Language is constantly evolving. There is no clear line. New words are added, meanings change, and it depends on the intent of the speaker too.

However as a mater of practice I choose to never assume it has been reclaimed. It’s always possible that someone hasn’t received the update.

I mean, he’s a billionaire. I guess there’s big money on propping up totalitarian regimes.

I understand it’s very similar to how people get wrapped up in a cult.

Charismatic leadership/ideology and exerting top-down control in much the same way cults operate.

Absolutely. That’s why it’s still good practice to include some kind of comment about the article in the post if the content isn’t clearly identified by the headline.

Surprised not to see meta-classes or package management in the meme.

EDIT: clarification

It’s a good idea in principle but headlines are often not in the viewer’s interest. The purpose is to get you to watch the video, not to actually tell you what’s in the video.

Unfortunately there’s lots of good videos with Clickbait titles.

Not all heroes wear capes. You’re saving their butts, and they don’t know it.

In my experience, the job of a sr. revolves around expectations. Expectations of yourself, of the customer, of your bosses, of your juniors and individual contributors working with you or that you’re tasking. Managing the expectations and understanding how these things go to protect your guys and gals and trying to save management from poking out their own eyes.

And you may actually have time to do some programming.

No, it’s not coming back like the title indicates. This is by zero of the original people and none of the original code. It’s a clone, of which there are many better ones, as the article content explains.

This is a scam abusing a legal loophole (sniping the trademark) to sound official.

You know you’re Sr. when it doesn’t even bother you anymore. It amuses you.

Sometimes you even get newer and more interesting bugs!

I’m not sure how AI supposed to understand code. Most of the code out there is garbage. Even most of the working code out there in the world today is garbage.

AI can be a useful tool, but it’s not a substitute for actual expertise. More reviews might patch over the problem, but at the end of the day, you need a competent software developer who understands the business case, risk profile, and concrete needs to take responsibility for the code if that code is actually important.

AI is not particularly good at coding, and it’s not particularly good at the human side of engineering either. AI is cheap. It’s the outsourcing problem all over again and with extra steps of having an algorithm hide the indirection between the expertise you need and the product you’re selling.

My main beef is that I don’t enjoy watching video form content, but having a summary would be more than sufficient to quickly determine whether or not I would be interested in watching anyway.

Strongly agree.

Thanks for the additional info! I don’t think this is good enough. The project is still under the GPL because it made use of GPL-licensed code.

Generally such an approach still has problems because you have to be sure you’ve replaced every single piece of GPL and that the new code wasn’t written simply re-implementing knowledge of the old code else there may still be an argument that the current iteration must comply with the GPL. He isn’t publicly providing evidence that he has permission from every contributor, so we can’t validate he isn’t misusing GPL code. However, this isn’t my main concern.

If you have anyone who has seen the GPL code write new code, that code is arguably also under the GPL. This has caused problems for other projects. If you really want to replace the GPL code, you have to bring new people in and write all the missing pieces. He is not free to implement this code himself because he has been tainted by knowledge of the viral code that was tightly integrated to the project in the past.

Again I am not a lawyer but this seems to be the general consensus on what you must do to implement this change properly. How I read this, the project is still under the GPL.

Perhaps! I’ve always found that people who participate in the HOA Governance are the kind of people who can’t mind their own business.

I had to. It was included with my monthly fees.

This developer offers flatpak and AppImage builds, both of which try to solve the problem of distributions making their own distribution-specific changes.

It’s not a perfect solution, but there are some packaging systems trying to move in the right direction.

I was there. It was really weird. The people doing the inspections didn’t even know what they were looking for. What, a USB drive? It was clear to me that they had a very basic, normal persons understanding of technology.

This was mainly motivated by the MGM hacks so they could show that they were doing something in case they got hacked later for liability.

This is probably illegal. I am not a lawyer, but when you have 114 contributors who provided their code under the terms of the GPL, you can’t just change your mind later. The GPL doesn’t work like that. You have to actually own the code as its copyright holder if you want to license it under a new license. Generally speaking, those other contributors retain copyright to their work, so unless you release your project under the GPL in perpetuity you would need to get the consent of all those contributors first. It’s not your code to license. You must obey the GPL that you agreed to when you included their work.

[…] the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users. […]

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

Any of your contributors can now turn around and assert that you are now distributing their GPL code in violation of the license. The GPL is quite clear that you need to respect the rights of the users to freely modify and redistribute derivative works. Because the GPL is viral, all you need to do is find the tiniest contribution that was made when the project was GPL to assert that all of the code must comply with the terms of the GPL and you can produce your derivative works as permitted by such a license. The legal risk of GPL contamination is very real and makes a more restrictive license practically unenforceable without a cleanroom rewriting of the project from scratch.

Also, Creative Commons licenses should never be applied to software as done here. These legal tools are designed for media, and the website itself indicates that the licenses are inappropriate because they don’t address software specific concerns like patents and development by multiple contributors.

Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.

Overall, this looks like a naïve attempt to prevent derivative works, but escaping the GPL is not so easy. The GPL was written to prevent you from doing this sort of thing.

ADDENDUM: Just in case the developer ever happens to find this comment, I want to say that I have a lot of compassion for the problems he is facing. I have maintained open source projects before, and watching your community get fragmented, your work disrespected, and failure to acknowledge that this is a hobby you’re doing in your free time weighs heavily upon you. I think this move is incorrect, but I acknowledge I’m not providing a viable alternative. I don’t know what the correct response should be.