Luis Villa

Programmer turned lawyer and community guy.

Current: Sonarsource, Creative Commons, OpenET, California HDF, 415/94110, dad.

Previously: Tidelift, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Open Source Initiative, GNOME, LegOS, Duke, 305/MIA, more.

Home + about me: https://lu.is
OpenML newsletter: https://openml.fyi
Work: https://sonarsource.com

Public Key

npub1zr7al5mjf2kq7vpddk4wkegqnnpk79y3jvp6vtkqr6fkvrhlke7qaezzng

NIP-05 Address

luis_in_brief_at_social.coop@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspplwl6dey4tq0xqkkm2htv5qfesm0zjgexqax9mqpaymxpmlmvlqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsum7ask

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1zr7al5mjf2kq7vpddk4wkegqnnpk79y3jvp6vtkqr6fkvrhlke7qaezzng

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Last Notes

2026-10-14 04:21:36 UTC

Downloaded 10,000 citations from recent English Wikipedia Good Article candidates and their non-English same-topic counterparts.
Only 61% fetchable, between 404s, paywalls, botwalls, etc. Not great.

2026-10-08 14:18:32 UTC

I am tiring of explaining to Wikipedians that WMF is in the grips of a brutal, near-textbook* innovator's dilemma. Changes to leadership and unionization may be good, but they won't fix that core fact.
* textbook requires getting undercut on price, which isn't the case here because free

2026-09-10 00:35:06 UTC

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/117241534134006167
Welp. The Omarchy thing is offensive not just because I spent a decade trying to get corporations to fund open but that’s definitely part of it for me personally.
https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/11724153413400616

2026-09-04 05:14:02 UTC

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should work now!

2026-09-04 04:58:10 UTC

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yikes, I'll fix that

2026-09-04 03:23:01 UTC

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yeah, it’s an impossible time to do strategy. Do not envy their exec team at all.
(Did I point you at https://friendsof.wiki BTW?)

2026-09-04 03:04:15 UTC

1️⃣ obviously congrats 2️⃣ lol at the board member who parroted the anti-union line that an election was necessary because anonymity would reveal something different 3️⃣ unfortunately, WMF’s morale crisis seems much deeper than a union can actually solve
https://follow.ethanmarcotte.com/@beep/117210400041826938

2026-09-04 03:04:15 UTC

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and 4️⃣ the light at the end of the tunnel is a garbage fire https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now-2-data-strikes-back

2026-09-02 18:34:05 UTC

I miss the old-fashioned FOSS drama, where if you knew someone’s three-letter initials and they were an asshole, you just called them an asshole or ignored them, and didn’t worry that (1) they were a vengeful billionaire and/or (2) that they represented the pending downfall of democracy

2026-08-17 05:12:05 UTC

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that’s wild

2026-08-11 13:26:05 UTC

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lord knows I have my challenges with Mediawiki but yeah Notion is a mess, and I've never met a block-level editor I liked. One of the biggest reasons I left wordpress after a quarter century.

2026-08-02 17:23:54 UTC

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/117026950567462473
HHI as a service, never thought I’d see the day
#note1gah…gpzp

2026-08-01 16:18:44 UTC

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oh I’m aware of all the rationalizations and excuses, because I filed a phab bug about this in … 2014? 2015? But at core they’re rationalizations and excuses that mainly serve to demonstrate where our priorities lie.

2026-08-01 04:19:39 UTC

I’d love a good think piece from one of the Wikimedia organizational sociologists on why/how the only “thank” button *that requires confirmation* is on Wikipedia, a site that nominally loves pro-social behavior.

2026-07-30 00:45:15 UTC

Spicy take: if your law firm has picked A Single AI Tool, and you can’t articulate why it was selected over other alternatives, you’re in violation of the Bar’s ethical requirement to understand the technology you use.

2026-07-26 18:03:41 UTC

The new Montmartre finish of the Tour de France is maybe the greatest spectacle in sports? Utterly wild.
(And I had to leave Paris yesterday. Only a little bitter about that.)

2026-07-13 16:44:24 UTC

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you also can't have it both ways: it's fine to want very little growth, or aim to grow only in a very specific niche - I can think of a bunch of good examples of that. But too often people say they want growth, attract other developers or users on that basis, and then ... don't want to do the hard work or compromises of growth.

2026-07-10 03:36:28 UTC

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that is counter to the experience of many fairly experienced software developers at this point, but to be fair “vibecoded” spans a lot of techniques and tools at this point too, from very sloppy to quite rigorous.

