There is action and there is the reaction. You could argue that the action is identical. But the reaction—internal, institutional, political—was and is not participating similar.
People in power will abuse power. That’s inevitable in any regime. What makes the difference is how they are held accountable, especially by their own regime.
And it also goes to show that while it’s possible to re-create similar sounds in a DAW, these hardware instruments were an integral part of the original creation process (mood, texture, composition, etc). The use of the Swarmatron defined some of the key aspects of the soundtrack.
Free software where the user is not the product is not an exception. The number of free dev libraries, Linux software, specialized software like audio plugins (Eg VCVRack, Max4Live, Reaktor, etc) is huge. Maybe in easily commercialized areas like iOS apps the vast majority of free apps monetize users, but outside of that this phrase has far less relevancy.
That isn't accurate. Let's look at Linux. Yes you can download it and compile it yourself but typically you would download from a website that tracks you. You would get a distro that typically has a business model. Yes, there's debian (and others) but even they have sponsors that pay the salaries of people working on the software.
The free portion are things that are already written. Services are the thing that costs money and they include features, hosting, adapting, etc. Those aren't free.
Maybe I'm cynical but I see things that are technically free all residing within environments that aren't. I don't have a problem with that, I'm OK with commercial interests. They pay my salary. But we need to be realistic about the scope of free and how financially viable would it be to be "free".
I am not sure I follow you. If I download a Linux distro from a website that is using Google Analytics, I am still the product? That is not even remotely correct. We are not discussing tracking or sponsorships here, or even whether people who write free software have financial incentives. In very many cases free software _is_ the product, not the people who download and use it.
Yes. Tracking data has value so you are the product to the company providing the hosting.
Yes. The code you're downloading is free. Just like the words of Shakespeare are now free. But you need to read those words off of something. That "something" sometimes includes tracking. Why would a commercial company offer this for free?
Sometimes it's indeed charity. But we have no way of knowing it. Sometimes the value is analytics which they can use to fingerprint and follow you across other properties they have.
You are saying that if someone takes free software and sells it (or distributes with the intention to monetize that service through ads) then that makes software not free? I disagree.
In the context of this discussion, there is a clear distinction between developers/companies that build truly free products vs free products that are intended to be monetized through selling user data or showing ads.
A service that tracks and sells user data in exchange for free downloads is a different product, has nothing to do with the original code/product that it might be distributing.
That was very specifically NOT what I said. What I said was that this person *might* be using tracking and monetization methods that would flip the value proposition by leveraging your details and privacy.
The thing is that you have relatively limited ability to know the level of tracking that companies use.
I'm *not* saying that paying for software solves this problem. I'm saying that "free" isn't as simple an answer as yes or no. It's more nuanced.
In that case I misunderstood you. Sure, we can’t always know all tracking details of closed source software, or even open source software with telemetry or some other tracking enabled.
The developer could be using harvested data for monetization. Or not. That’s a bit too speculative and borderline conspiratorial to be discussing.
I released free software myself, my friends have done the same - without any user tracking or ads. So anecdotally I can tell with confidence that free software does exist. Is all free software really free (as in not monetized by the developer in some hidden way)? No, not all.
I did too. But I put it on github which makes collaboration easy.
What does github track?
I don't know. I don't pay for it and I get a lot for free. I'm not switching to doing everything on my own private servers, etc. I live in the modern world. But I think we need to be conscious of who is footing the bill and their motivations to do so.
I think I responded to this concern in my previous comment.
Basically you are conflating free software as written and released by a developer with a completely separate service (eg Github) that is used to distribute this free software. Both the software and GitHub are free to the end user, but GitHub is likely harvesting user data for monetization.
As I said before, this does not make the original software not free. In this specific case distribution/download is not free. That has nothing to do with whether the user is the product or the code is the product for the developer.
He got banned from social media for posting “I am going defcon 3 on the JEWS” or something like that, not for exchanging Ideas in an Open Society. Unless you include this type of “ideas” in your definition.
I am not advocating censorship, but want to point out that your hopes might be misplaced. The illuminating ideas this kind of a free speech platform usually attracts rarely go far beyond bigotry.
And what, exactly, do you believe he means when he says that? Because I have a hard time seeing how any rational person would think that that's an actual threat towards Jewish people.
And absent it being an actual threat (which it's clearly not), I don't see what your issue is. Kanye West is well within his rights to criticize Jewish people the same way that literally every woke person is within their rights to criticize, nay, demonize white people these days on every social media, corporate media platform, and news outlet these days.
I rarely understand what his actual position is (outside of contrarianism). In this specific case it's a bigoted thing to say, regardless of whether this is a legitimate threat. Worth banning? I don't know, I don't set rules or own Twitter. A valuable contribution to an open society? Don't think so.
If he is "criticizing" Jewish people (which does not sound like it to me) - do you think it's not an antisemitic thing to do? (To pre-empt your counter-argument... yes, criticizing all white people is also racism/bigotry.) Treating a race, a nation, all followers of a religion, etc as a uniform group that can be subjected to some "criticism" is not an idea that's valuable to an open society. Saying that, I don't think people should be immediately banned for posts like that.
If you think we need a "free speech" app filled with these "valuable" ideas - that's fine, just don't expect that it will be a space for discussing opposing views. Places like that always end up on either extreme right or extreme left.
I mostly agree with the parent that just sales of all sorts are not a sign of cultural relevancy.
However, measuring said relevancy is a very subjective endeavor (due to the fact that it’s hard to objectively evaluate things outside of our own bubble). In my view it’s whether the artist is “talked about” and whether they are influencing the current music (and a broader culture) - that’s what makes them relevant. Kanye is still doing both of those things, so he is very relevant.
Donda (and Donda 2 to a smaller degree) was a very noticeable cultural event. Listening parties, album guests, the controversy around his romantic relationships (scandalous IG posts, etc), merchandise (tied to his big fashion releases)…
Billy Joel has none of that. Nostalgic concerts are definitely not a sign of relevancy outside of his fandom bubble.
App cut is taken at the time of purchase not at time of donation or withdrawal. So on iOS it costs 30% more to buy a coin precisely because they give a cut to Apple. But once the coin is in the system, the cut has been paid and gifts do not have an additional 30% cut.
Also people compare this to twitch, but for twitch's own gifting system(Bits), streamers get 100% of the bits when they cash out. the 50/50 split for the subscriptions(when a viewer subscribe to a streamer - 3 tiers, the cheapest being $4.99)
People in power will abuse power. That’s inevitable in any regime. What makes the difference is how they are held accountable, especially by their own regime.