Ask HN: Feedback on my side project: upstreamist (thanks to pg for the name) - <AUTHOR>

Howdy
So upstreamist (see name note at end) basically scrapes the front page of HN, Reddit, and Digg and then tries to show this data in cool ways.
http://upstreamist.com
The area people seem to like best is "where first" ..this tells where an article was posted first (and where else) if it made it to the frontpage of more than one source.
I would really like to get some feedback on what else you think I should add. Here's what I've been thinking/been told:
* parallel discussions * making the data available in standard format (probably json) * do something like nowmov since I have a building list of videos that I know are popular (at least to a certain crowd). * scrape beyond a sources front page (then maybe concentrate on search?) * I have an idea for hybrid between Google Reader and Google News (but I am a news/current events junkie...).
Thanks so much for reading all of this.
<comment>----- On Name:
pg gave me the name upstreamist here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319455
I was totally pumped about that and it's totally re-energized me on this project. Hopefully it wasn't inappropriate of me to reference him in the title. </comment><comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://upstreamist.com></comment>


Whatever happened to the Hurd? (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gadgetdaily.xyz/whatever-happened-to-the-hurd-the-story-of-the-gnu-os/ <comment><USER2> I always like to give the Hurd its due. It is a great lesson in motivation, ego, and effectiveness.

Motivation, because it was solving a problem that didn't need to be solved by the people working on it. Specifically they had access to other UNIX systems but they "wanted" one which was open source. Linus on the other hand was a kid without access to such operating systems and he wanted to learn about them and play with them. His motivation was to simply build something he could play with.

Egos were another interesting part of the problem, at the time the great micro kernel / monolithic kernel debate was going strong. "Big brains" were arguing one side or the other and it was an area of research. So on Hurd, what had been thrust very much into the local spotlight, if it was going to be "big" then the people working on it wanted to be "right" and arguing over what was the right way to do it consumed an amazing amount of time and energy.

And finally effectiveness. By far the most effective thing to come out of the free software project is gcc (and by proxy the binary utilities binutils). These were tools that were built so that the "real project" could be built, and as such were just re-implementing an existing thing (C and C++ compiler) which was a little more than a senior undergraduate project in most universities. But gcc was _useful_ because people could get operating systems when they bought hardware but the industry was really trying to make money by selling them the compiler tools.

So gcc/binutils came into the world with little ego (it wasn't changing the world, just re-implementing it). Was highly effective, and people were motivated to use it because it was an alternative to an expensive compiler suite. But Hurd, was no better, and significantly worse in that it was less developed than, the OS that came with the hardware that these folks bought (workstations) it was just that it had source and you probably didn't have source to the OS you were using (or you did but you couldn't share it).

Linux on the other hand, while still a toy was a better OS than MS-DOS in that it was already more 'unix like' than DOS was, and more useful than Minix because rather than just teach concepts Linus was using them to make the other parts of the OS as well. So the motivation was there to try it, Linus was not the egotistical "expert" who didn't listen to alternate ideas, and it was at least as effective an OS as MS-DOS if you didn't care too much about applications. As a result it was much more successful.

<comment><USER3> Yes, your observations make a lot of sense. You are right about the industry trying to make money by selling compiler's and development tools.

For perspective, I've programmed since well before the first personal computers. When they came out I had to buy compilers and development tools from Microsoft, Borland, and others (for the Apple systems and MS-DOS and early Windows) in order to program at home. I estimate that is cost me thousands of dollars over the years; I even had to buy Emacs-like editors so I could program on a PC. Around 1985 I bought Epsilon from Lugaru Software, its a nice Emacs-like editor still sold today!! I always wonder how profitable that product has been over the last _thirty years_.

Because I wanted do do document preparation on something other than Word I ended up buying a number of word processors (XYWrite, WordPerfect, MS Word for MSDOS); finally, I found a MSDOS markup based system by Mark of the Unicorn (which now sells high end Midi audio gear[2]). Mark of the Unicorn's markup system was based on Scribe (described in Brian Reid's influential CMU PhD 1980 dissertation[3] for which he won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award) that ran on PC's.

My first personal Unix system was a Dec Workstation, I think it cost me over $20,000 in 1990 for disk drive (maybe 300MB), monitor, and computer!! I put it to good use doing consulting and development, but nevertheless I am so so grateful to the open-source community for gcc, freebsd, linux, tex, and every other tool I use not just because it doesn't cost me as much to try out new things but because it has made it possible for people all over the world to access the power of computers.

[1] [http://www.lugaru.com/](http://www.lugaru.com/)

[2] [http://www.motu.com/](http://www.motu.com/)

[3] [http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU- CS-81-10...](http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/scan/CMU- CS-81-100.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article's a little dated. Just for the record, work on the Hurd continues: [https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/](https://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm far more interested in why his girlfriend Alix changed her name after she and Stallman broke up. :)

<comment><USER6> Nothing special. She just couldn't come up with a proper recursive interpretation for ALIX. Now she is called MIRIAM (= MIRIAM Isn't RIchard's AnyMore).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, microkernel's promise is to have a bigger part of the system in userland. But isn't that what happens around Linux as well, over time? I'm not deep enough into that topic to name reasonable examples but I remember to have heard something like "A can now be savely run in userland." "B can be configured to be run in userland or the kernel." etc. Am I interpreting these kind of statements correctly?

In my opinion software is a fluid thing. No matter what the design decisions where if some change is necessary over time it will happen. So despite being an idealist (and therefore wishing for a more idealistic kernel as well) I don't feel bad about Linux making these decisions early on at all. But of course I may be wrong. Feel free to correct me.

<comment><USER8> The use of the term microkernel has stronger connotations than just having a bigger part of the system in userland. The intent was to have the minimum possible functionality in the kernel.

At the extreme this meant just resource allocation and messaging between processes. I would say that it then becomes a matter of opinion how much more one can add to the kernel before it stops being a microkernel.

The advantage of a microkernel is that it should be able to be made more robust and secure than its more monolithic cousins as the code that is, in principle, capable of taking out the whole system is small and slow moving. On that basis, saying that Linux is not considered a microkernel is a fairly safe statement.

Where I believe general purpose microkernels have struggled is in the performance of the messaging (often because of the increased access checking). More targeted uses have been successful. Probably the standout one being QNX which has been used extensively in the embedded space.

<comment><USER9> I think QNX is more famous as a real time kernel than a microkernel.

<comment><USER10> QNX is famous as a real time kernel _because_ it is a microkernel.

All the scheduling power of QNX derives directly from having _all_ non- essential code in user processes rather than in the kernel, which does only one thing and does that very well (message passing).

I've re-implemented a 32 bit version of QNX long ago, maybe one day I'll attempt to move it to the 64 bit era if I can figure out a way to automatically convert linux device driver source code to an 'administrator' (QNX parlance for a daemon). That should take the sting out of re-writing each and every driver under the sun.

I strongly believe that Linux not being micro kernel based (and not in a 'minix' sense but a real micro kernel with _all_ services as user processes) is one thing that is currently holding us back.

Many real world interactions require hard real time and with monolithic kernels you are just not going to be able to meet your guarantees.

<comment><USER11> > Many real world interactions require hard real time and with monolithic > kernels you are just not going to be able to meet your guarantees.

Lots of hard realtime systems (e.g. on microcontrollers) use a RTOS where there is even no distinction between user and system mode, thus one cannot even talk about microkernels vs. monolithic. From a software engineering architectural perspective this is not a good design, but it is very fast (thus the time guarantees you can give are smaller) and sometimes easier to guarantee runtime guarantees. And it is easier to write a RTOS where all things run in system mode (which does not imply it is easier to debug bugs or to maintain).

<comment><USER10> It is _much_ easier to develop drivers and system processes for a micro kernel because they run in isolation, you can hot re-load any one of them and if it is designed properly you can even upgrade the kernel on a running system without a reboot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > [...] Linus Torvalds had begun his project to write a UNIX-like kernel for > the IBM 386.

IBM 386? Did they mean to say Intel 386, or did Linus actually have a computer that used an IBM 386SLC, which was an 80386 that IBM designed and manufactured under license from Intel?

<comment><USER13> It means a 386 that was IBM-compatible, presumably.

Not sure there were all that many 386 systems that weren't, though I'm sure they exist...

<comment><USER14> A UK company called Jarogate had a line of 386 based CP/M machines that didn't use an IBM PC compatible architecture.

CMOS versions of the 386 also showed up in some mobile phones and other embedded systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When you name your project something that's only one letter away from "turd," that's poor UX. They should have hired an enterprise naming consultant.

</comment><comment><USER16> It failed to timely move away from MACH into the post-Liedtke world, and as a consequence it fell into irrelevance.

</comment><comment><USER17> _tl;dr_ absolutely nobody at any time has cared, because there is no reason to, and if it weren't a GNU pet project it would be a "whatever happened to" My Favourite Toy OS filed in dusty history with all the others.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not obsolete. Just illegal.

<comment><USER19> Uh, what?

