An alternative would be to create jobs for people that take on part of the development of used software. They would be a close connection between their organization and the Open Source project in question. Paying money to the project would be one way to go. Providing development resources another. Both would be best :)
That's very true in the case of private companies. I'm not sure to what degree employing developers who contribute to open source projects (probably for lower than private sector wages) works in the case of a lot of public sector entities.
Why would it make a difference? Offering developers a salary to contribute to an open source project is a good thing. Leave the developers to be free if they want to work for the offered amount.
There are often different incentives, constraints, and pay scales. Nothing against public organizations doing this obviously. Just don't see a lot of evidence that it works well in general.
The problem is that most of that work is not something anyone can pick up.
Regardless of the coding, one would first need to be familiar with git or VCS in general.
Also, you would want people to go back to normal jobs when they can. This would lead to short stints for all employees which I've always found to be one of the best predictors of bad outcomes
Obviously it wouldn't work for everyone but for those who have an interest in computers it would be a nice option.
I was unemployed for a while in 2008 and I'd have loved it if I could have got paid minimum wage for working on open source rather than just getting jobseekers allowance and searching for jobs that didn't exist.
Plus I'd have learned some valuable skills that would help me find work anyway. And it would have increased the numbers of IT savvy workers. Seems like a win-win-win.
The catch depends a lot on the context that you're considering. Trying to replace Microsoft Office as a whole by a drop-in replacement like LibreOffie may work better or worse depending on who uses it.
I've never used anything but OpenOffice / LibreOffice for writing academic texts in the humanities and never missed anything. The "catch" whenever I tried Microsoft Word was the menu that had the most important functions (for me) hidden away much deeper than in OO and LO.
I've never been a big user of Spreadsheets but I've heard only good of Excel and trust the widespread opinion that it is unchallenged in its domain. In sociology you wouldn't use it because you've got specialized statistics software such as R and SPSS (PSPP being an attempt at an Open Source Alternative to SPSS).
Looking at administration, Excel ist probably quite important but when you get rid of it, not one but various solutions might take its place, depending on who uses it. If you want something like a browseable database in a colorful table for office clerks, LO Calc might be enough. But the things Excel gets praised for a lot (I never know what exactly people mean) would probably have to be tackled another way.
Governments going down that need to invest into finding those solutions by providing staff that is qualified to find them or even develop them. The state of Schleswig-Holstein considered in its Open Source initiative strategy that it may be challenged by a future legislation and put a focus on the reasons for acceptance of Open Source solutions. I wonder if that is put into action well to find solutions with the least "catch" that may even excel over Microsoft products depending on their context :)
Immerse yourself in a workplace setting where Excel is the first thing that people grab for anything but text editing. You'll see how insanely productive people are. Now actually try switching to LO Calc.
I've done this several times during my career, to see if LO Calc would ever come up to the performance of Excel. To be fair, I haven't done so since I switched to Python.
Here's the experiment I would conduct. Generate a column of 5000 numbers. Now graph them. Now make a few token changes to the graph such as modifying some of the aesthetic parameters. The difference in processing time was profound, last time I tried it. Also, there was a noticeable "latency" between clicking something, and seeing something happen, that made it quite un-ergonomic if not physically painful to use. I'm sensitive to this because I get eyestrain headaches easily.
Netsurf isn't fun on many websites but it should be enough for rendering HTML content from RSS, no? Terminal emulators and lynx/elinks/links/w3c work, too. And terminal RSS readers. HTML rendering is also possible with KOreader which runs well on rM2, come to think about it.
I've had my rM2 since 2020 and enjoyed the hacking community a lot.
I've since lost track - at some point I updated the firmware because I wanted the automatic shapes feature from upstream and couldn't use the framebuffer anymore.
You've summed up a lot of findings that I've made again and again trying to pick up where I left but it's become very confusing.
Looking forward to your next update! No pressure, though :)
I've just remembered: Check out KOreader if you haven't. I think it doesn't rely on QT and it runs on rM2 tablets with recent firmware if you launch it via ssh after stopping xochitl.
I have taken a (short) look at KOReader and saw that there's an instructions page on its wiki on how to install it on the rM2; it still uses rm2fb but it suggests using timower's version, which works on newer versions of the OS. What I should've made more clear in the post was that there are options, they're just less convenient to use because Toltec doesn't work.
I guess it's mainly un-sueable because the reference is very implicit (nothing but the last name) and using the name Swift by itself constitutes neither impersonation of someone specific nor a Trademark violation or anything like that.
And Taylor Swift actually is invested in data security, so it's a compliment :)
That's no reason against filing a lawsuit but much less for filing one.
