only one of the ones i linked is from the 80s. i think you’ll find the majority are from the 50s.

gosh where have i heard that before

i did some fun metaprogramming today. i can practically hear my future self screaming.

oh no! hope you both stay safe.

…this is gonna feel glib now, but…

i finally got a job! nine months it took me. i made an unemployment baby. and with all the union salary insurance, starting this job lowered my take-home amount by €350 a month. but at least i can help do something.

i thought that was specifically for the voice recognition ones but apparently not.

#beep#

dispatching goblins. good luck!

*click*

it’s a tsunami. uncontrollable, started far away from any normal humans, sweeps up everyone in its wake, and will cause massive damage when it inevitably crashes into a place with lots of people.

ibm is still huge, but mostly because their shitty tactics in the past means that all their customers are completely dependent on them.

seems like microsoft is taking inspiration.

you’re absolutely right! substituting pigeons.

funny you should use that example in particular because i recently had the displeasure of using microsoft’s phone tree. i was trying to close a dead relative’s account and the info on the website was wrong.

they built a phone tree that remembers you. if you try to call in multiple times during some time period (at least several hours) it will just assume you have the same question and skip to your last choice.

“for financial services, press one. for technical support, press two. for goblins, press three. for repairs, press four.”

alberta

i’ve had to deal with situations like that before, not specifically because of gpl but because of international regulations. one of my customers was a digital id provider, and they had one of those super-accurate timekeeping/cryptography servers they needed to move from lithuania to sweden. because of laws surrounding encryption of personal information, the server would count as compromised if there was ever a single second where it was left without supervision. so they had two of their people drive non-stop through poland, germany, denmark and half of sweden with the server on a ups in the back seat.

well then. my argument is moot.

sounds like it says that to me. “we can’t send you the source over the internet because of security reasons so you need to pay us for a plane ticket so one of our representatives can give you a cd directly” is evil and stupid but completely reasonable in a legal sense.

i’m using “on top” rather flippantly here, since orca is AGPL. but bambu may also have separate code running on the machines that is not agpl.

yeah, this is the interesting one. also this one and he ones below it.

basically, bambu has the right to refuse handing out gpled code. that’s part of their freedom to distribute as they see fit. however, they can only exercise that freedom on people they haven’t given the binaries. so if you decompile or download all the sources, and you don’t own one of their printers, you are also violating the license.

now if rossman owns a bambu printer, and he has gotten the sources from that printer or directly from bambu, they can’t do shit. otherwise there is wiggle room.

the fsf is off the opinion that you explicitly can paywall the sources separately from the product. that’s why i find this interesting.

yeah, a lot of times. i had software licencing responsibilities for a product for a while, and they really didn’t want gpl stuff in there for the reasons stated in the thread.

the interesting wrinkle in this situation is: if rossman is distributing all of bambu’s code, including the account stuff that far as i can tell is another codebase, and he hasn’t gotten it from his own printer (which wouldn’t have the sources) then no “agreement” has taken place. if bambu is told to distribute sources and they say “no”, they’re in the wrong. but if they haven’t said anything, then technically rossman is stealing the code. it would most likely get thrown out, but the case can be made.

they also have ones covered completely with diamonds so they can’t be read. usability is probably not their primary concern.