<comment><USER20> Reference to Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. The characters use Hurd boxes to hack into the "Secure Hardware Environment"</comment></comment></comment>


Italian study funds 73.9% asymptomatic rate for those under 60 - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08471 <comment><USER2> Seems to me like most people (in so far as their own health is concerned) do not treat sars-cov-2 like there's a 3/4 chance that they won't even know they have it.

<comment><USER3> I was thinking that we should increase testing for people carrying antibodies.

Yes, apparently they think post-infection immunity might only last about 3 or so months. But my expectation then is that if you didn't have symptoms the first time, you probably wouldn't have much of an effect on you the next time, either. And if you are pretty much constantly in contact with it, your immune system would be continually updated.

It does seem like people who have had it should not avoid contact with the virus thereafter, in order to maintain that immunity. But I'm not an epidemiologist. So I could easily be completely wrong. Barking mad, even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that this study only looks at the asymptomatic rate: it does not attempt to determine how infectious are asymptomatic people.</comment>


Show HN: A Minimal Code Example of Using Vulkan for Computations on the GPU - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Erkaman/vulkan_minimal_compute <comment><USER2> I haven't used GPGPU in a while. Is Vulkan expected to take over from OpenCL?

<comment><USER3> OpenCL (the API) will merge into Vulkan, but OpenCL C/C++/DCompute/compute shaders (the kernel languages) will remain separate as they compile to SPIRV, which is compiled into the native binary format.

<comment><USER4> Can you explain this a bit more clearly? As I understood it, OpenCL's compute API will _look_ like Vulkan's functions and nothing from Vulkan side will change (interpreting this from the fact that Vulkan group apparently won't be involved in this merge -- according to the interview)

How will everything possibly work? Is it just that OpenCL's API will change and the libraries for OpenCL will remain the same or will the library be merged into Vulkan too? I'm just confused since the programming models are so different.

<comment><USER3> >nothing from Vulkan side will change

AFAIU Vulkan will continue in the direction it is going.

I imagine that the OpenCL API will replace the directly comparable parts of the APIs (e.g. contexts queues images/buffers) so that OpenCL will use the Vulkan "definition". OpenCL kernels would go next to compute shaders in terms of the pipeline. There of course would be some additional things added to the combined API to support OpenCL specific things (like pipes).

But alas, I am no more privy to these things than you, and the above is pure speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. This is a small code example of how to use Vulkan for compute operations. Only ~400LOC. It's pretty short, and has plenty of comments, so it should be useful for people learning Vulkan, I hope.

<comment><USER5> Might wanna open a PR to add your sample to the list of Vulkan resources too, under samples and demos [0].

[0] [https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Khronosdotorg/blob/master/ap...](https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Khronosdotorg/blob/master/api/vulkan/resources.md)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks for the tip :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has someone created a wrapper or higher-level API that takes care of some of the details for common use-cases?

For example, say I don't need to optimize my command submittal, or I just want the main device. Or maybe my common use case is a compute shader just like the program submitted in this Hacker News post. I would want a class that just exposed a simple API like runComputeShader() or something.

</comment><comment><USER7> It would be great to contribute some of this to [https://github.com/hughperkins/tf- coriander](https://github.com/hughperkins/tf-coriander) (which is a port of tensorflow to opencl). Mainline TF is not moving to opencl because of various issues - [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22#issuecomm...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/22#issuecomment-305836597)

It would be great to see a tensorflow-vulkan</comment>


If you want to build community, open your Facebook Groups API - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/29/dear-mark-zuckerberg-if-you-want-to-build-community-open-your-facebook-groups-api/ <comment><USER2> Don't build a product or company around the APIs of a company whose primary asset is its social network.

You'll be in big trouble when, on a whim, they change their mind and restrict access again.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember a similar argument when it came to FB Credits. The whole industry collapsed when virtual currency was hot. Let's hope they learn and grow this.</comment>


Ask YC: anyone know if the Olympics is broadcasting digitally? - <AUTHOR>

hi, i love sailing but it's always relegated to the 3am 10min summary slot.  does anyone know if all events this year are being digitally filmed and up for retrieval/purchase?? <comment><USER2> From NBCOlympics.com: "In addition, the site itself will offer more than 3,500 hours of exclusive video, including 2,200 hours of live streams, plus full- event replays and extensive highlights -- all free and on demand throughout the Games. Powered by MSN's Silverlight technology, NBCOlympics.com's video will allow users to further customize their experience -- whether by selecting picture-in-picture functionality, watching simultaneous views of multiple events, or setting on-screen alerts and more. This same Olympic video will also be available on mobile devices and cable VOD packages."

<comment><AUTHOR> cheers, sounds promising. hopefully us non-US mac users will have an outlet too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think NBC was going to be broadcasting multiple events online, but I might be thinking of another event.

</comment><comment><USER4> Indeed, it does suck that there is never any sailing on normal broadcast hours... I used to race Lasers but had to stop as it got way too time demanding and $$$.</comment>


Show HN: I made food – A recipe revision manager for creative cooks - <AUTHOR> http://imadefood.com/ <comment><USER2> I like it. Something you could add that would be great for bakers would be the ability to convert common ingredients between volume and weight. King Arthur Flour's website has the option for their recipes, and it's very useful since you don't have to dig for a recipe with the weights, which are better for baking anyways.

Humidity/environment affects the amount of water used in baking quite a bit, so revision history would be useful for bakers already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Thanks for the feedback, and I'll definitely add it to my list for review. You're the first to specifically request something regarding baking, and it's something I've not thought about. Have to think of an elegant way of doing conversions in the GUI, without making too much clutter, but I agree, helpful feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It'd be nice to have the recipe title in the URL. For example, if [1] was something like [2] (or something) it'd be helpful when looking at the URL for a recipe.

[1] [http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl](http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl) [2] [http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl/herbs-and- gin](http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl/herbs-and-gin)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, it's in the roadmap! Initially I wanted to make the URL's as short as possible , for sharing purposes, but I can see this would be much more beneficial. Thanks for your feedback :)

<comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be possible to have [http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl/herbs- and-gin](http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl/herbs-and-gin) redirect to [http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl](http://imadefood.com/recipe/NkgHYiLPl), or _vice versa_ , thus allowing short links when they are desired and informative links when they are desired?

<comment><AUTHOR> Much simpler than that, simply regex the route to ignore past the recipe ID. Everything after is just descriptive text. This allows both as you suggested. I'm adding this tonight along with some other updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks interesting and promising. Some suggestions:

\- a button to convert to SI units, please

\- add picture, as it's hard to choose recipe without one if you don't have a specific recipe in mind (a.k.a "what to do for dinner tonight?")

\- a very minor notice, but add blank space on the bottom of recipes, so you can scroll the last paragraph higher for better readability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good morning, and thanks for the response.

\- This is a top priority, hopefully I'll have something (albeit crude) sorted for the weekend.

\- I'm on the fence with pictures of food at the moment. I really want this focused on being a recipe manager for creators, without the clutter of being an Instagram of food. Not just another recipe "dump" to get lost in the mix. People focus on uploading filtered pics of everything, and it loses the spirit of creation. I will be adding more utilities to search for ingredients, and social aspects. But the pictures may be off in the far distance. I'll see how feedback comes in regarding it.

\- Yes agreed, lots of little quality of life stuff to be done. I'm working on it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice. Will there be ways to visualise diffs? Also having the ability to fork a recipe (own or some one else's) would be cool.

My only complaint and not wanting to sound like a grumpy old fart, but you want me to login with none of the things I would ever want to login with.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've considered the visualization of diffs, but I really, really don't want this too complex to the average cook. As far as "forking" is concerned, you CAN copy their recipe right now. There will be an indicator that says the "original recipe", with a link to the OG recipe.(I just haven't published the template yet.) The copy works, and it will be a completely new recipe associated with your profile. A simplistic visual tree of it's origins to where it ended up is a good thought though.

I understand your concern regarding the social networks, but user security is paramount to me. Especially when this is a one man crew. Dealing with local accounts is just another avenue of anguish, I don't want to deal with right now. The big guys have already invested millions in making their services bullet proof. Possibly in the future with tokens based on email alone, I'm just anti passwords. Is there another auth method you'd consider? I can certainly add just about anything that supports oAuth.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you have this up on Github? It's really cool project with a ton of potential. I'd be curious about your tech stack.

I really like the look of the UI.

I think maybe having sort of like a simple user profile like Github has, with a pic and some basic info would be good to. Along with the ability to make some recipes public and view other users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Nick,

No GitHub available, and thank you for the praise. As far as tech is concerned, NodeJS + VueJS + RethinkDB. I have a lot planned, but alas this is a one man operation, so I'll be releasing new features as quickly as possible. Certainly there is a lot to be desired regarding a more social aspect of it, but I wanted to nail down at least the core idea first. My initial intent of this was more of a private recipe manager, but I can see the appeal, as I've enabled simple "publishing" so far, which puts the most recent recipe revision on the front page. More to come for sure!