2026-06-16 14:29:16 UTC

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attn @npub1hv5…xq0v

2026-06-13 16:51:58 UTC

The best time for a European organization to start building an independent European mirror of Wikipedia, not reliant on the US or WMF, was in December 2016.
The second-best time is today.

2026-06-09 20:02:58 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.opencloud.lu/@BrideOfLinux/116721924268516654
Hi, it’s me, I’m a winner of Cyberlaw Trivia Night
#note1lcl…4xmc

2026-06-09 17:59:57 UTC

Bookshop.org is amazing because they build software for public good without accepting compromise: it has to be every bit as good as the alternatives. So I regret to inform that if you excitedly pre-order a friend’s book, Bookshop will happily let you do that repeatedly without a warning 😂
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/721/449/891/655/826/original/0cec066ebd542da7.jpeg

2026-06-08 23:10:47 UTC

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usually I try to warn people off :blobcat_weary: Sounds like you're having fun though!

2026-06-08 23:07:46 UTC

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wait I'm sorry what

2026-06-02 22:08:57 UTC

In case you needed a reminder that "progressive" has been rendered completely meaningless, here's an article claiming that a centimillionaire and Nancy Pelosi's favorite candidate are progressive, while the pro-legalization, instas-his-leather-at-Folsom, pro-transit/anti-car, pro-housing candidate is not progressive https://jacobin.com/2026/06/sf-congress-election-chan-chakrabarti

2026-05-09 02:28:07 UTC

Distinctly possible that the only thing that makes humans more accurate than Opus at Wikipedia citation checking is… being able to see and read web embeds.

2026-05-05 17:36:16 UTC

I’m trying to have lots of empathy right now for anyone trying to grab onto anything that gives them agency in this utterly disempowering time. Even if I disagree with how they’re doing it.

2026-04-23 05:36:36 UTC

New post: Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-decline-by-topic/
#wikipedia #wikimedia #llm

2026-04-19 05:45:03 UTC

New post: Career articles on Wikipedia: some scary numbers
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-career-cliff/
#wikipedia #wikimedia #llm

2026-04-19 04:40:23 UTC

Am looking at a lot of graphs of Wikipedia readership tonight and this is the only good one.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/429/528/860/516/973/original/4c9c91cc5c09e8a7.jpeg

2026-04-12 16:46:21 UTC

RE: https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/116388921310943162
Wellll boy that escalated quickly.
Ironically, the subject of my lightning talk at this event was that long-time wikipedians feel intimidated to talk about how they think we can use LLMs to advance the values and goals of the movement, which is bad for the movement because we're fighting bad-faith AI with one hand tied behind our backs.
The in-person response was positive and constructive, including many new demos of useful LLM-based or LLM-built tools. It also included "literally devoted their entire adult lives to Wikipedia" folks saying "yup, I built useful LLM tool X at a hackathon but haven't talked about it online because I know I'll get attacked".
Thanks for proving my point, I guess. :thonking:
#note16ec…p5hs

2026-04-12 00:33:19 UTC

Talked to Wikipedians about AI all day. A thing that came through loud and clear: editors are experiencing AI as an outright high-volume assault. That is related to, but much more intense than, “I tried AI in 2024 and it sucks”. People building AI tools for wikipedians have to grapple with that.

2026-04-06 15:24:23 UTC

If you’re a space nerd and wondering how the toilet can get so wrong, highly recommend “Spacesuit”. TLDR: the points at which space engineering and human bodies meet are Hard, on many levels, including “engineers often don’t think they’re hard”.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262015202/spacesuit/

2026-03-05 04:21:11 UTC

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it’s originally from CT!

2026-03-02 18:04:54 UTC

New post: Of Monsters, Men, and Lawyers
https://lu.is/2026/03/on-monsters-and-men/
#law #llms #ai

2026-02-24 06:08:35 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/116123866175660510
It’s a small detail in this thread, but it’s utterly bonkers that we’ve elevated cars over *freedom of assembly*, a right literally in the Constitution. One of the ultimate symbols of car-brained America.
#note189d…5g3m

2026-02-14 15:57:07 UTC

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my gut reaction was “but this is interesting because the enforcement model is different for PBCs!”, which led me to do a really deep dive on PBCs and…boy they’re an even bigger scam than I realized :(

2026-02-12 19:13:12 UTC

RE: https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/116059238863475827
I'm basically pro-LLM at this point, but absolutely this - the more precision we can have about this, the better. And genuinely still think it should be illegal for bot chats to use first-person human pronouns.
#note1qa9…e2tm

2026-01-26 20:49:03 UTC

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oh, interesting. Part of why I used Openverse is because it nominally includes Commons, but doing Commons separately (especially if there is a matching category of some sort) is a good idea?

