As someone deeply interested in this subject, would you mind pointing out what options there are for products that would fit this criteria of being a SBC made with aerospace constrain in mind?
You seem to be missing the point. If I wanted to send a funny webm in a room on Discord or IRC for example, if I didn't want to upload it directly to Discord that is, I could use this with ShareX to upload it and get a link that's easy to share. It's not supposed to be secure. It has its place alongside Magic Wormhole just fine.
If you want to send a funny webm, use whatever you'd like. The comment to which I responded to said "no, this isn't the same use case, because Magic Wormhole makes you install something". If they'd said "this isn't the same, it's supposed to be OK for this to be grievously insecure", I'd have shrugged and moved on.
For Japanese go server, I'd suggest IGS aka PandaNet.
It's hard to say how much larger it is than OGS. OGS has an enormous population of correspondence players but generally smaller for live play maybe by 3x?
I'm just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no strings attached, a big company used it for god knows what and acknowledged him. Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? As far as we know they didn't demand any updates or support from him, why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?
The company is giving him something, which is a huge vote of approval to his library. "You ship it, you own it" means Nintendo just said, "This guys code is Nintendo-handheld quality code!" Big endorsement. And literally no-one in the world knows more about that code than him.
Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you'd like it to run.
That's a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.
I fully agree. A small piece of software I'm most proud of is a very small library I wrote for an ex-employer and was lucky enough to open-source. It isn't updated in years and should nonetheless still work. Since a few years ago it is used by the Gitlab main repo.
I don't expect anything from them, they don't ask anything from me and just knowing that it is useful for such a big project is all endorsement I need.
SheetJS was created because of a Microsoft licensing issue with a library (https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8). The other project had a nonstandard license with a clause that only applied to browsers run on Microsoft Windows, which is really bizarre for a JS library that can run on any browser. Apparently the original developer was working for Microsoft at the time, and Microsoft mandated the license clause.
In a funny twist of fate, Microsoft now uses SheetJS open source to power some Excel exports in Office 365! https://tasks.office.com/License.html is the license disclosure, and you can actually see it in action in the exported files.
We were blown away when we found out. It's the ultimate endorsement! Oftentimes we just wonder what would have happened if Microsoft just let the original project adopt a standard open source license.
A bit too close to a troll, but there is a germ of a good point, which is whether its ethical for Nintendo to profit from this code. I think the answer is clearly yes, for the simple reason that the author chose to release his code for the world to use. Most projects will die in obscurity, unused (and unmourned).
There are a ton of project owners who would love nothing more than to be used by a big, popular platform. That's a pretty big win with hardly any risk. It means their thing beat out something that could have been made in-house by the world's best devs. Can you imagine discovering that your little thousand-star github library is present in, I don't know, Gmail? Presumably, at the very least, it means an auto-hire if you apply to any of the biggies for a very high total comp.
(And if you refuse on principle to cash in on that endorsement? I say good for you and I would like to hire you to be on my "wizard council". These are people I subscribe to to be diligent, principled, skeptical, and open about any software update I consume. This would include, BTW, a holistic definition of "software" to include firmware, FPGAs and so on. Please talk to me like an adult about InfoSec! Thank youuuu!)
I used to be a big believer in open source software, but as for profit enterprises continue to pillage the community without giving anything back more and more I feel that it’s not worth the time or effort involved, unless the work is protected by a proper GPLv3 license.
I'm reminded of a story Tim O'Reilley tells. When we started out, he published a set of the BSD documentation, which was explicitly licensed for free commercial use, this was long before what we know now as Creative Commons. He kept getting flak from people criticising him for profiting from publishing freely licensed documents, but one time he was at a book fair or conference and one of the authors told him how thrilled they all were to see their work in print and out there being used by so many people. That was a dream come true for them.
That is the ethos, it's what open source and CC is about. I may not be in a position to profit from some of my work, or I might be willing to donate it for free. If someone else can do something valuable enough to other people with it that they get paid to do it, good for them. The world is a better place. At the end of the day companies and corporations are just made up of people making a living.
Oh I don't know, I bet Google would love to hire someone like DHH just for their geek-brand. Honestly, they should have hired the homebrew guy for the same reason. But yeah, I think the FAANG+M's of the world understand the value of a "thought leader" type dev. (Microsoft has plenty of full-time open source devs on payroll, which I know because I've met some at conferences.)