<comment><USER7> I would love it if you would open source. I would contribute! If not keep up the good work sir!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks again Nick! Really just starting to get the ball rolling with this project. The feedback has been overall positive, so the biggest tasks right now are getting users happy with some needed features, and spreading the word. I'll update this post if I have plans to open it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had submitted this a week ago without the "Show HN" tag, out of ignorance of this section being available. So apologies for the double post.

I like tinkering in the kitchen, and I've had this tumbling around in my head for a while. So I decided to bang it out a couple weekends ago. It's simply a recipe manager for people enjoy creating new recipes, and want some type of revision history during the process.

Feedback definitely welcome.

</comment><comment><USER8> That's cool! I would use this. I love to cook but rarely follow recipes and love to tinker.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the idea, and I hope you find it useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is the best way to contact you? I am working on another food related website and could see some possible integrations.

<comment><AUTHOR> email@example.com I look forward to speaking with you!</comment></comment>


EA's Tetris games will no longer be playable on iPhones and iPads - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/you-soon-wont-be-able-to-play-eas-official-tetris-game-1841155666 <comment><USER3> The article's update provides the reason:

> Last year, The Tetris Company, Inc. and N3TWORK announced a multi-year > agreement where N3TWORK will be the exclusive developer and publisher of new > Tetris® games for mobile devices worldwide, excluding China. EA's > announcement that it will retire its Tetris®, Tetris® Premium and Tetris® > Blitz games as of April 21 is a result of this agreement.

Kind of surprising they don't have recourse to rebrand/retool the game.

<comment><USER4> TTC somehow got a court ruling saying that their copyright on Tetris covers the actual game mechanics [1], so that might be legally risky.

[1] [https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris...](https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris- holding-llc-v-xio-interactive-inc)

<comment><USER5> strange I didn't think you could copyright mechanics...

<comment><USER6> You can't. The whole case rests on trade dress, a form of trademark. They clearly know what they are doing in court, with past episodes being on Nintendo's side in the past. Xio also had a terrible defense, and imo their expert witness falling flat. The evidence presented was also skewed imho, it drives me nuts every time I think about it.

I should note that it is possible to patent game mechanics, and there are various patents owned by them, and also other developers of Tetris games. None of these cover the core mechanics of Tetris however.

<comment><USER7> Any parent on Tetris would have long expired, Tetris was published in 1984.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't believe it's taken N3TWORK over six months to produce a bare-bones replacement game. It doesn't even support multi-touch, so you can't move and rotate at the same time.

I'll admit, I honestly have no idea what it takes to develop, test and launch a top-tier game for mobiles, but we're talking about Tetris. And this particular version is as minimal as it gets.

I love Tetris, so I really hope they add some cleaner skins without the odd faux 3D effect and fix the controls before their battle royale version comes out.

<comment><USER6> Their battle royale game is already available in the NZ region. The version that was just released is just a stripped down version of Tetris Royale to fill the void EA's game made. The controls absolutely need to be fixed, but in the end, I just thing touch controls are bad in general, even the EA app was not enjoyable to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pay for the Real Thing, they told me.

Eschew the clones, your pay supports the game, they said.

<comment><USER10> People say "You Get What You Pay For".

One of these days, they'll realize that isn't always a good thing.

<comment><USER11> I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

The people who paid for the game on the App Store won't end up with what they paid for.

<comment><USER10> You paid for a game which can be taken from you.

That's what you got.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This has happened before with other IOS games (Monkey Island comes to mind) and is the main reason I never buy anything from the App Store. A number of titles never got updates for 64bit either (lost treasures of infocom) or when they did asked you to pay again (GoodReader 3) so I said fuck you to that whole ecosystem a long time ago.

I use my iOS devices to read books I side-load (libgen and Calibre), read comics and listen to music I download from private trackers and to browse the web.

<comment><USER13> I find it's helpful to treat app store purchases as a convenient way to temporarily get access to something. I don't mind paying a few bucks here and there for a game - you just have to assume you're renting it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I get why they would do this if they have online services that they're shutting down, but it seems like the games ought to easily have offline modes (from the screenshots for Tetris Premium, I don't see any obvious online features). Even if they're losing the license, it doesn't seem like they should have to force the app to check in with a server, or push an update to kill the games, especially if the user paid for it.

From one user review:

> Hadn't played for quite a while, so was surprised when they announced that > after April 2020 the game wouldn't be "available to play". Turns out they > wrecked it a while back by making it so you can't play offline (why? - <USER2> > years it worked fine offline).

</comment><comment><USER15> Run Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris Classic in DOSBox.

<comment><USER16> Available here as abandonware:

[https://www.myabandonware.com/game/tetris- classic-1j3](https://www.myabandonware.com/game/tetris-classic-1j3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm surprised this is possible. I was expecting as soon as an app is installed on a device (android, iOS, etc.) No-one can tamper with it (except via update). I guess that means Apple could, if they wanted, delete apps from people's devices!

<comment><USER18> The problem is that it's not just Tetris, but probably backed by a service which provides various in game features. Since they won't be able to sell the game or collect in app purchase revenue, they've likely decided to shut down the servers.

Apps may be able to delete apps remotely (I believe their mobile device management tools allow companies to push policies like that[0]), but to my knowledge has never done so. Amazon has pulled books back from people's Kindles and many platforms have removed content from being redownloadable.

0 - [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/r...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/remove_an_app)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How hilariously dystopian. You can expect this behavior to get worse and worse until we have decent digital consumer rights laws.

<comment><USER6> Tetris is preparing our children for a lifetime of virtual labour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This same thing also happened with tetrisfriends.com. It sucks because they took all of the game modes that you could play for free and then are willing to sell them back to you in Tetris 99.

Also I don't really follow any Tetris forums or anything so I don't know how people reacted when it shut down but I was amazed it shut down since they sold mtx skins and I assume that they didn't transfer any of it to Tetris 99.

<comment><USER6> Tetris Friends shut down because the company that runs it (Tetris Online, Inc.) shut down. They had a fairly big library of games that was delisted from various platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why is Apple taking 30% if not to prevent app developers from remotely disabling offline software that has already been purchased? How is that not a malware update?

<comment><USER22> Surprisingly, Apple doesn't care a bit when developers fuck you.

One app that I bought on the app store for 60€ just refused to start one day if I didn't buy an additional annual subscription.

When I complained to Apple, they just told me to contact the developer.

They take 30%, but they don't care one bit if what they sold you actually works.

<comment><USER23> I tried to find an iOS habit tracker the other day, but eventually failed because I can't tell what the actual cost will be, it's all In-App-Purchase at this point.

Now add that you can't even be sure that apps you "purchased" will continue to be available.

The app store model is broken, there's also zero chance that I will buy anything from any app store anymore. I'll download free apps that solves a problem, like buying a bus ticket, but that's about it.

Apple does give a crap about the quality of their app store, as long as there's no porn and you both directly steal, they simply do not care.

<comment><USER22> I think a big problem is that Apple puts all the maintenance effort on developers. On iOS, developers have to update apps at least once a year to make sure they keep working.

On the Mac, as on Windows, you could just keep using an old app for years. It didn't matter if the developer bothered to update their app for the latest OS, you could generally just keep using apps that you bought years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is crazy. All the star wars games that were previously licensed by one company or another can still be played. Why is Tetris different?

<comment><USER25> _In August 2008, Apple Inc. removed Tris, a version of Tetris from its online App Store. The software author had written a tetromino game for the iPhone iOS without authorization from The Tetris Company.[12] In March 2009, The Tetris Company sued BioSocia, operator of the Omgpop gaming portal[13][14] because one of its multiplayer games, Blockles, was too similar to Tetris. By September 2009, Omgpop removed the game from the website and replaced it with an alternate that the developers created, based on Puyo Puyo.

In May 2010, lawyers representing The Tetris Company sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notice regarding Tetris clones available for Android.[15] Google responded by removing the 35 games listed in the notice as it was legally obliged to do, even though, according to one developer, the games contained no references to Tetris.[16][17][18]

In February 2011, The Tetris Company continued to make copyright claims against independently developed Tetris clones, most notably against Tetrada on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The developer, Mario Karagiannis, rejected the claims of copyright infringement on the grounds that copyright does not cover gameplay design, but still removed the game, citing lack of resources to fight what he called "bullying".[19][20]

A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012, that the Tetris clone Mino from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks.[21]_

Why is this still going on in 2020? Is the copyright on a falling blocks game concept never going to expire? This is a poster child case for why current copyright law is harmful to everyone.

<comment><USER26> Presumably the copyright will expire sometime around 2079.

<comment><USER25> Under mickey mouse act, there's no reason to believe it will ever expire.

Whole thing is rotten to the core. Megarich proponents arguing that copyright in its current form encourages competition is about as laughable as megarich proponents arguing for trickle down economics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act)

<comment><USER27> Current expectations are that copyright _won 't_ be extended again.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood- says-i...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not- planning-another-copyright-extension-push/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft says security fixes will noticeably slow older PCs - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/09/microsoft-meltdown-spectre-performance-hit/ <comment><USER2> An instruction added as a curiosity / micro-optimization back in 2010 is now _very_ important.