2026-01-26 02:12:45 UTC

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yay! high praise.
(I keep wondering what a UX revamp of the Wikidata Game might look like...)

2026-01-25 23:55:01 UTC

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thank you for playing with it and helping build the project!

2026-01-25 22:06:27 UTC

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no, the feedback is why I shared! I'll fix that.
For "hide", are you seeing this? (it's small, subtle, so it might be there but you might have missed it?)
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/958/008/077/396/598/original/02b63c4214f06e4f.png

2026-01-25 21:05:59 UTC

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nope might be on my end, I’ll poke more in a bit

2026-01-25 20:42:10 UTC

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try now?

2026-01-25 20:19:19 UTC

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say more about "ignore this source" like... ignore all of flickr? or ignore a specific flickr user? or...?

2026-01-25 19:37:53 UTC

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now a "load more results" button.
(As you can probably guess, I'm vibe-coding the backend but there is no LLM involved in the content process.)

2026-01-25 19:02:12 UTC

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in my experiment in 2017-2018, my hit rate on getting things to stick was shockingly high. Lawyer got the most pushback. :blobcatpensive:

2026-01-25 19:00:33 UTC

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oh, I see what you did there - nice use of the "in horror" subcategory.

2026-01-25 18:59:54 UTC

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I was trying to find a good female clown! Such an obvious one!
The interesting one I want to track down is a male geisha - it's such a wide belief that there are no male geishas, but through this project I learned it was an exclusively male profession until fairly recently.

2026-01-25 18:49:57 UTC

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can I ask what article you picked to poke at? Because my one frustration so far in my own build/experimentation is that the tool is good at identifying problematic articles but bad at finding better images.

2026-01-25 18:46:49 UTC

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nope, you're just ahead of the curve! I'll fix it ASAP.

2026-01-25 18:35:52 UTC

Small #wikipedia experiment, feedback welcome from this safe-ish space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LuisVilla/ImageDiversityTool

2025-12-24 21:26:58 UTC

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it's sort of weird how little we talk about our toes, now that I think about it

2025-12-24 20:41:01 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@onlmaps/115774733448340183
Growing up weakly bilingual (my Spanish is bad) I admit that as a very young child I thought Spanish was a stupid language because of this. I had no idea it was so common.
#note1y4r…0g8n

2025-12-17 16:31:56 UTC

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is it publicly tourable? The amount of cultural goods stashed away, out of sight, by the big museums that claim to support sharing culture with the world drives me utterly mad.

2025-12-06 21:44:22 UTC

We absolutely need legal consequences for self-driving car companies, but it bothers me that so many people think human drivers face consequences for hitting people. The US legal system bends over backwards not to penalize drivers who kill, and doesn't even bother to pretend with drivers who merely maim and traumatize.
https://mastodon.social/@jmcrookston/115674707791502748

2025-11-18 01:19:36 UTC

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It’s not that the current EFF is anti-antifa, but its beliefs are still at core *libertarian* in the deep sense of “the biggest threat to human flourishing is the state, and the best way to counterbalance that is to unfetter humans” (at EFF, read: “unfetter technologists”).
Which was not an unreasonable perspective in the late 1990s! And is still not completely *wrong*. But it feels a bit besides the point when our most unfettered technologists are open monarchists and eugenicists.

2025-11-17 17:45:58 UTC

Skimming https://authoritarian-stack.info/ and wondering what an explicitly and actively anti-authoritarian/anti-tyrant, not just (civil?) libertarian, EFF would look like.

2025-11-05 01:41:43 UTC

Finally reading @npub1v85…mqcs ‘s Inventing The Renaissance and may have just described it as “what if suck.com grew up just a tiny bit and wrote a deeply scholarly history of the renaissance”

2025-09-23 14:42:13 UTC

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are you a joints half full or joints half empty person, Joe

2025-09-08 15:28:39 UTC

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it is historically very good on that scale, with active moderation and strong culture.
Though I haven’t been active for (checks notes) a disturbingly long time and I’m sure it has some lurkers who may monitor it to see what should be attacked.

