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Posted by sureanem
No, not sandboxed in a separate process. It should still have full access to the memory of the Firefox process, but if it crashes it shouldn't bring FF down with it, but rather just stop interacting with the browser.

Posted by sureanem
Sure, they could overwrite its memory, but that's not something to happen by accident.

Posted by creaothceann
Windows 95 has virtual address spaces. You probably meant DOS or Windows<=3.11.

Posted by Kawa
though they may need elevation now

Posted by Screwtape
Old news, but Stay classy, Pale Moon. (why Pale Moon does not have an OpenBSD port)

    The issue you don't seem to understand here is that our in-tree
    libraries are often patched specifically for the quirks of our code, and
    of very specific versions (system-installed versions may or may not
    work, since APIs and behavior changes). Also, due to the sheer size of
    our code, number of components involved and interconnectivity between
    such components, any component that does not play well due to a version
    difference or missing a patch will have immediate and far-reaching
    impact on the rest of the resulting application.

    ..., there are too many unknown factors in the resulting binaries on
    user's systems. What you are asking is exchanging known-good
    combinations of libraries with unknown and potentially disastrous
    combinations as-present on end-user's systems.

Posted by sureanem
mattatobin seems like a fairly reasonable guy, only his sidekick who seems a bit too pissed off for his own good.

They both seem to have the same issue many of those kinds of developers do; due to spending too much time interacting with complete idiots they respond to anyone doing anything with complete hostility. You can see it clearly in the FAQ/rule lists of cough some websites as well, where the author sometimes appears to have been figuratively seething with rage when he or she wrote it.

Either they're competent enough to actually make something of value, in which case there is no problem, or they are incapable of this, in which case they are the kind of person who wouldn't need a complicated license agreement to get persuaded into rebranding the project they're forking into something along the lines of "PaleMoon+ Optimized Edition by somedude123", in which case any sane person would avoid it, in which case there is no problem either.

It feels like somewhere along the line, the free software movement got mired down in the legislation they were fighting against (GNewspeak: "use copyright to guarantee their freedom" - direct quote), confusing the map with the territory and getting us all into this great big hash of licenses and regulations. For all practical purposes, The Pirate Bay accomplished far more in six years (operating at a net profit) than the FSF has done in thirty-six (spending about $1mil a year) and counting. Even if the heroes who ran TPB would have paid their fines, which they did not, it would still have been a vastly cheaper endeavor ($6.5mil) than whatever the FSF did (something to do with India?) with their money.

Posted by Screwtape

Really? The guy who starts off the very first post with "You will..."? Not even "Hello, I'm a fan of the Pale Moon browser, and I noticed you're doing this particular thing that the project leaders hate" or "Thanks for helping to get Pale Moon working on your platform, but we've got some problems with the way you're going about it"?

Regardless of the legal or technical merits of his position, that's not the way to get people to want to help you.

Posted by Screwtape

That's definitely a problem - there's always more jerks in the world, and it can be very difficult to give the next person the benefit of the doubt when the last five people you interacted with were assholes, just ask anyone who's worked retail.

That's really part of the job, though. Some people have the emotional maturity and support network to handle that kind of work, and other people don't, in the same way that some people have the upper-body strength and fitness levels required to haul loads of bricks around all day, and other people don't. If you have those things, you can do the job well, but if you don't have them you're going to do the job poorly, or do OK for a little while and then burn out. If you can't do the job, there's no shame in finding a more appropriate way to contribute.

Posted by Screwtape

All that to say, if the Pale Moon developers and their proxies can't send legal requests in a polite manner, they should find somebody who can do that on their behalf, for their own good, and the good of the project. Heck, if they'd just called their lawyers instead of creating that GitHub issue, the resulting cease-and-desist letter would probably have been more pleasant to read.

Posted by Screwtape

There's also the people who take browsers like Firefox and sell "subscriptions", where for an monthly fee they'll send you a copy of the Firefox installer and tell you they've scanned it for viruses. There's even people who will build Firefox with an insecure configuration, or with nefarious CA certificates bundled, or with spyware, and pass it off as the real deal.

Sure, you and I probably wouldn't fall for such tricks, but with a product as widely used as a web-browser it's good to have some level of protection; protection that trademark law was invented to provide.

Posted by Screwtape

It's not just browsers, either; I remember hearing about a bunch of punks who would take every VBA-M release, hex-edit the binary to replace the original attributions with their own names, then upload it to their own website with changelogs like "improved HDMA timing accuracy" and "higher-fidelity colour reproduction for mode-3 graphics", and ridicule the original VBA-M team for being unable to provide such improvements themselves.

It's enough to make a man want to invent a device to punch people in the face over the internet.

Posted by Screwtape

I'll grant that TPB probably provided more practical freedom than the FSF in the time they were around, but where are they now?

Posted by Screwtape

TPB was an attack on the excesses of copyright law from the outside, the FSF is an attack from within. TPB had much success with little effort, but the System brought its resources to bear, the System squashed TPB, and the System will be immune to such attacks in the future (why download MP3s when you have Spotify? Why download movies when you have Netflix? Why download an office suite when you have Office365.com?). The System cannot attack the FSF, because the FSF is made of the same stuff, so it would just be attacking itself.

Posted by Screwtape

Honestly, if anyone wants to make any kind of techno-social change, investing the money in India or Africa or somewhere like that is probably a far smarter move than doing something in the USA or Europe, calcified as they are in their existing systems. If you really have a better idea, you have a better shot at getting it adopted in a culture that's not already heavily invested in an alternative. For example, the ideas behind Kaizen were invented by Americans, who couldn't get them adopted in America because American industry was in love with Ford-style mass production. It wasn't until those ideas came to Japan post-WWII that they were successful, because Japan's industry was largely destroyed during the war and they were ready to try something new.

Posted by sureanem

They're not working retail, though. It's not a job. As harsh as it sounds, they have no obligation to be nice.

Personally, I'm no fan of either, but I would much prefer contributing to a project with a perpetually angry but honest maintainer, than the one with one who uses the disgusting corporate sickly-sweet tone, referring to problems as "challenges," expends large amounts of time on writing meaningless documents about "inclusive language" (and actually enforcing them, instead of treating them like repository ornaments like the gratuitous makefiles), and uses expressions such as "yikes" and "sweetie" instead of explaining their issues with a given suggestion clearly.

Posted by Screwtape

I'll grant that TPB probably provided more practical freedom than the FSF in the time they were around, but where are they now?

It was a triumph. I'm making a note here, huge success.
It is still online, and works just fine. It's true that there wasn't any more development after the initial release (short of DHT/magnet links decentralization), but the fact still remains that paying for media today is effectively optional, and this improvement persists regardless of whether any future ones are gained.

What has the FSF accomplished? Helped large companies externalize software maintenance?

The Global South at best perpetually skijors on the achievements of the West, and so does China but with actual, quasi-legitimate industry. There isn't any change to affect down there anyway, since nearly nobody uses computers and if they did they would all just use whatever shipped on the computers the West sent them.

It is a common fantasy, that the oppressed third world will rise up against their capitalist masters and do something, but it's not a realistic one. Even the so-called independence movements were mostly just the Soviet Union funding proxy wars, or power struggles that had completely nothing to do with ideology (Sierra Leone).

Posted by Screwtape
... but democracy has had a pretty good track record versus dictatorships (albeit a bit bruised since 2016) but there's hope yet.