Previously: "PCID is now a critical performance/security feature on x86" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16094349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16094349)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that it's more substantial on older CPU's. The cynic in me wonders if that's a way to force an upgrade from CPU's that normally would be fine for most typical office use.

<comment><USER4> This has absolutely destroyed Intel's reputation and handed a massive PR win to their competitors (including AMD). Hard to imagine any normal company cutting out their own feet so willingly, this will cost Intel a lot more than it will make them in short term revenue.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure how they could have come out of this cleanly other than waving a wand and not having it happen? They pretty clearly owned up.

<comment><USER6> They sat on it for over quarter and gave no indication that any sort of trouble was coming up. The CEO even sold stock and made a profit after being made aware of the issue, but before having the issue be announced publicly. I would not classify that as clearly owning up

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >>> If you're using a 4th-generation Core or older CPU, however, you'll see "more significant slowdowns,"

With server CPUs always being a few generations behind the desktop, this is gonna have massive impact on datacenters.

<comment><USER8> Heh. Have you seen the Phoronix benchmarks?

[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KPTI- Ret...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KPTI-Retpoline- Combined-Ubuntu)

E3-1280 v5 goes from 32278.00 Apache requests per second to 25399.47 Requests per second. In other words, a Skylake Xeon performs like an Fx Bulldozer after the patch. And Skylake has the PCID instruction too.

Although to be fair, static-file hosting is about as I/O bound as it gets, and these patches affect file I/O the most.

<comment><USER9> Compile time slowdown looks pretty sad too. -21% is quite bad.

<comment><USER10> Is there any idea when this will be fixed in hardware?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has Anyone Moved from Engg Head to Business Head Without MBA Degree? - <AUTHOR> Hi All, I have been a software developer and eventually becoming a manager and have approx 12 years of experience in the industry. Lately I have found myself interested in seeking position in the business side of things but I do not have a management degree to begin with. Any suggestions? please share experiences, how and when did you do it? <comment><USER2> I think a lot will come down to the local business culture and specific company cultures. One may emphasize credentials another may jump at the idea of putting a person with a technical background in a business leadership role.</comment>


Loyalty with a tinge of betrayal - <AUTHOR> http://tomtunguz.com/loyalty-with-a-tinge-of-betrayal <comment><USER2> I'm happy for the author that he enjoys Android and has reflected on that fact, but he's not making any point with that post. It doesn't really have a reason to exist. It reads like he's answering a question from someone, but redacted the paragraph of setup with the question he's answering.</comment>


Companies 'can sack workers for refusing to use fingerprint scanners' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/27/companies-can-sack-workers-for-refusing-to-use-fingerprint-scanners <comment><USER2> In any right-to-work state, a company can fire you because they don't like the color of your shoes. It may give them a bad reputation and they may find it harder to get good employees, but they can fire someone for nearly any trivial reason that does not tread on discrimination.</comment>


Oblique programming strategies - <AUTHOR> https://traviscj.com/blog/oblique_programming_strategies.html <comment><USER2> \- Write down, in paragraph form, absolutely everything I know about the problem

\- Implement it in pseudocode

\- Write the simplest code that will work end-to-end, and work outwards from there

\- Find a library that does it

<comment><USER3> Love these. Can't believe I missed "Find a library"!

<comment><USER4> Sometimes importing/depending on a library is exactly what's needed.

Sometimes importing/depending on a library means you're permanently saddled with an unmaintained, inflexible, third-party white elephant.

These outcomes are not mutually exclusive. One of my apps even has a directory called "lib/boondoggles/" because it includes so many of these. It works fine, but I will never revise it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author here, quite flattered to see the attention on HN! I would be quite open to feedback, additional mental de-blockers others have picked up, and/or requests for clarifications that I could expound upon. :-)

<comment><USER5> I was introduced to the Creative Whack Pack in college. It does come in handy. I think it predates Eno's version.

[https://creativewhack.com/product.php?productid=64](https://creativewhack.com/product.php?productid=64)

<comment><USER3> Interesting!

Looks like Eno's was 1975 and CWP was '89, but I think the title+description+prompt is actually closer to what I'd originally intended to / would make if I had fleshed it out fully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I occasionally use these two:

* What would we do if there was an order of magnitude less time to solve the problem?

* What would we do if there was an order of magnitude more time to solve the problem?

This can flush out 'we would just buy/use XYZ tool/library etc.' for the first, and reveals fundamental things that we are ignoring for the second.

<comment><USER7> Ooh, a programming version of the reversal test! ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_test))

That's always been a great trick for getting rid of "this is where we are, so justify all changes" and seeing whether your problem is one of inertia or real challenges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> \- "Can we move work between query time (when we need the answer) and ingest time (when we see the data that eventually informs the answer)?"

This is quite a valuable one; it's easy to default to one or the other without really thinking. I would add to the list:

\- can I write a state transition diagram? (like the classical lift controller or vending machine)

\- how did people solve this problem in past decades? (can lead you to the wikipedia rabbit hole, but gets you away from trying to pick a solution from the fashionable set. Answers of the form "with bits of paper" are acceptable and may be useful)

</comment><comment><USER9> I would love to read a concrete example about these two:

> Think like a tree: ignore the book-keeping details and find the cleanest > representation.

> Think like a stack: zoom in to the book-keeping details and ignore the > structure.

<comment><USER10> Think like a stack - e.g. take this from Redux documentation:

"In a more complex app, you're going to want different entities to reference each other. We suggest that you keep your state as normalized as possible, without any nesting. Keep every entity in an object stored with an ID as a key, and use IDs to reference it from other entities, or lists. Think of the app's state as a database." [http://redux.js.org/docs/basics/Reducers.html#note-on- relati...](http://redux.js.org/docs/basics/Reducers.html#note-on- relationships)

TL;DR Redux docs are telling you "Think like a stack: zoom in to the book- keeping details and ignore the structure."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Love the idea, but to work effectively I believe the card descriptions have to be more synthetic / abstract, both to make them fit into more contexts and force the reader to interpret them.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree -- My original intent when I scribbled them out was to make the long ones pithier and add some personal interpretation to the short ones. Life's a work in progress, I guess.

<comment><USER12> That's almost another one right there :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> MVP validation data point: please develop this into a physical product that my wife can buy me as a birthday present.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love a lot of these. I might reference this the next time I get a sinking feeling about the path I'm taking.

Can someone explain this?

> List the transitive closure of fields in a data model. Regroup them to make > the most sense for your application. Do you have the same data model?

<comment><USER14> "Transitive closure" is basically saying which states are reachable from other states in your data model.

For example, if you have a soft-deleted field "is_deleted" in your data model, then the transitive closure from "is_deleted" is the empty set, because nothing can ever change once an object is deleted(unless you support un- delete).

<comment><USER3> Maybe this is dumb, but when I wrote this I also took it to mean the "transitive closure" of different fields of your data. So if you had a object "a" with fields "b" and "c", you'd consider "a" and "a.b" and "a.c".

There's also an interesting relation here between reaching some state "S" and having some field "s_reached". I haven't been able to fully understand that relationship, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's worth noting that original oblique strategies were invented by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in '70s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a lot of fun, thanks. I've always enjoyed the original oblique strategies, but a lot of them don't translate well from business to programming settings. These are a nice tweak.

</comment><comment><USER15> I knew I had seen something like this before - [http://kevinlawler.com/prompts](http://kevinlawler.com/prompts)

</comment><comment><USER16> The best way to solve a problem is to avoid it.

</comment><comment><USER17> \- try turning it off and on again

\- it must be a compiler a bug</comment>


Announcing Sourcegraph 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/announcing-sourcegraph-2/ <comment><USER2> Looks pretty slick! Requested early access to the editor.

I'm still not a fan of Electron apps. I'd rather they at the very least be offline Chrome apps, so then I'd at least be using the latest Blink/V8 combo. Not to mention it seems that anything Chromium-based likes to make a ton of little writes to disk for just about everything (even when I'm just moving my mouse across the page), so to have multiple apps doing that with their own respective config/cache directories is annoying.

That said, VS Code is the least bad editor running on top of Electron that I've used, so I'm glad this one is based on it. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks great. Sourcegraph is slowly and steadily making tangible some ideas that are hard to explain. Whenever I wear their shirts I get asked what they do, and I have a one-liner, but it's really hard to comprehend the scale and scope of what they're really trying to accomplish. Really looking forward to using the editor!

<comment><USER4> What is your one-liner? I haven't figured out a great way to succinctly describe Sourcegraph.

They are an interesting company and I'm positive your endorsement is genuine. It might be worth mentioning that they sponsor one of your projects just to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

<comment><USER3> I tell people they're building the global graph of source code.

People without any theoretical background will look confused, but CS people generally understand the deeper implications of this, I think.

I've been supportive of their mission for years, well before any sponsorship. My (unofficial) relationship with Sourcegraph isn't about money. We have shared values, pure and simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sourcegraph CEO here. Thanks for posting this. Happy to answer any questions here. We're really excited to start helping with the code editing and review workflow as well.