2025-09-04 03:26:18 UTC

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I read a thoughtful, careful piece today that said:
“Building AI systems that serve democratic values… requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths about how power operates in technology companies”
Sooooo I guess we’re not going to be building AI systems that serve democratic values any time soon :blobcatsob:

2025-08-24 16:20:03 UTC

Are you on Masto for very eclectic weird? Yes you are, so here is @npub1hmq…tzeg doing very eclectic weird. You’re welcome.
From: @npub1hmq…tzeg
https://social.coop/@adamgreenfield/115084166276097771

2025-08-24 15:16:38 UTC

Very specific #music request: I have 20 minutes of morning PT (ugh) but I have the luxury of doing it in a lovely garden, often as the sun comes up.
What’s the best orchestral work to come into the morning with? Copland and Williams’s fanfares are go-tos but I want to branch out.

2025-08-22 14:49:30 UTC

Any S.F. privacy knowers know whether it is legal to hang a private surveillance camera on a public utility pole? And if not where one would report that to get it removed?

2025-08-12 03:06:43 UTC

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we have the power to do this
(shudders)

2025-07-19 23:46:25 UTC

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no! Not nice! I want to read the book! Now!

2025-07-19 17:57:05 UTC

🤔
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/881/188/596/032/478/original/7a2d085fb18de303.jpg

2025-07-18 05:18:55 UTC

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(Some day I need to write down the quibbles. They’re related to my somewhat quixotic belief that UNESCO should make Wikipedia the first pan-human intangible cultural heritage, and to my utterly deeply quixotic belief that the entity and servers should almost certainly be under UN jurisdiction.)

2025-07-18 05:08:04 UTC

I have some quibbles with this. But the core intuition is roughly correct and the quibbles mostly make the claim stronger, or at least more interesting.
From: @npub1ysw…06g2
https://fosstodon.org/@djspiewak/114831647604435802

2025-07-15 00:29:34 UTC

@npub1eyy…x54t or other #sf #bike folk: what’s the least terrible way to get up Potrero (specifically to the Rec Center?) I tried 23rd today and that was… oooooof. Am willing to come up it from pretty much any side. If no suggestions, probably 17th to Rhode Island tomorrow.

2025-07-07 14:14:18 UTC

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https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/we-need-to-escape-the-gernsback-continuum

2025-07-06 19:24:12 UTC

I am about 1/3rd of the way through this book. I don’t love the style but the substance… coming away so far fully convinced that Sumner should be on the pantheon. (And, tangentially, that America needs a fleshed-out pantheon around Lincoln, in order to be able to fully tell the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction as a Second Revolution.)
https://toot.community/@SharonCrockett/114802519136162083

2025-07-02 18:46:28 UTC

I have heard it said that tech people do not commission enough art.
https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/

2025-06-19 19:13:09 UTC

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yup, Tidelift got bought and I’m still with Sonar. We’re still paying developers! That work is a little quiet right now while we get situated (and ship the integrated customer-facing part of the product, here: https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/sonarqube-advanced-security-now-available/ )
I’m hopeful that as part of Sonar we’ll be able to add C/C++, which was always a blocker to supporting things like libxml in the past.

2025-05-18 00:15:37 UTC

Related: enwikifriends: is there a reason to prefer/not prefer use of interwiki links [[iarchive]] instead of just… a link to archive? Given that you have to cut a weird substring out of the URL, a URL is much faster; does anyone actually use the extra metadata provided by using iarchive: instead?
https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/114524386270158230

2025-05-08 17:05:03 UTC

This is wild. It takes a lot of traffic to move the needle at Wikipedia.
https://wikis.world/@wikipedia/114473196600149526

2025-04-19 16:06:39 UTC

❤️
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o5bmj7zjgwqmmlq5h5vwolrz/post/3lmqzbqvktc2p
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/365/484/100/900/231/original/8fef3e2657eeadf2.jpeg

2025-04-14 01:26:18 UTC

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clown high school rejects, let’s be honest

2025-04-14 01:23:33 UTC

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went and got a law degree instead? 😆 So I’m doing OK.

2025-04-13 21:51:58 UTC

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Yeah depression and anxiety (and bad timing with an advisor who left for a new uni, but let’s be honest mostly the depression and anxiety) cost me mine.

2025-04-13 21:13:09 UTC

America needs more holidays where we set fire to things (fireworks don’t count). Extra credit for burning symbolic bad things like (checks notes) customs boats.
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:su7q6jngaiyjueenbbabq43s/post/3lmpwwjvxdc2c
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/332/715/472/898/091/original/e8e8bda4ff878816.jpeg

2025-04-13 14:40:30 UTC

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Works definitely worthwhile, can’t speak to the slag.
I also found the cathedral strangely moving, though I suspect that was very specific to my mood and circumstances at the time.