Mistel Barocco fully split Keyboard: Can (and unfortunately must) be programmed without software.
Right half is the main keyboard. Left side connects to it, works also in standalone mode but is not programmable then.
https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/bd20945a731491407807e80d...
I was maintaining [1] which might be useful to you, but it's become outdated. It doesn't have a filter for one handed keyboards, but some of the "two halves" ones might be appropriate.
(If someone is interested in taking the site over and bringing it up to date, please open an issue.)
On OS X you can achieve this with Keyb, Karabiner Elements, etc. It's also easy to do with a programmable keyboard with ZMK/QMK. I've set up my Kinesis 360 Pro this way, being symmetrical means I can access every key easily. Hardware support for sticky keys also helps quite a bit.
The mirror board is an interesting idea as it allows to start with a normal keyboard and one could then switch to a smaller board with the muscle memory trained. I would prefer a different switch key though. I use cap lock as a layer switch on my keyboards. But I will think about it and try out a few things.
It could already be useful in situation where I need to keep my hand over the mousepad.
Yes, having a special keyboard can be limiting in that it’s a pain to cart around to hook up to laptops, etc. and to get an extra in case it fails.
It still could be nice to have something optimized, though. If you ever design one, please share it, because I think you’d get more interest than you’d think.
I began to have interest in developing for everyone (primarily for differences for vision, though difference in hearing, memory, learning also) about 13 years ago, and got little support from the small company I worked for. We had a very color-specific interface, because we were space-limited. Then, wouldn’t you know it, our next manager was red-green colorblind, but it didn’t bother her.
I got jaded about it, learning that basically no one cared enough, and that people just get ignored and struggle with their adaptive devices. This still pisses me off, and I was once thinking heavily about applying a job where I could do something about it, but I don’t have the required background.
With AI, there’s beginning to be almost no excuse for someone not to add first-class support for all types of people into their interfaces and process, but people still continue to design like everyone is a twenty-something y.o. with full hearing, 20/15 full color vision, 130 IQ average, and no memory or learning differences or other modalities.
I did, too! And it reminded me of a project idea I had a while ago:
A time traveller's wiki that collects casual knowledge for different times (and different places).
Such as: "Buying a train ticket in Paris in 1972".
But it was a shower thought and it's pretty hard to imagine how this knowledge should be collected and especially presented.
In a way, wikipedia is already doing this by keeping records of articles as they change over the years :)
The article about train tickets wasn't so good as an example but "computer monitor" from 2004 is kind of fun to read :)
Unfortunately, "casual knowledge" is often omitted when writing informative articles. In this example, there is no mention that power buttons are often located somewhere in the back of the monitor, which was good to know in 2004. Also, some monitors are drawing power from the computer, thus they won't power up before the computer will. And speaking of that: You may want to turn of your computer after shutdown!
Edit: This would probably be useful for novelists and filmmakers (in addition to the casual time traveller)
I find casual knowledge particularly interesting, because it's the exact kind of thing that's most related to my day to day experience, but is simultaneously the exact thing that our encyclopedias and AIs omit.
I know one story that may have become such an experience. It's about Wikipedia Germany and I don't know what the policies there actually are.
A German 90s/2000s rapper (Textor, MC of Kinderzimmer Productions) produced a radio feature about facts and how hard it can be to prove them.
One personal example he added was about his Wikipedia Article that stated that his mother used to be a famous jazz singer in her birth country Sweden. Except she never was. The story had been added to an Album recension in a rap magazine years before the article was written. Textor explains that this is part of 'realness' in rap, which has little to do with facts and more with attitude.
When they approached Wikipedia Germany, it was very difficult to change this 'fact' about the biography of his mother. There was published information about her in a newspaper and she could not immediately prove who she was. Unfortunately, Textor didn't finish the story and moved on to the next topic in the radio feature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Tilly is my sister. It claims that she is of Irish descent. She is not. The Irish was her stepfather (my father), and some reporter confusing information about a stepparent with information about a parent.
I've just recently switched to GrapheneOS and I must say it has been very convenient. That is, coming from the hassle of flashing LineageOS to Samsung devices.
Obviously, buying a device and using it as it is will always be the easiest path and I would have recommended Apple to anyone looking for this until this week, when Apple pulled the E2E feature from British phones.
So GrapheneOS is the only reasonable option left that I know of.
Installing sandboxed Google Play (no sideloading needed) from the Graphene App Store is a breeze by the way. It's right there after installing the OS.
And Pixel devices don't try to keep you from replacing the stock rom, you don't lose your warranty doing it. And there is a browser-based installer that gets rid of the need of using command lines.
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