<comment><USER6> Hi! Big fan of your work here. My question is: What do you think about Kythe, the open-source version of Google's Grok ([https://github.com/google/kythe](https://github.com/google/kythe))? In the context of both your overall vision, and of strategies: Do you do things similarly? Do you see collaboration/integration there as desirable?

<comment><USER5> That's a good question. They've built an amazing system. Google and ex-Google engineers love the code intelligence/search systems that Google has, and those are powered by Kythe and related systems inside Google. At a product level, many ex-Googlers miss those systems in their new companies and fill the gap by setting up Sourcegraph internally.

Tech-wise, Kythe is optimized for offline analysis, and we use servers that speak LSP ([https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server- protocol](https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol)), which is built for online analysis and use while you're editing code. That is what I see as the main difference. We would love for the approaches to converge, or for the representation/configuration to be compatible.

<comment><USER7> I think online analysis is the way to go, for those of us using non-google- sized codebases. Of the many tools I feel programmers are missing in order to clean up the mess we're making, Sourcegraph is trending towards several of them - keep up the good work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Sourcegraph Editor is a fork of vscode? Is it not possible to implement it with an extension? Happily would install an extension but i'm not sure whether i would switch the editor

<comment><USER5> Sourcegraph CEO here. The Sourcegraph Editor features (on [https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor](https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor), plus other things on the roadmap that aren't on that page) are currently not possible to build as an extension.

One of two things will happen, assuming we build a great product (which is obviously our intent :):

1\. We will prove that these features are valuable, and VS Code and other editors will eventually add support (or extensibility) for them. Then we could just ship extensions. Everyone wins. And our customers and business do well because we have a great server product for companies needing to scale up code intelligence and code reviews beyond what can run locally—the backend for all these editors that now support these new code intelligence and review features.

2\. We'll prove these features are valuable, but other editors don't add them (or the extensibility to support them). Then we'll continue shipping a first- class standalone editor with support for these features, and developers who need these features will use that editor. The world will have one additional editor. For developers that don't use that editor, we'll build lightweight extensions for other editors with some of the functionality (and that make it easy to jump to our app from other editors).

I don't know which will come true, but I do know that either way, we as a company need to demonstrate that these things are valuable to developers in their editor. That's what we're focused on now. :)

<comment><USER9> What are your thoughts on editor preferences for developers? If a company wanted to adopt Sourcegraph wouldn't they need to force all their devs to use the Sourcegraph editor? What if half of the team used Jetbrains and the other half VS Code?

<comment><USER5> We were worried about this initially, too. It turns out that the features are valuable enough that developers are willing to use Sourcegraph as a separate search and review tool even if they don't use it as their main editor. So you can use IntelliJ for day-to-day editing and Sourcegraph for code review and search.

Perhaps we should make that explicit: "Whether you use it as your primary editor or just for searching and reviewing code, ..."

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the reply. The form factor for code-review and commenting were standout features for me and i'll definitely check out the process.

<comment><USER5> Also, you can set up Sourcegraph Server ([https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/server](https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/server)) and then everyone gets the core features on all your company's code in their web browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love VS Code, but I have a hard time understanding what this does, is this an additional way to manage my repositories or my commits? Or does it cross- reference and access my dependencies?

<comment><USER5> Sourcegraph CEO here. Sourcegraph Editor is an editor built on VS Code that adds 3 main features that make it useful for searching and reviewing code as well as editing code. Two of them are what you mentioned: (1) it connects to your code host so you can more easily search for and open repositories (it automatically clones them if needed), (2) it can do find-references, etc., across many other repositories, not just your current or local repositories. And (3) is built-in code review and comment capabilities.

Check [https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor](https://about.sourcegraph.com/products/editor) for more information, or just post back here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That looks like a pretty underwhelming "coming soon" announcement to me.

I personally really like the ideas behind Sourcegraph, but as someone who had the extension installed for a long time, until I removed it recently when it got more in the way than it was helpful for the 100th time, all I've seen so far from Sourcegraph has been pretty disappointing.

<comment><USER5> Sourcegraph CEO here. Sorry to hear that. Re: the announcement, we will have more to show as the private beta and public beta of Sourcegraph Editor progress. I hope we can impress you then.

As for the Chrome extension getting in your way, I followed up over email to learn more. I want to make sure we fix it ASAP so you find it valuable. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome work!</comment>


Yahoo Tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.yahoo.com/tech/

<comment><USER2> This is actually pretty interesting site. The prose is really down-to-earth (easy for non-tech types), the videos are high-quality productions (at least the ones that I clicked through). It helps that the site is fun to use.

Really hope this catches on.

<comment><USER3> Re: "videos are high quality productions" \-- the video resolution is atrocious though. It looks to be 360p resolution (go full screen to see true ugliness).

Also that "Yahoo tech" jingle/gag in the intro video got annoying very quickly.

I also found it amusing how the search feature for the Yahoo tech site is "coming soon".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Was looking for a description of how Yahoo! runs its tech stack, found this...</comment>


Word2vec: Fish + Music = Bass - <AUTHOR> https://graceavery.com/word2vec-fish-music-bass/ <comment><USER2> So. Could anyone explain _why_ it is doing that?

My (very rough) intuition to what w2v does is that it associates each word with a point in a space, then moves the points around so that their distances roughly correspond to how often they are used together with similar other words. (I.e., two words that both are often preceded by "It happened in" would be put close to each other, while words occurring into very different sentences would be placed further apart.)

I can see how this could give some semantic meaning to _clusters_ of words - however, I'm still baffled as to why it gives meaning to _directions_ within the vector space.

I also wonder how consistent it is. Seems to me it would be interesting to investigate the directions further. E.g., are all of them meaningful? What happens if I slightly rotate or scale a direction? How much transformation can I apply before it changes its meaning?

Are there more complex shapes in the space that also have meaning?

<comment><USER3> The "trick" is that word vectors are just projections of sparse tensor.

For example the word "queen" can be represented by its attributes. Representing in triplet form from wikidata Q16511993 (queen, subclass ,monarch),(queen, subclass, female),... A king would be (king, subclass ,monarch),(king, subclass, male),

Transitioning from queen to king is just changing an attribute in this triplet space, i.e removing a triplet and adding another. All those operations are linear. And then you take the projections.

This is kind of similar to the kernel trick of SVMs. You do the calculations in a lower dimensional space (word vectors) but implicitly you are doing them in the higher dimensional space (graphs of relations, aka triplets lists).

<comment><USER4> The sparse tensor perspective intrigues me, could you perhaps provide me with some references?

<comment><USER5> that person's description is unnecessarily jargony. sparse tensor just means vector that's mostly zero and has some ones. take your corpus of concepts and number them 0 to n-1. then each word you want to turn into a vec turns into a vector that has ones for concepts it's associated with and 0 elsewhere. learning that association is what word2vec does.

<comment><USER6> Can you explain attention in this same way?

<comment><USER5> nah i don't know much about LSTM but this looks like a fine tutorial

[https://towardsdatascience.com/intuitive-understanding-of- at...](https://towardsdatascience.com/intuitive-understanding-of-attention- mechanism-in-deep-learning-6c9482aecf4f)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These analogies need to be taken with a grain of salt. For instance, king - man + woman actually returns king (since woman - man ~= 0). It's only queen when you ban the words king, man, or woman (since the embeddings of queen and king are close).

See Ian's tweet [https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/113352818965167718...](https://twitter.com/goodfellow_ian/status/1133528189651677184) or the linked paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.09866.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.09866.pdf) for more information.

</comment><comment><USER8> The bass/bass confusion seems to have permeated Chinese machine translation, as a search for 低音魚 (literally "low frequency fish") will show.

Another amusing one there that shows a similar ambiguity is: pig : oink :: mouse : keypress

</comment><comment><USER9> The typo in "pig : oink :: Fred Flinstone : wassup" bothered me, but even "Flintstone" doesn't produce the "Yabba dabba doo" that Woody Woodpecker (!) produces: pig : oink :: Fred Flintstone : mumble mumble.

If you're wanting to try it, you need about 6GB of RAM free.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm trying to replicate this on my Macbook and it's causing a lot of lag, and taking a long time. Anyone else have this issue, or might be able to help me debug this? I'm assuming I just don't have enough RAM (I only have 8GB here)?

<comment><USER9> It took several minutes to load off my old SSD, and took 6GB just to load the data. Trying out a bunch of word combinations pushed it up to ~9GB I think. So yeah, it seems like you just don't have enough RAM.</comment></comment>


Steering Council Nomination: Emily Morehouse Challenged - <AUTHOR> https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-emily-morehouse/686 <comment><USER2> Whether or not the criticism is justified, shutting down all criticism of a female applicant with explicit accusations of misogyny and trolling is wrong. The guy is literally banned and his thread of comments moved on the basis that he dared to criticize a female applicant.

It's also surprising that this got buried with no upvotes and no comments, was it mod-nuked?