2025-04-13 01:13:59 UTC

This is the sort of paper I wanted to write as my thesis: data analysis of legal forms and how they impact the longevity of commons. Unlike mine, though, it’s about water, acequia, and the state of New Mexico’s law. Great stuff. cc @npub15rs…knyc
https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1112#1-introduction

2025-04-12 15:31:34 UTC

On the plane home from three straight weeks of travel. Good trips with a mix of family, old friends, and coworkers old and new. Highlight was probably seeing the coal works in Essen. Gave me a lot of feels about labor, industry, and unintended consequences.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/325/710/010/442/787/original/fd526bed6afab965.jpg

2025-03-22 17:36:42 UTC

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and yeah, it’s a CRM but I have found it nice for reconnecting with people. My experience is that most old friends are genuinely happy for the outreach.

2025-03-22 17:28:09 UTC

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https://www.relatable.one/
It’s not perfect (and expensive) but it’s trying to get at what you want here.

2025-03-15 16:13:01 UTC

It’d be interesting to do an audit of all the deleted American government pages and see which of them can/should/don’t have #Wikipedia articles. Is anyone doing that yet?
https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/114167314994107129

2025-03-05 16:36:57 UTC

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it’s unfortunate but this is the case. Elsewhere in this thread I’ve posted at least three situations where a security researcher did proper bug filing against OOo, and then no release was done until after the security researcher had done the correct thing (waited, waited, and only then with reluctance published the vulnerability). And given that Libreoffice is doing regular security releases from a similar codebase, there’s almost certainly more.

2025-03-05 00:00:44 UTC

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Eg, the OpenOffice website could say “please don’t download this, we just do it for fun and as a result this often has security vulnerabilities. If you want an free office suite that is maintained to a high level of professionalism and security, please go to libreoffice.org”. But instead it not only encourages downloads, it misleads a banner stating “380M downloads”, giving the impression that it is an active (and presumably secure) project.

2025-03-04 22:41:35 UTC

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No, ASF has the domain and the Google/SEO juice, so they have the primary responsibility.
And to be clear they’re not actually maintaining it, since it regularly has security vulnerabilities that go unpatched for months at a time.

2025-03-04 04:49:48 UTC

It’s really really embarrassing that @npub1lpa…q3qx still distributes OpenOffice, leaving people like this schoolteacher (name omitted to spare them spam) to think it’s a maintained or viable alternative.
My casual count suggests LibreOffice has done 40+ releases since OOo last did a release.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/102/356/379/786/612/original/245b21e1b54a4332.jpg

2025-02-02 13:23:13 UTC

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Now powered partially by… Nostr?

2025-02-02 10:48:44 UTC

I would love some sort of curated feed of protest pics.
From: [@gedankenstuecke](https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke )
https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke/113931901035101572

2025-01-31 09:00:36 UTC

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This panel is spicier than any I’ve been to in a long time. Not what I expect in stuffy Brussels. Kudos to @npub15j7…gj8c for putting it together.

2025-01-31 08:59:53 UTC

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Peter from @npub16al…4u4w raises that “buy european” mandates can be in some tension with how open source is developed. (We’re certainly going to see that in the US, with “buy American” mandates being used to exclude globally-developed open.)

2025-01-31 08:58:25 UTC

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Specifically hits on the idea that Trump controlling EU infrastructure should be horrifying to Europeans. “Trump is not a blip.”
She says eight worst words you can hear if you’re a founder: “I will introduce you to DG-CONNECT”.

2025-01-31 08:56:24 UTC

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She’s blaming the focus on regulation, among other things. Also says Commission has no urgency. Gets lots of spontaneous, interruptive applause when she says there should be buy-European rules—“patriotism is not bad”.
Draghi mention #3, but not sure if it counts for a drink because she says it is just a copy and paste of the Lisbon 2000 report. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Strategy

2025-01-31 08:53:55 UTC

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Tempted to step out briefly because (1) I need a coffee and (2) I might play the Draghi drinking game, where we’ve just had a second mention.
But glad I didn’t because Cristina Caffara from [@cepr_org](https://econtwitter.net/@cepr_org ) says out loud what German dude implied earlier: “we are a colony”. She’s explicitly trying to shock, but she’s not wrong.

2025-01-31 08:48:04 UTC

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talks about the sorts of things that need to be done to make open competitive, particularly focused on the economic dynamics to support larger teams.
She’s not wrong! But boy I wish we had other ways to compete than playing purely on their terms. If “open” means “enterprise-style software and enterprise-scale businesses, but with a different licensing scheme” I think we’re not likely to win in the long-term.