transition away from the intrusive and hostile ad-based business models, and into one that eliminates the middle-man and allows users to support content creators directly.
> perfect for monetizing a project like a web browser
They could also try regular old fashioned money for monetization. It has worked for ~3,000 years pretty well and you can buy things like food and shelter with it in pretty much every country on earth.
Also rich patrons supporting artists was how many of the greatest artworks of many civilisations were commissioned for thousands of years...
Is writing software closer to growing potatoes or designing the Sagrada de Familia, or writing the Clarinet Concerto?
I'd argue that writing a web browser is a lot closer in scope to writing a symphony than building a house - at least in audience and durability. In a house's life time, maybe 100 people live in it, and perhaps 2000 people visit it, but a browser, or a symphony, will have an audience of millions.
The market is massively smaller. The impact massively larger.
Assuming you mean the electronic form of fiat, it's not a good fit for microtransactions because of the fee requirements. A digital currency can be used for much smaller and frequent transactions. Not Bitcoin and most major ones, but there are currencies optimized for real-time transactions with minimal fees, so it is possible.
It's a shame that the cryptocurrency stigma doesn't allow legitimate uses of the technology to enable novel business models and user experiences. But keep downvoting me because you disagree. :)
I disagree, as being able to earn BAT incentivizes fraud, and fraud protection cannot be done well without a significant loss of privacy.
There's no way to confirm that you've watched an ad, you can write a Python script that pretends to be the Brave browser and sends the right requests to their API, and there's no way to distinguish those two on their side. The easiest (if not the only) way to make this difficult is to require lots of tracking and fingerprinting, which is hard to emulate well with a custom script. This is one major reason why tracking is so crucial for the ad economy to work.
There is no way to confirm whether you've watched an ad with existing systems either. Ad impression / click / PPC fraud is rampant, and adtech is in a perpetual battle to detect and prevent it.
A solution like BAT isn't meant to address fraud. It's meant to address user privacy and monetization of web services by serving ads that don't track the user, and by allowing the user to directly support the services they use.
The fact advertisers have inserted themselves as middlemen between consumers and producers for decades now has corrupted all forms of media, not just the internet. The solution by Brave is not perfect, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Without such solutions user privacy and experience on the internet will inevitably continue to degrade, as publishers optimize creating content specifically designed to please advertisers, and adtech optimizes systems designed to extract as much data from users as possible.
Advertising is an absolute scourge on humanity. As we move towards a transhumanist future, I shudder to imagine the machiavellian ideas adtech has in store for us. They've already experimented with face and eye tracking, and I'm sure they're thinking of ways of injecting ads directly into our brain... We should be open to any alternative solution that steers us away from this future, even if it's not perfect.
I really hope the judges rule in the Internet Archives favor. If they don't and those half a million books stay down and more publishers continue to come after the Internet Archive's library until it is completely gutted, that would be a total indictment of our awful, horrible culture. It would be like voluntarily burning the library of Alexandria.
At the same time, I can't help but be saddened by the defenses that the Internet Archive is using, which all seem to lean heavily on the idea of artificially limiting digital information in order to simulate the limitations of physical books. It's so frustrating that we've created an essentially post-scarcity system, where goods can be infinitely shared at almost zero cost without ever running into supply issues, and yet, we are forced to fit this world into the straightjacket of scarcity and property rights, instead of using it to benefit and empower everyone.
Especially since it's just fundamentally absurd; it's extremely difficult to actually make digital information, especially on the internet, actually function like a scarce rivalrous good that you can have property rights to. That's why piracy is such an issue, and fighting piracy will simply require more and more surveillance and corporate control of our computers and our communications until there's nothing left at all of the decentralized, post-scarcity, free-as-in-freedom potential of computers and the internet, because as long as an ounce of freedom remains, then information will slip through the fingers of corporations and the state-like sand, information wants to be free, dammit, and the more we try to deny it, the worse things get. This is no slippery slope argument either. I think the logic for why this progression would happen, the forcing function that will ensure this is pretty clear: if your goal is to eliminate piracy then any freedom on the internet and on someone's computer is a threat to that goal because information is infinitely copyable and redistributable and so the pursuit of that goal will inherently and necessarily always tend toward the complete elimination of software freedom in the long run.
I think they mean "use the software" as in using the actual source code of the software in some derivative work or as part of some other application, or downloading and redistributing it for a different purpose, and things like that, not using the end-product application. They could stand to be a lot clearer about that, but their whole goal is just to prevent mega-corporations from being able to freeload off their work to make money off their software, not to prevent random people from using their software in certain contexts that might be construed as "commercial" in some sense. They mean not using the software for commercial purposes in the sense of not selling the software, not simply not using it for business emails or something stupid like that.
