I don’t quite agree with some of the rationale
- I do think users have benefited from Open Source, but I also think that there has been an a decline in Open Source software in general
- I don’t think contracts are a good analogy here (in the sense that every corporate consumer of the software would have to sign one)
Having said this I do understand where he is coming from. And I agree that:
- a lot of big companies consume this software and don’t give back
- corporate interests are well entrenched in some Open Source projects, and some bad decisions have been made
- he does raise an interesting point about the commons clause (but them I’m no laywer)
I would like to remind everyone that the GPL pretty much exists because of (1.). If anything we should have more GPL code. In that regard I don’t think it failed us. But we rarely see enforced (in court). Frankly most of our code is not that special so please GPL it.
Finally I think users do know about Open Source software indirectly. In the same way they find out their “public” infrastructure has been running without permit or inspection the day things start breaking and the original builder/supplier is long gone and left no trace of how it works.
Since these days everything is software (or black box hardware with firmware) this is increasingly important in public policy. And I do wish we would see public contracts asking for hardware/firmware what some already for software.
I wont get into the Redhat/IBM+CentOS/Fedora or AI points because there is a lot more going on there. Not that he is not right. But I’m kind of fed up with it :D
Just pilling on some concrete examples, awesome-gemini is definitely the best place to start looking. There are both converters for the gemtext format and gateways for the protocols.
For format conversion tools, awesome-gemini already lists a handful of tools.
From the gemini side there are some gateways for specific websites operated by various people
These work pretty well for me. I think there were public gateways to open http pages from gemini, but I can’t recall one from the top of my head.
Some of the gemini browsers support gemini proxies to access http(s) content. You can run it in your own machine. Duckling is the only one I’m familiar (but see the awesome list for more)
Conversely, to access gemini pages from a web browser portal.mozz.us hosts a gateway (just place whatever gemini link you want in the box).
One big privacy caveat of using gemini proxies for this is that while this may improve your privacy with regards to javascript/cookies it will reduced it because it makes your behaviour more identifiable from the point of view of the websites you visit (i.e. your proxy is clearly not a browser making it unusual).