On the political level, (putting aside whether gender is actually a factor in this specific case)- I actually don't mind diversity hires in situations like this where you have some sort of representative body. What sticks in the throat is the attempt to have it both ways. When people in power make statements that X (objectively less qualified candidate) is equally qualified as the other candidates, and that ALSO criticizing female candidates is disallowed and they have better "perspective", it's dishonest which normally leads to trouble.

Decisions should be transparent, if gender is going to be a factor, whichever side of the debate you sit on that should be made transparent, and disallowing criticism is obviously a bad idea.</comment>


Scapegoating free software's failures - <AUTHOR> https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/11/17/VC-Shill.html <comment><USER2> They mention it in one of the lines of this blog, but apparently this individual (perhaps with the help of others, it wasn't clear) has come up with two of their own software licenses, with a website and everything.

[https://guide.licensezero.com/](https://guide.licensezero.com/)

> The Prosperity Public License (Prosperity) works a bit like a Creative > Commons NonCommercial license, but for software. Prosperity gives everyone > broad permission to use your software, but limits commercial use to a short > trial period of 32 days. When a commercial user's trial runs out, they need > to buy a private license or stop using your software.

> The Parity Public License (Parity) works a bit like AGPL, but requires users > to release more of their own code, in more situations. Parity requires users > who change, build on, or use your work to create software to release that > software as open source, too. If users can't or won't release their work, > they need to buy a private license that allows use without sharing back.

I'm one of those folks that usually defaults to AGPL for their open source work for practical reasons - it's much easier to go from a copyleft license to a permissive one due to circumstance than the other way around. However, I always found it a bit strange that there were dozens of variants of the MIT and BSD license out there, but aside from the GPL and MPL no other popular license really took up the mantle of copyleft, aside from perhaps the old Sleepycat license.

This looks like a very appealing license on its face, but the fact that it's specifically _not_ written in legalese is a little weird, though the fact that the author is a lawyer is some reassurance.

<comment><USER3> > _limits commercial use to a short trial period of 32 days. When a commercial > user's trial runs out, they need to buy a private license or stop using your > software._

So it's clearly not Free Software because it doesn't respect freedom 0. Hardly a surprise that Bradley Kuhn and the FSF object to it being classified as such.

This is hardly a failure of "free software", just the author wants to try to subvert the definition which the FSF has long established. Maybe the author should try calling it something completely different (I suggest "trialware") and then the FSF wouldn't be bothered.

([https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free- sw.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html))

<comment><USER4> I've never presented Prosperity, the noncommercial form, as free or open source. The debate was about Parity, the strong copyleft form.

<comment><USER3> Why not simply use the GPL?

<comment><USER5> The GPL has always been criticized for its definition of distribution, which allows companies to host SaaS offerings of GPL software without having to make their modifications available.

Hosting a GPL-licensed server and receiving network activity does not constitute distribution, which is why the AGPL exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While this article's tone is somewhat angry and personal, it makes some quite interesting points and takes a perspective that I've never heard before.

Before reading the article I was tentatively in favor of more expansive copyleft licenses such as Mongo's SSPL, for various reasons. But I hadn't considered something implied by that position, which this article says directly: The FSF and what one might call "mainstream copyleft" are aggressively defending corporate interests by attacking such licenses. Perhaps they (the FSF et al) don't do it intentionally, but that's nevertheless their effect...

<comment><USER7> I've thought this for years: the aggressive defense of super liberal OSS licenses with no sort of "SaaS clause" or other limits turns FOSS into free labor for SaaS companies.

SaaS is more closed than closed: you control nothing, not even your data, and can trivially be spied on and monetized in other questionable ways. The fact that some of the pieces of a SaaS site are open source is meaningless and changes nothing.

If all code must be free "as in beer" for all uses then this kind of SaaS (paid or "free" and paid for via surveillance capitalism) is literally the only possible business model. Well that and traditional 100% closed. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are fine with that.

<comment><USER8> Just as a side note, "free labor" is common and not necessarily a bad thing. Whenever you give someone a gift, whatever work you did on it is effectively free labor. You could also think of donations to charity that way when you fund them out of your salary, not to mention volunteering.

It's true that often people don't want to do that, though, and this is certainly understandable.

<comment><USER7> I don't want to give free gifts to surveillance capitalist companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I recently developed a new vegan dish that addresses some of the practical problems with veganism as a whole by using bugs as a substitute protein source. Very promising, but these critics keep on attacking me, claiming I can't call my product vegan because "technically" it uses animal by-products.

And I think this shows why the vegan community organizers and primary advocates are actually anti-innovation. If the vegan movement wants to actually achieve its ideals, we need to reject the old guard that ideologically insists that no vegan dishes can contain meat.

<comment><USER10> Your dish isn't vegan though. It may be an improvement over eating meat, but it still creates suffering for living creatures. I don't know why you need so strongly to apply the "vegan" label to whatever your dish is, especially when it seems to involve literally eating "meat" from insects. Just call it "sustainable omnivorism" or something.

<comment><USER9> Now take the same reaction you just had, and apply it in the context of Kyle's post.

> _When I wrote a strong copyleft license for dev tools, the FSF faithful > objected. Why wouldn't a movement best known for dev tools and software > freedom want a copyleft license that requires devs using dev tools to make > their work free?_

Because it's not Free software. It may be an improvement over proprietary software, but it's still restricting user freedom. Just call it "Source Available" or something.

<comment><USER4> Why aren't SSPL, API Copyleft, Parity, CAL, and Icepick free software licenses?

GPL restricts my freedom to build and share closed applications with free libraries, in order to prevent the creation of closed software that restricts others' freedom.

AGPL restrict my freedom to build and share network applications as closed software with free code, in order to prevent the creation of closed software that restricts others' freedom.

Why can't a license restrict my freedom to build closed applications with free dev tools, in order to prevent the creation of closed software that likewise restrict others' freedom?

<comment><USER9> The licenses you mention are not Free Software licenses because restricting what people _do_ with their software (and not just how they share it) violates rule 0.

> Why can't a license restrict my freedom to build closed applications with > free dev tools, in order to prevent the creation of closed software that > likewise restrict others' freedom?

It can.

If just won't be a FOSS license by the traditionally understood definition of FOSS. For better or worse, the Free Software definition guarantees more freedom around end-user usage than it does around how you distribute software.

And maybe you think that's an arbitrary distinction. That's fine. You can build anything you want. You could build your own "Software Equality" or "Extended Copyleft" movement, or whatever you wanted to call it. Maybe it'll be even better than FOSS. The only thing you can't do is confuse people by calling your licenses something that they're not.

Nobody is upset that SSPL, API Copyleft, Parity, CAL, and Icepick exist. They're all fairly interesting licenses. I'm glad that they exist. Just stop trying to co-opt a movement and blur lines that have been clearly understood for years.

<comment><USER4> > It just won't be a FOSS license by the traditionally understood definition > of FOSS. For better or worse, the Free Software definition guarantees more > freedom around end-user usage than it does around how you distribute > software.

I appreciate your frank admission of the distinction, but I have yet to hear a good defense of it that both rests on something other than "that's the way we said it is" and doesn't trap GPL or AGPL.

The understanding you describe exists, but I can't agree that it's broadly shared or accepted. If there's a tradition, it belongs to a very narrow tribe. That tribe isn't growing particularly fast precisely because its tenets are so esoteric and don't stand up to typical hacker interrogation by those not thoroughly marinated in the political history. That's the "byzantine, insular ideology of copyleft" I mentioned in the blog post.

> The only thing you can't do is purposefully confuse people by calling your > licenses something that they're not.

I can call it open, and I do. Folks may hear both your view and mine, but the result isn't confusion. It's a choice.

There is no proprietary right in the terms "free software" or "open source". And there is no good reason for those presently ill served to pretend those ill serving them enjoy such a right. When a better mousetrap comes along, the designer of the last model doesn't get to pull the words "mouse trap" out of the newcomer's mouth. As in software, so in licenses: lead, follow, get out of the way, or get run over. When I follow my people to a license problem, I try my best to lead with solutions.

> Nobody is upset that SSPL, API Copyleft, Parity, CAL, and Icepick exist.

I'm glad to hear you say so, but I've received lots of feedback from people who are upset. And not just because "license proliferation". Have a look at the OSI license-review archives ... though I don't generally recommend that.

> The licenses you mention are not Free Software licenses because restricting > what people do with their software, and not just how they share it, violates > rule 0.

Making changes and building applications are things that people _do_ with software, ways that people _use_ software, in common parlance. The only folks I know who want to split that hair aim to defend FSF's free software definition. That definition was largely a post hoc rationalization designed to alleviate the cognitive dissonance between the increasingly libertarian, permissive bent taking over open source ideology via OSI/ESR and the overt prescriptivism of GPL. OSI revels in permissionlessness and an idealized, rules-free environment. GPL is full of rules.

It was politically expedient to draw a line around GPL and say "no rules, except these rules, because we need these people as allies". Not rigorous. Not otherwise coherent.