I guess it must be weird to you that people volunteer free labor and money for anything. People give free money to charity. Lawyers give free time to various causes. People give free stuff to Goodwill, a for profit company, and to Salvation Army (NPO). The volunteer to clean parks even though they're already paying taxes that are suppose to cover that. They give gifts to neighbors. There's nothing wrong with giving.
My open source is my way of volunteering to make the world a better place. Whether some for profit company uses it is irrelevant to me. Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take and even though I have about 100-160 original repos on github my free output pales in comparison to the amount of stuff I take for free. Nintendo might give less today but lead by example and that might change. Though if it never changes it still doesn't bother me in the least.
> Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take
OH NO.
In what planet is donating to a charity the same as "donating" code to a for-profit enterprise, but even more insane (in my opinion ofc) in what planet do google and facebook "give more than they take"??
I don't know how to estimate how much Google uses other's OSS, but they certainly have generated quite a lot. Chromium, Android, TensorFlow, Go, WebM, Kubernetes, and Angular are no small contributions.
To play devil's advocate; Google give me access to an easily searchable index of the greatest repository of knowledge in all of human history for the price of a few ads. This is profitable for Google, certainly, but I feel I get more out of the deal than they do.
Google's revenue from ads for 2019 was some $135 billion.
Do you really think the ability to use their search engine is worth more than that to you?
With less than 0.1% of their annual ad revenue I could retire tomorrow, debt-free, and set up a trust fund for my daughter so she'd never have to work a day in her life.
But that is the total revenue for all ads. You hardly made up anywhere near 0.1% of that.
I do believe that if you actually calculated the value that you contributed to that sum, you would agree that the value you got back was greater.
I can't imagine I'd be even 50% as productive at my job if I didnt have access to the tools google provides for free.
Also I'm pretty sure the cost of ads to you depends on your person. The harder it is to get you to make irrational choices based on emotions evoked by ads the less it costs you to use ad driven services. If you are stoic enough to stop using Google services then I am certain Google ads barely affects you.
People say that ads work so of course you are affected by them, but I am pretty sure lots of people aren't affected that much by ads. Luckily for ad companies there are a lot of ad-whales out there, people who are very easy to influence and get money from. These are the same kind of people spending lots of money in free to play games, at casinos or who falls for MLM schemes.
Parent claimed that they got more out of search than google did. Parent did not claim that they got more out of search than google did, divided by the number of google users/ad targets.
>"In what planet is donating to a charity the same as "donating" code to a for-profit enterprise, but even more insane (in my opinion ofc) in what planet do google and facebook "give more than they take"??"
One example of Google giving back is the Summer of Code program. TBH I'm quite surprised that the other big tech companies don't also have GSoC-like programs.
Creation isn't zero sum. I make things all the time which create shared benefit.
I spent this Saturday morning working in my front yard. It looks nice for my benefit, but it also benefits my neighbors. It would be really strange for me to approach my neighbors and ask for financial remuneration because they've been enriched by my yardwork. Yardwork is enjoyable and I like making the world better in this fashion.
I wouldn't join a yardwork company and work for free.
Software is similar. We can use OSS to share the benefit when we do something we want or need to do anyway.
Sure, but what does it mean to contribute something back? Is a for-profit entity taking your code and profiting off of it what the original idea behind open source was? Or was the idea more something like creating computer labs in Africa with Raspberry PIs?
The goal of the open source offshoot of the Free Software movement was initially to make Free Software more palatable for businesses to adopt. That aspect of it has been wildly successful.
"Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring the FSF's Free software ideas and perceived benefits to the commercial software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the Free software movement to emphasize the business potential of sharing and collaborating on software source code. The new name they chose was "Open-source", and quickly Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others signed on to the rebranding. The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize open-source principles."
Well, it gets added to your CV too. But, theoretically the company contributes back to the codebase for any enhancements they require making the code better for all users.
Weird as in exactly what you allow by assigning an open source license to your code? I'm not sure when the mentality of "the little guys can use my code but companies better pay me" crept into common discussion around open source, but it's never worked that way. If Nintendo didn't find a library up to their standards, they would have just created their own (likely not open source) version.
