today's leftovers

posted by Tux Machines on Jul 29, 2022

• Fedora removes Creative Commons CC0-licensed software; leaves Fraunhofer AAC. Bonus: Use Opus instead of AAC. – BaronHK's Rants

  Fraunhofer is a member of the MPEG-LA patent troll, and other patent trolls. It is a patent troll.

  They are giving you software and threatening to see you in court if you use it without paying a ransom to someone. This is blackmail.

  You may remember Fraunhofer from the late 90s and early 2000s threat letters sent out around the time that Napster made MP3 popular, which said that they intended to collect royalties from or sue people for using MP3 or offering people encoders (such as LAME) or decoders which could play the files back.

  They specifically demanded “$25,000 per year” in one case, from one open source MP3 encoder project called 8hz MP3, knowing it would ruin them, and that they would decide to shut down the project instead.

  (Although the article plays up MP3 “Pro” and Microsoft WMA, nobody took them seriously. The only serious usage WMA ever got was some music “stores” that failed and destroyed your entire library with the Digital Restrictions Malware when they did. Walmart even had one!)

  This resulted in a number of responses.

• What is the OpenGEH (Green Energy Hub) Project [Ed: More greenwashing PR to dilute/harm the brand "Linux"; Linux Foundation is not misusing the brand "Linux" to spread lies for Microsoft and it's like ClearlyDefined in OSI; LF became a GPL violators' force of occupation against Linux and against the GPL. If the LF's mission isn't to kill Linux, it's to kill the original owners/ownership of Linux, handing over control of the project to its enemies.]

  OpenGEH ( GEH stands for Green Energy Hub ) enables fast, flexible settlement and hourly measurements of production and consumption of electricity. OpenGEH seeks to help utilities to onboard increased levels of renewables by reducing the administrative barriers of market-based coordination. By utilizing a modern DataHub, built on a modular and microservices architecture, OpenGEH is able to store billions of data points covering the entire workflow triggered by the production and consumption of electricity.

  [...]

  Initially built in partnership with Microsoft, Energinet

• HTML Emails: A Rant

  I’ve wanted to share these thoughts for a while, but stitching them into a coherent piece of writing seemed too much to overcome. However, with some prodding I decided to go ahead and hit “publish”.

  I’ve been in the world of HTML emails lately so the wounds are still fresh — maybe too fresh. Perhaps these are more feelings than thoughts. But I don’t care, it’s how I feel.

  Maybe you do too.

• Vincent Bernat: ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup: Akvorado

  Here are the slides I presented for a ClickHouse SF Bay Area Meetup in July 2022, hosted by Altinity. They are about Akvorado, a network flow collector and visualizer, and notably on how it relies on ClickHouse, a column-oriented database.

• Firefox Nightly: These Weeks In Firefox: Issue 121