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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • AnanasMarko@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlUnpopular Opinion
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    1 year ago

    Yes, I agree. And Creative Commons are a great example of peoples’ control over their work. My argument is that it wont be ‘the original artist’ who gets to interpret the licensing terms.

    If I may take your example of border patrol abusing immigrants with your software. And I’m sorry for the trivial example beforehand.

    Let’s say you put in licensing terms: “This software may not be used to endanger peoples lives and/or livelyhoods”. And software is used by both Border Patrol and the immigrants to protect/cross the border.

    Both parties come before a judge, accusing the other party of misusing your software. Border patrol says the immigrants are endangering american people with crime etc. ,and the immigrants accuse the border patrol of violent beatings.

    In whose favor would a judge decide?

    P.S.: thanks for the link. I’m a huge Tom Waits fan, and had no idea about the voice-theft.


  • While we might not agree with immigration policy and power abuse, it’s hard to put moral limitations on who gets to use our software. While the example you gave is far from trivial.

    The second we say someone can’t use our software for whatever reason, that’s the second the software is no longer truly free. It’s same with Open data.

    If you set in writing that your software can be used by anyone, then you also take away the power of those in high places to interpret the licence in a discriminatory way.











  • Yes, you are right. It’s a lot like working in IT, with special data types and some processing.

    In typical setting we basically separate the system in three layers: (1) data - file servers and databases, (2) services - Servers that read this data and offer API endpoints that programs can call, that return visualised data in form of images or individual features (see: WMS, WMTS, WFS…) and (3) User/presentation layer - the (web) applications that endusers access (think Google maps / Google Earth and similar type of apps)

    On my typical work day I work on one or more of above “layers”. Be it data aquisition, server administration, debugging services, programming end user application, or simply helping our users understand how to use the data… being in IT though means that there also are a lot of nonse meetings involved :)



  • Sure, I’d love to. It’s more ELI10 that ELI5 tho…

    It’s very likely that you or your brother played an adventure game or an RPG on your computer. When you get lost in such games, or simply want to know where your character that your playing needs to go, you open up a digital map. On that map you usually get all the information you might need - what is your current location, where your active quests are, maybe even different parts of the world, if it’s divided into ‘zones’.

    Such interactive maps are a great example of what GIS does. The town or city you live in, usually uses a similar interactive map. Instead of active quest, their system might show things like parks, points of interest like turist spots or parking spaces. It might also show how many people live in what part of the city, their average age and income.

    Beside your local municipalty, other companies or organization also use GIS. Their systems might show other (spatial) data that interest them.

    Fire department might have a system that shows historic data - where they’ve had most fires, what the current situation is and where their units are dispatched at the moment.

    Your Internet provider might have a map of their network and any issues along it. Maybe even overlay of property lines, so that they know who to contact when they’d like to expand their network and put new optical cables in the ground.

    The system that collects and shows similar data as mentioned above is usually referred to as a Geographic information system. In it’s most basic definition it is a system for collecting, storing and displaying spatial data.