>> I'm not sure when the mentality of "the little guys can use my code but companies better pay me" crept into common discussion around open source, but it's never worked that way.
Yeah that's weird. I think it's partly people realizing the difference between MIT/BSD and GPL (or even AGPL) licenses. Or the diff between some ideal "how open source works" and what the licenses actually say.
This is a good thing. People may realise that the choice of license actually matters.
The GPL and AGPL still allow for monetisation of open source without contributing back financially to the project. Most of the recent complaints seem to be about contributing back money rather than contributing back code.
What should happen is the company also contributes libraries back to the community, although Nintendo doesn't seem to https://github.com/Nintendo. The reason that the internet is as big as it is and as accessible to small and scrappy development teams is because of open source. A lot of the internet is built on code which is given away by companies like Google and Facebook so there is a bit of give and take in this.
Hehe, I see what you did here. But it's a bit different in some ways. The developer decided in the first place to opensource the software while absolutely no one could produce a gaming platform that was free. And in this case the developer got acknowledged which is a big deal, generally big companies use FOSS without even bothering to do so. That acknowledgement may help improve the career for FOSS developers and raise the potential of obtaining really well paid commercial gigs. I wish FOSS were paid but then it wouldn't really be FOSS. At least being acknowledged is the first step towards fairness.
This right here, talk about a career boost. I don't think they will have to white-board to get a job ever again. Nintendo cares about code so that means they write good code and think about being able to walk around and seeing so many people smiling playing a device that unbeknown to you, you were a part of making possible. That would make my day if I ever contributed to something like that, making people smile.
I don't think this is true. At the big companies that do leetcode interviews, my understanding is that the process is rather inflexible. Doesn't matter what your past accomplishments are, you go through the same pipeline as everyone else.
Recently I was chatting with a young woman who competes in motorcycle racing at an international level. She's almost old enough to get a driver's license to drive on public roads. Do you think she gets to skip the driving test because she can ride better than all but a few people in the country? No, she'll do figure eights in a parking lot like everyone else.
Big company bureaucracy functions similarly to government bureaucracy. The rules are built for the common case and exceptions for individuals, however reasonable, are hard to make.
I don't think that quite holds true. Big companies often have different pipelines when hiring for specific roles within special projects. When applying for a general software role, you typically get interviewed by random software enginespe, and so you end up with a fair amount of canned leetcode style questions. When applying for a specific role within a project, you typically get interviewed by engineers on that project; the interviews are usually more domain specific and less leedcodey.
Yes, this might be true for certain roles and certain companies. My understanding is that Google and Facebook have centralized hiring pipelines and so an exception would be a lot more unique than, say, Microsoft, where each org/ team defines their own standards and requirements. (By the way, this is why internal transfers at MS can require an interview process. Some orgs don't trust the hiring standards of other orgs and have rules for which transfers require a technical interview and which don't.)
My comment was based on my personal experience when I worked at Google. I'm mainly an embedded software engineer, though, so I tend to get pinged for more niche projects. Google does internal interviews as well, at least when hopping between letters of the "Alphabet".
When I interviewed, one or two of the questions were stereotypical "reverse the string in Pig Latin while solving tic-tac-toe" or whatever. Most of the questions were directly relevant to real-time safety-critical embedded systems stuff though.
At some point while I was there, Google did some viral marketing leetcode foobar challenge recruiting thing. If you searched for certain keywords, your web browser would do a fancy 3D zoom effect and then give you coding challenges. I did some of them for a couple hours one time. Some of them were tricky word problems, but algorithmically none of them were particularly difficult. The only one I remember had maybe 5 paragraphs of text, and my solution was literally one line of python.
Some people don't understand what they're doing when they release open-source code with a permissive license. This results in expecting more than what the chosen license demands.
It cuts both ways; some users expect more support than promised.
You get an interesting collision between two expectations on licensing in a modding community for an open source game.
Modding communities have historically leaned on self-penned bespoke licences tending toward the, "only Tool fans can use this! Do not rip my sprites without permission, that means you XxSephiroth494 YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!" school of legal text. But as an open-source project, there is a convention to upload things to the content distribution network with a GPL or Creative Commons licence.