> Just stop trying to co-opt a movement and blur lines that have been clearly > understood for years.

That movement hasn't moved in some time. The initiative is out of initiative. There is no widespread understanding of the details we're discussing. We are both rarefied wonks.

The movement you seem to think I'm coopting was itself coopted. Open source "won" by giving software freedom to developers who don't pass along to end- users in turn. I don't apologize for writing copyleft licenses that eschew the compromises of the earlier forms. Especially in light of their performance to date.

<comment><USER9> > That definition was largely a post hoc rationalization designed to alleviate > the cognitive dissonance between the increasingly libertarian, permissive > bent taking over open source ideology via OSI/ESR and the overt > prescriptivism of GPL.

This is... a view of that debate, and to be fair it's not necessarily unfounded. But let's assume it's 100% accurate.

Would you say that debate was a good thing for the FOSS movement as a whole, or was it a painful years-long argument that fractured the community and forced otherwise productive developers to waste hundreds of hours arguing with each other?

I don't understand the point-of-view of someone who looks at the GPL, says, "that exception was an arbitrary compromise" and then concludes, "let's add _more_ arbitrary compromises."

> I don't apologize for writing copyleft licenses that eschew the compromises > of the earlier forms.

I'm not asking you to. I just don't see why that has to involve attacking a tribe that is resistant to fundamental changes of this sort, and that is perfectly happy with its current growth and direction. I don't see what any of that has to do with your ability to build or promote new licenses, and I don't see why the narrow nature of the FOSS tribe means that suddenly we shouldn't be free to create our own terms that accurately and narrowly describe what we stand for. Say what you want, brand dilution is a real thing, and you are causing it.

And what possible benefit could there be to having this argument? Call your licenses Copyleft++, or Shared Source, or Liberty Licenses, or Social Good Licenses, or Share Alike. You say that you're not trying to co-opt a movement, but I don't understand what benefit you could ever gain from going to war with the existing FOSS community other than to seize on the existing expectations of users who feel like they already understand and can trust what FOSS software is and how it acts in the real world.

> When a better mousetrap comes along, the designer of the last model doesn't > get to pull the words "mouse trap" out of the newcomer's mouth.

No, of course not. But if you build a bear trap and start advertising it as a mouse trap, I'm going to call you out on that. You can say the distinctions that we have are arbitrary, you can say that the community is small, you can say that we're dumb for holding on to them, you can say that most people want a new movement that's more receptive to their specific goals, you can say we're ineffective. Fine. But the distinctions still exist, and they allow us as a community to precisely describe ourselves, and we have used them for years, and you don't have the right to arbitrarily take them away.

If you think you can build a better movement, and you obviously think you can, then _go build a better movement._ I have no objection at all to different communities approaching user freedom from different angles and philosophies. I welcome that, the more the merrier. I would genuinely, sincerely love to see more alternatives to the FOSS movement spring up, because I admit that the FOSS movement can't address everyone's needs on its own.

It's especially fantastic to see lawyers getting involved, because there's a huge, real need for more variety of pre-built licenses that devs can safely adopt, and there are a very small number of people who are both advocating for user freedom and equipped to build those licenses. It's really, really good. Just stop saying that it's FOSS.

<comment><USER4> Enjoying this conversation!

> I don't understand the point-of-view of someone who looks at the GPL, says, > "that exception was an arbitrary compromise" and then concludes, "let's add > more arbitrary compromises."

I don't think we should carve more ugly exceptions into a bad rule. I think we should have a better rule that better serves the underlying purpose. Specifically: license conditions that require developers using open source to build software to contribute their own work alike ought to be welcomed, no which kind of "use" as we slice and dice that term triggers the obligation. In FSF-speak: copyleft can regulate exercise of freedom 0 and freedom 1 as well as freedom 2 and freedom 3, to the same end, adaptable for both activist and pragmatic business use.

> I just don't see why that has to involve attacking a tribe that is resistant > to fundamental changes of this sort, and that is perfectly happy with its > current growth and direction.

Because that resistance to change creates and perpetuates restraints that prevent developers from addressing pressing, practical problems. Embedded library developers have recognized license choices at hand to keep their work free, or to dual license. Service library developers do not. Distributed- application developers have established license choices to keep their work free or to dual license. Developer toolmakers do not. And so on.

Intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously, the old-guard posture picks winners and losers. No picking losers, then claiming to represent them.

> going to war with the existing FOSS community

I'm not at war. But there is no singular FOSS community to go to war with. And again, doctrinal specifics---like being able to rattle off the four freedoms from memory---aren't characteristic of any broad set. They're common knowledge only among a particular cohort of developers who came into open practice in particular ways at particular times. I suspect that includes both of us, but not nearly everyone. It took me way too long to internalize that.

For example, I published a noncommercial software license a while back and took great care _not_ to present it as "open source". Many of its early adopters did anyway. When I reached out to them to warn of the feedback I thought they should expect, the answer was often "nobody I code with cares about any of that". I'd send them the Open Source Definition or links to fsf.org. No awe. Lots of good questions I couldn't answer.

That was my experience with the maximal-copyleft license and OSI, too. After a number of weeks, I had to report back that approval didn't seem likely, but that I didn't feel I could make a strong case why in any but political terms. The developers I thought I was serving by taking the debate for the team responded, almost unanimously: "We don't care. I know open source, and it's open source. Why are you wasting your time on that process in the first place?"

> But the distinctions still exist, and they allow us as a community to > precisely describe ourselves, and we have used them for years, and you don't > have the right to arbitrarily take them away.

Sure I do, but not arbitrarily.

I believed as you do, that FSF and OSI definitions represent rigorous, legal- flavored standards. Having actually dove into them now, the only precision to take away is false precision. Without linking you to a bunch of long blog posts: The OSD is a fork of DFSG, which OSI holds out as a technical standard, but Debian never did. When the text actually met many eyeballs under OSI, the org ended up making a bunch of hasty changes and commentaries to stem the tide of hackers reading it to exclude GPL. Twenty years later, I still saw comments on OSI's mailing list to the effect that the nondiscrimination criteria prohibit copyleft---more confounding than helpful. In the intervening time, OSI approved a number of controversial and just plain bad licenses. They approved stronger-than-GPL copyleft terms like OSL and RPL.

If the organizations' work in today's climate is to preserve a winners' history of open licensing circa 2000-2010, they should build that monument. Monuments don't move. Movements have to.

If "the movement" was just a tribe, you're right. It belongs to its time and place ... long past. But if "the movement" was really more than that, a set of goals beyond mere market penetration and a very niche kind of fame, the mantle belongs to those advancing those goals. Developers unhappy with where software freedom has run aground don't deserve to be marker for scorn or shorn of their "open source" identity. If that happens, they won't bend over backwards to honor open source as predecessor. They'll turn on it. New tribe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> All of the licenses this person defends have serious defects which are being ignored here. FSF saw and understood there were many weaknesses in gplv2 which is why they worked so hard on gplv3, which is the standard bearer for copy left in my opinion, including it's derivatives like a/l(gpl).

The main criticism that is valid is the "gunshy enforcement" by FSF, but if you listen to people like Eben Moglen they are very open about the fact that they have been working on the long game of getting into a position where enforcement would be effective instead of weaken the copyleft movement via a failed enforcement action, and that they have known it would take many years and even decades before the law side would catch up and be ready. I do think they need to step it up, but these are things that FSF et al already acknowledge and are working to address.

I have to admit a certain amount of conflicting views here, as I am at the same time sympathetic to entities afraid of doing work that others might then use and profit off of without contributing back (such as MangoDB claims), but I am also sensitive to claims that the licenses they are pursing could also be used as a cudgel to get more people towards paying them instead of using FOSS versions, and also to the fear of corps that SSPL could be a dangerous license if misconstrued. Which is why Mongo was dropped by RedHat, Fedora and Debian...

In general I think that (a/l)gplv3 did most of the work actually needed to solve these issues, and that attempts like SSPL, however laudable, are likely to fracture and weaken FOSS as a whole and, being incompatible with gpl, I cannot support them. There are ideas there that are important and should be discussed however.

I have put my actions where my mouth is on this issue. I have worked very hard to make the majority of my daily desktop and server stacks gpl or gpl compatible. (which means I steer far clear of mit/bsd licensed things if I can) The few exceptions are things I always keep an eye out for alternatives on.

An interesting SO on the SSPL: [https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/sspl- and...](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7522/sspl-and-the-open- source-definition)

In essence, I mark it as a sign of honest discussion when someone admits the weaknesses to their arguments. There is none of that here, ergo...

<comment><USER4> I believe I mentioned enforcement only in closing. As far as licenses go, my criticism was sharper: FSF licenses as _intended_ allow substantial bodies of activist work to benefit venture capital-backed, closed-software companies. Those intentional drafting decisions are incongruous with a post-hoc politics of VC scapegoating.

You mentioned Moglen's public writing on enforcement, and I think you summarize it fairly. But it is precisely that posture that I criticize as gunshy. The Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement lay it shorter and plainer.

