> overreacting to a small part of [a Pope]'s talk

As is Catholic tradition in the US

Use trailers like has become common for LLM assisted code.

Co-Authored-By: Whatever LLM

License: WTFPL

> add strategic insights

This claim has always been BS in my experience.

> This library was lacking some key features we needed, like server-side collection synchronization

Yes! This is my #1 issue with the library as well.

Library maintainer here. Why not send a PR?

I have some patches saved up coming your way once I leave my current employer, who doesn't allow external open source contributions. Though that is not for a few years probably.

Love the libraries BTW. Thank you for all of your hard work.

Why not publish it anonymously?

If there's actual employer IP in there then just leaving said employer wouldn't magically clear it.

If there isn't and you're just trying to avoid red tape, then publishing it anonymously would work around the issue.

I feel like it'd be kinda a jerk move to contribute anonymously when you know that might create an IP issue for an open source project. Even if the code truly has no IP issue, legal attention from an litigious company would likely be devastating to even a well resourced project.

Well the idea is that you determine the intention of the “IP issue” and act accordingly:

If there is an actual IP issue then even waiting after you’re out of the company will not resolve said IP issue. If you’re using your employer’s IP then waiting is unlikely (both legally and especially morally) to magically resolve it - it’s still your employer’s IP.

If it’s just to avoid red tape but otherwise the IP is yours and has nothing to do with your employer (aka you could’ve done it just as well even if you weren’t at your current employer, and your employer’s competitive advantage is not based on having a good WebDAV implementation) then it should be fine and you’re just taking a shortcut to save time on both sides.

Basically, if your employer is a vendor of WebDAV libraries, yeah of course there’s a (legal, or a least moral) issue. If not, then all fine.

(Obviously this is just opinion and not legal advice - but legality only matters if they can figure out who did it ;)

I think the situation your missing is when the employer has a much much more aggressive stance to IP. Even if you are 100% confident that your contribution doesn't violate your employer's IP, they can still sue and ruin your life.

Some employers have an unbelievably unreasonable interpretation of non-compete and IP. They think they own everything their employees do, and even though they're wrong. That doesn't stop them from ruining you and whatever unfortunate open source project they set their sights on with vexatious litigation.

> they can still sue and ruin your life.

Thus the suggestion to publish anonymously.

I think it is unwise for a maintainer to accept anonymous contributions.

I think most non-lawyers agree with this and consider it common sense. But, the US legal system explicitly disagrees.[0] My understanding is that it does affect the damages though, meaning the damages scale down based on the level of pre-existing frailty.

This is an issue of the law struggling to catch up to technology yet again. I think the only novel thing here is applying eggshell to psycological frailty. But that may just be because I'm not a lawyer and not aware of cases around this that might exist (beyond the extreme bullying cases like [1]).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Conrad_Roy

Looks like it's available on the coding plan as well.

I would buy one of these if they sold a kit. Although I have the skill-set to assemble an working copy of folk myself without the kit, it's something that I just haven't prioritized doing. And a kit is probably enough for me to get over that hump.

Imagine if the 3D printing movement ideologically refused to sell kits. 3D printing would have remained irrelevant instead of starting a revolution and creating millions of home makers. Same for Arduino and so many other devices.

If the goal of dynamicland & folk is to empower everyone to participate in computing by moving it into the physical world, I'm not sure why lowering the barrier to the necessary hardware is off limits. That's what dynamicland is doing with the UI, but how can anyone interact with the UI if it only exists in Oakland, CA?

Folk is doing the messy work of making dynamicland-style physically interactive computing available on hardware that normal people have access to and in the environment where they currently are.

The vast majority of people talking about how big university endowments are don't care what the rules are on it. It's not that people don't know how endowments work; they just find the rules to be bullshit to justify universities continuing the status quo.

I don't think it's that surprising that the Open Group would cut corners certifying Unix compatibility.

I don't have experience with .NET. So that's nice to hear you've got a reliable setup. But, this has generally not been my experience with Microsoft.

There's tons of old programs from the Windows 95-XP era that I haven't been able to get running. Just last week, I was trying to install and run point and click games from 2002 and the general advise online is to just install XP. There was a way (with some effort) to get them working on Windows 7. But, there's no way to get them to work that I've seen on 10/11.

HellCopter in my case. Few years ago I still somehow manages to get some edition running, no luck this time. Rot is a thing and the retro gaming & archival communities a blessing.