This causes some rather dramatic fallouts when "I don't have to give you any source code, it's mine and I wrote it" or "he can't just take my mod and build his own version of it" meet the inevitable response of, "you released it under the GPL, that's how it works". It gets rather messier when said work includes upstream things which were originally released under the Tool Fan Restricted Licence or similar where the original creator forbade further sharing of source code.
I see. I wasn't aware of this problem. I never fully read the differences about licenses, but again I never released anything. That was informative, thanks.
If you look at the library (and many of his other 100+), then the code itself is so simple that it barely counts as a library. It's 60 lines where the only logic is to type-check for a string or a number.
Chances are it's just found itself as a dependency of a dependency, rather than being used directly. Not to shit on either of them, but they both 'maintain' a large amount of trivial packages that any language with a sensible standard library wouldn't require.
You're downplaying my `safe-buffer` library without understanding the reasons that it exists.
The Buffer security issues that Mathias Buus and I uncovered led to the deprecation of `new Buffer()` in Node.js and the creation of the `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` APIs. There is an explanation here: https://github.com/feross/safe-buffer#why-is-buffer-unsafe
I created `safe-buffer` as a demonstration of how the API could be fixed to be safe. Then, the ecosystem adopted `safe-buffer` as a polyfill to get that safety even before `Buffer.from()` and `Buffer.alloc()` were included in Node.js. And to this day it continues to be used to provide safety in older versions of Node.js which lack the newer APIs.
tldr; We fixed Node.js and made it safe for you. But, by all means, feel free to continue mocking me and the volunteer work I've done for the community :/
>why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?
Because it would be cool, and some good press that very few people would read.
After the tweet likely started to trend you see the start of the eternal GPL vs MIT/BSD debate, but the first couple just seemed pretty like they thought it would be neat if he got a Switch.
1. It's more work to do than a normal resume since it's project-centric. Also unless you're constantly tracking this, does everyone remember all the libraries they're using? Probably not (There's still a lot of work needed on the UX front. It's not very optimized for mobile)
2. People have to start using it. (I have never marketed my IMDB for everything well enough) See #1
It's interesting that people are calling for him to get a switch specifically and not for him to get $200 which he could spend on a switch or not. That would make it feel like a market transaction and would call into question whether it was the right price, even though it was licensed to bypass the market.
So this is some sort of middle ground, folks feel like there should be a more meaningful gesture than is required by the license without feeling like it should be put into the psychological category of compensation/market rate.
Or somebody read their tweet, and then personally imagined how cool it would be if one day they got a package saying "we used your code, here's a Switch as thanks." People aren't always making complex cost/benefit analysis before posting a one sentence tweet.
I don't see how that's in disagreement with what I found interesting?
Usually the sentiment I see expressed in these threads reads to me as: hey, it's not fair that this company is profiting on your (permissively licensed) work without sharing the profit.
But I think that is not the sentiment being expressed here, and rather it is the thing you said.
I thought you were discussing the twitter replies, not the discussion here.
The top comment in this thread, the one I replied to, is basically "I'm happy for the guy, but why do people think Nintendo should/would contribute back?" It's the same GPL vs BSD discussion, just people aren't trying to rain on the individual's celebration.
The license didn't require acknowledgment at all. This is already a more meaningful gesture than is required. They are specifically calling out this software as something powering the Switch software.
MIT does require acknowledgement. Nintendo was legally obliged to include the full text of the license and the copyright notices in their documentation.
Not everyone is a fan of that requirement, which is why Unlicense, 0BSD, 1-clause BSD and Boost licenses were created.
Huh? He released his stuff as open source. That's exactly what other open source users using GPL-style licenses want. Nintendo are the ones not releasing their software as open source. They're the ones using open source without giving back, thus breaking the chain. (Which permissive BSD-style licenses do allow.)
It seems like you're drawing some false equivalence between the open source developer and Nintendo.
Open source licenses say nothing about giving back and in fact the OSI quite deliberately moved away from that idea as a key differentiator between themselves and the FSF.
If someone wants to distribute their software with the expectation or requirement that derivative works in some sense give back to the community they should use the GPL or AGPL.
So what point are you trying to make exactly? He's using open source software and then contributing back to the open source community; he's a model citizen of the community. Nintendo, meanwhile, is taking without giving.
The conversation exists because this guy in particular has talked and implemented various (in my opinion hostile) methods for commercialising open-source work.
>Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement?