The idea that the law isn't ready for GPL enforcement is laid bare by _other_ organizations' success enforcing GPLs. This has some folks within the FSF camp worried: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1mGG4JYurE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1mGG4JYurE) They are losing the power to construct and enforce their own social truth about the licenses they published.

<comment><USER11> Well, I have to admit, you make some convincing points. I feel like I have a lot of reading to do. Are there any books or even blogs that really delve into the meat of the subject you can recommend? I think there is a lot of internal criticism in FSF that doesn't get leaked due to fear of it portraying a weakness, but that needs to be talked about regardless, and you are doing that. Thanks for a balanced response.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, there's no single tome directly on point of these debates that I'm aware of. Some of these debates are very old, but some are also basically current events. I'd also be suspicious of any one point of view, including my own.

As for blogs, I'd strongly recommend all the folks mentioned in the post, all of whom I link from my blogroll ([https://writing.kemitchell.com/blogroll.html](https://writing.kemitchell.com/blogroll.html)).

Bradley Kuhn: [http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/](http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/), but see also [https://copyleft.org](https://copyleft.org), to which he's contributed extensively

Heather Meeker: [https://heathermeeker.com/](https://heathermeeker.com/)

Van Lindbergh: [https://processmechanics.com/](https://processmechanics.com/)

My own: [https://writing.kemitchell.com](https://writing.kemitchell.com)

I think I remember correctly that Bradley and Van were generally against SSPL, while Heather and I were for it. But you should ask them, rather than take my word for it!

For a more general reading list, see this one from Blue Oak Council: [https://blueoakcouncil.org/lawyer-reading- list](https://blueoakcouncil.org/lawyer-reading-list)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Frank Karlitschek (Nextcloud and Owncloud founder) has a very interesting take regarding open source and licences[1]

[1]: [https://karlitschek.de/2019/08/open-source-if-more-than- lice...](https://karlitschek.de/2019/08/open-source-if-more-than-licenses/)

<comment><USER4> Nice post. I'd say Van Lindberg's Cryptographic Autonomy License and my own Icepick License respond to a number of its concerns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > GPLv2 and v3 gave hobbyists, students, and anti-corporate hackers a means to > _feel_ as though their work resists the evil empire of the software > industry, while in fact serving it up with unpaid work product. From the VC > point of view, the GPLs break the dam on that pool of labor, flooding > venture prospects with freebie technology.

That seems concerning and deeply cynical. Mostly because I worry that it may be accurate.

<comment><USER14> I think it's silly: the idea that free software is primarily done unpaid is just a myth, as can be seen from the attendees of any major free software conference, or the commit history of the major codebases. The killer feature of copyleft is as a way for standards to propagate within industries so that duplicate work can be avoided. Any benefits that end users get are a happy coincidence.

<comment><USER15> This is certainly true for the big headline projects. For every one of those, there's a hundred small but widely used libraries or tools whose sole maintainers (or tiny groups of maintainers) struggle under the workload of keeping it going, as they do so in addition to whatever pays their bills - with no obvious route to recompense for that unpaid labour. Worse, large users of the tool or library get to make modifications without sharing them with the original author and rest of the world.

 _the idea that free software is primarily done unpaid is just a myth, as can be seen from the attendees of any major free software conference_

I'll point out that just because you mostly see delegates from big businesses to FOSS conferences, that doesn't mean this is a representative sample. It can just as well mean that the long tail of contributors isn't able to attend.

Of course, had the maintainers of the small-but-popular tool/library chosen a license under which the big corporate users were forced to contribute any local modifications back, this may in itself have prevented the popularity of the tool or library in the first place. Because for many developers and companies, using an AGPL (or even GPL or LGPL) licensed tool or library is absolute anathema.

(GPL in whatever form of course does not help with financially compensating independent developers, so it wouldn't fully solve the problem.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Despite all the points the author tries to make, he forgets to mention the most important one: license proliferation is not a positive thing for people who care about software freedom. He's responsible for proliferating, and I hope it stops. Lack of innovation in licensing isn't the problem. Corporate greed is.

<comment><USER4> The licenses I've contributed to don't rehash old licenses. They represent new choices. Some patch holes in old forms. Some break new ground.

If "license proliferation" means something even stricter, like "no new licenses, even if they do new things", there's no good argument for it as a policy, other than protecting those currently "winning" who fear change. Database proliferation is not killing software. Nor is framework proliferation or markup language proliferation or programming language proliferation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just my opinion, but the author sounds like a corporate shill (I realize he is a VC): " The old, creaky pillars of the free software movement need convenient scapegoats, because the facts on the ground raise serious doubt about the effectiveness of their leadership and the byzantine, insular ideology of copyleft they impose."

The state of software development and benefits to society from FSF licenses are, I believe, manifest.

I also support other open source licenses, I am not criticizing them, I am merely defending FSF licenses.

I guess that my personal bullshit meter gets tripped up when something is an attack rather than a balanced discussion.

<comment><USER18> > _corporate shill (I realize he is a VC):_

[citation needed]

Your comment seems more to prove his point than refute it.

<comment><USER17> The header said "Venture Capital Shill", so I thought I was using a term he self identified with. Maybe I was wrong about that and it is just the title of the article.

<comment><USER18> You literally quoted part of the section that describes that the author considers that label an unfair attack made to allow people to ignore his arguments. And then used said label to attack him and ignore his arguments.

The article is worth reading more carefully, even if you don't agree with him.

<comment><USER19> I read the article as carefully as I could given its style and I think the author is injecting the negative sentiment by self abasement to give himself license to anger, etc.

The GPL was written by an institutional employee that was upset by VC backed plans to co-opt internal software and turn it into a profit vehicle. In that context the compatibility of everyone's interests but VC interests make perfect sense.

The claim that copy left is failing and byzantine are haberdash. That many people don't understand GPL and that it is succeeding in its direction and not the one they assumed is an argument that could be made and should at a minimum be significant to VCs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So if I want to write an OSS library that can't be used for monetary gain, what license do I release it under? AGPLv3?

EDIT: Actually, I misspoke, since monetary gain isn't the problem. I should have said "used against user freedom", but that's much less well-defined. I want a license that is as "open" as possible, for whatever definition of "open".

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say as strongly copy left as possible, although that will inevitably bring with it some restrictions for users. Parity ( [https://paritylicense.com/](https://paritylicense.com/) ) is my favourite at the moment (created by the blog posts author).

It's interesting in that it doesn't try to prescribe the license downstream projects use as long as it's free (in contrast to for example GPL) but is, at the same time, very strict in regards to when it applies (basically every time Parity-licensed code 'touches' non-free software), which means there is no Saas loophole for example.

<comment><USER20> That's an interesting license, thanks! I would have liked some examples about what exactly it does, because reading the text doesn't make all the ramifications clear, but it looks promising.

<comment><AUTHOR> If some of the text is unclear, you can submit an issue on the license' GitHub repository. Kyle (the creator of the license) considers this an issue with the license, and is very open to improve the text to eliminate any such issues readers have.

<comment><USER20> I will, thanks. It's not unclear in a legal way, just in a human "what can my users/forkers/etc do with this license" way (which may still be a valid issue to open).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > their work resists the evil empire of the software industry

Not sure that the creators of BSD really cared about the things this article is talking about when created BSD license. Many of the opensource projects that I use are either created or maintained by the "evil empire of the software industry".

</comment><comment><USER22> The author makes interesting points well illustrated by the abuses, by multinational corporations and internet fatcats, of the licenses we depend upon.

But he neglects to mention the fundamental point that the community is not well served by a proliferation of licenses.

<comment><USER23> So, what is the alternative? What am i supposed to do if I think there is no license that deals satisfactory with the problems I have, and I'm can't create a new one, because, well, it makes things a bit less straightforward for my users?

<comment><USER22> One alternative, for the author, would have been to mention it. Address it, even.

<comment><AUTHOR> To me, it's not really proliferation if the license addresses issues no other license addresses. Just because it adds one or more licenses to the number of existing licenses, doesn't mean those licenses should not exist.

Also, as a developer I think choice is good. If users have to do a bit more work to figure out whether they can or want to use code because of its license then that is unfortunate, but not too much to ask.

Why exactly do you think writing such a new license is doing more harm than good?

<comment><USER22> It might benefit the author, a little, but it imposes new costs on everybody else.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that's where we disagree. I think the existence of such a license might be -- in some cases -- the one thing that motivates the author to create a project in the first place (its for me, anyway). And I don't think open- source has any obligation to come with 'no cost' for its users.

Reading (and respecting) its license is the least one can do when using somebody elses code. If that takes time, then one just has to factor that in when deciding whether to re-use someone elses code or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are there any books to read about the complete list of software licenses ?

</comment><comment><USER25> It would be nice if there were a license that forbade corporate use entirely. Corporations are not really people, after all.</comment>


GitHub Dark Mode - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/StylishThemes/GitHub-Dark <comment><USER2> This title choice made me believe GitHub had added a dark mode, rather than this being someone's script for a browser extension that someone had posted on GitHub. dang, can you help?</comment>