Because there is a level above "doing the absolute minimum necessary" that is a nice-to-have, but not at all mandatory nor expected.
It seems like everyone is purposefully going out of their way to not understand that throwing him a freebee that's cheap compared to the cost of engineering time (e.g. a nintendo switch) would be a pleasant thing to do and a way to buy goodwill.
> "Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement?" [...] why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?
I disagree that it's "expected" that the company gives him anything, there's generally no expectation like that in OSS. BUT it'd be super-cool if they did give him a Switch!
> Because they make big money with his work and he does not.
They don't make big money with his work. They make big money with their own work, and he delivered a very tiny gear in that. It's not like he made some genious unreplaceable part which is worth billions on it's own. It just happend to be there and fullfil a demand they had. They can acknowledge it and give him something extra, or just follow the lizense and mention what's neccessary. It's up to them and how much value his work has for them.
Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library?
Also, yes, the Switch makes a lot of money, but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000%
"but if I had to assign a percentage of revenue that is attributable to feross' library, I think I would assign it exactly 0.00000% "
How do you know? Did you followed internal developement of the switch?
"Since feross would materially gain from being gifted something from Nintendo, should feross give partial ownership of the Switch to the authors of the open source tools he used to build his library?"
Why not?
Whats wrong with inviting them over for a gaming round, or sending parts of the money? Depends on the amount.
I know because the author's project, safe-buffer, is obviously open source, and you can look at it on his github. It is 65 lines long, and mostly boilerplate. And what isn't boilerplate isn't even particularly complicated code (which is a good thing) - it just adds a few common sense safety checks to the Buffer class.
> Why not?
Nothing's wrong with that. But if the author doesn't do it, I won't call him an ungrateful asshole and berate him on twitter.
"I know because the author's project, safe-buffer, is obviously open source, and you can look at it on his github. It is 65 lines long, and mostly boilerplate"
Ok, well, I didn't. And probably neither did most people on twitter.
That being said, you probably know too, that even some lines can be very valuable, if they prevent crashing bugs. In either way, it is a value.
It just would be nice, if companies could find more ways, of giving back to OSS, if they use it.
The internet sentiment is, 'they' are exploiting the OS community - thats why the harsh reactions, even though maybe not justified in this case.
Yes, it is a value, but it isn't really anything that couldn't be rewritten from scratch in about 30 minutes by a typescript developer.
And it's possible that they aren't even directly using his code, and don't even really know about it beyond an automated system publishing the licenses. Due to the way licensing works, Nintendo could be using OSS library A that they shower their largess upon with free switches, but library A uses library B, which uses library C, which uses safe-buffer. Safe-buffer would still have to have their license published in that manner, but it isn't really clear that nintendo is exploiting that party. Hell, it could even be the case that the author's code is never actually executed on the switch, if for example it was bundled in but is part of a feature that is never called, because Nintendo wanted to use other parts of the same library that happened to include safe-buffer.
By the way, I just checked Nintendo's open source switch library, and there are at least 36,000 copyright notices present in the archive. That's a lot of free switches!
Companies do not run on morals. If you want people to pay you then sell it as a product. Likely you will find out that Nintendo would rather reimplement it themselves.
>I'm just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here.
My opinion is that if we knew, fully understand and answered your questions we would have nearly ended all the past, current and future political debate.
Some people just always wanted more, especially those who are making more profits.
The licence doesn't require giving anything back, but when you're a massive for-profit corporation, it would be easy to do something nice to the people whose work you're using for free.
The hard part of giving things to people is not necessarily gathering the things; but determining which people, and finding their contact information, and complying with taxes and tarrifs.
To be fair, that wasn't the author's viewpoint - just random people on twitter. You can find a lot of insane ramblings in responses on twitter.
For everyone that thinks he should get a switch for his work - I wonder if they also think that the author should, say, lend out his switch to open source authors for a week or two for using the open source software that he almost certainly used in order to build his library which was included in the Switch.
I guess it's mostly about acknowledging his free contribution to their own work. Being thankful and such. Though, it's questionable how much value his work really have for them and whether the company is actually aware of it. Likely the devs at nintendo decide such things on their own and non of the manager who decide on gifting stuff even know about this.
The company is following the license, as they should for any other. I'm glad to see this (and/but will note in my experience Nintendo is an above board company).
