Because they're hoping not to antagonize the megacorp (too quickly). If a megacorp has you in their sights, especially in a country like the US where court battles are prohibitively expensive, pushing the envelope will just draw ire and aggression from that megacorp. A normal person has no negotiating leverage in front of MS especially when it comes to open source.
It's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you'll end up face down in a ditch and authorities will look the other way. Megacorps have stolen, copied, reverse engineered, replicated, etc. things since forever and it always worked out for them.
In this case MS didn't need any help. They could very well take everything and face no real repercussions (this is the reality when the majority is uneducated, and their elected representatives are greedy and spineless). So playing along gives some chance to get something positive out of it.
> especially in a country like the US where ending up in court is prohibitively expensive
What’s the scenario here where they could take you to court for refusing to (in GP’s words) doing charity for them?
Scenario 1: Microsoft contacts you and says they want to talk about your open-source project. You never reply.
Scenario 2: Microsoft contacts you (…). You reply “thank you, but I’m not interested. You are of course free to contribute or fork within the constraints of the license.”
Scenario 3: Microsoft contacts (…). You reply “sure! I charge $X/hour or I could do a flat rate of $Y for the meeting. Is that acceptable to you?”
What basis would they have for taking you to court in any situation? As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.
“Ending up in court” vs “Microsoft suing you.” I think the implication is that if MS simply decided to unilaterally fork the project and change the license, the OS maintainer’s only real recourse is the court system (and the court of public opinion), and that would be expensive.
> I felt there was going to be a path forward ripe with cooperation and hopefully a place where I could onboard new maintainers
He was hoping for a fruitful collaboration and offered the help towards this goal. MS taking whatever they wanted anyway just proves that they had no intention to cooperate, let alone to pay handsomely for something that was already free.
Ending up in court means you need to sue the megacorp to enforce the license. This makes it a free lunch for a megacorp.
With every single scenario MS takes whatever they need. They don't have to pay, don't need the help to read code, and you can't afford to force them to respect the license.
P.S.
> As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.
There's a guy rotting away in a El Salvadorian prison with a lot of press to keep him comfort. Not sure your letter will capture the world's attention like you think it will.
Thanks, term I'd never heard of. Usually think of that in terms of an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy".
And as an added benefit it sounds a lot like "corpsocracy" with the "corp" and a country that's a "corpse" animated by "corps." That uses their military "corps" to exert control. Insurance company with a military.
The two sides of your thought are going head to head. "Gated corporate networks" don't benefit from software that "updates itself" (unless we're talking about pure SaaS). It's exactly where auto-updating is completely useless because any company with a functioning IT will go out of its way to not delegate the decisions of when to update or what features are forced in out to the developer and their product manager.
Auto-updates mostly ever practically happen for software used at home or SMB which might not have a functioning IT. If security is the concern why not use auto-updates only for security updates? Why am I gaining features I explicitly did not want, or losing the ones which were the reason I bought the software in the first place? Why does the dev think I am not capable of deciding for myself if or when to update? I have a solid theory of why and it involves an MBA-type person thinking anyone using <$300 software just can't think for themselves and if this line of thought cuts some costs or generates some revenue all the better.
You're not thinking of it long term. In the short term you might be better off deciding when to update yourself, but in the long term you will be infinitely worse off because the reality of business practice is to delay updates until something catastrophic happens just to save a few bucks in the IT department. This approach merely means your system will run smoother over short time scales, while it becomes a complete clusterfuck over long time scales.
True, but only rarely and with foreseeable and preventable damage. The alternative leaves you open to basically infinite losses at an exponentially increasing risk over time. That tradeoff is simply not worth it if you want your company to exist long term.
> foreigners looking for prestigious schools are searching in the USA because their own system is middling
See how you called it "prestigious" not "expensive", and "middling" not "cheap"? Price contributes to the feeling of quality of any product but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. There's more than that just the price.
The US is an economic powerouse, it attracts top talent in every area or level because it offers opportunities and high rewards. Even the language is part of the cycle which fuels this talent attraction. This brings results, the results bring prestige, and the prestige brings in more talent.
An expensive school in Bulgaria will not attract that kind of talent because fewer people are attracted to living, working, or learning the local language there. Heck, even a no-name US school couldn't attract talent by jacking up prices.
> The US is an economic powerouse, it attracts top talent in every area or level because it offers opportunities and high rewards.
The US is an educational powerhouse, and we attract top talent, sometimes charge money to educate these visitors (undergraduate and graduate work quite differently), and then, wait for it, we kick the people we educated back out.
Seriously, check out the visa types linked from here:
I don’t know the history, but if I was in charge of a non-US country trying to import skills, maximize my country’s future success, and even slowly weaken the US, I would love these rules. If I were a US lawmaker, I would struggle to invent a more self-destructive, not to mention inhumane, policy.
So, in answer to your comment, no, our educational system is crap at retaining the top talent it attracts, because the US made it mostly illegal for that talent to stay here.
Yes, but they'd have to issue another one of these snooping demands to either the app's developer (there's loads of developers so this would get out of hand quickly) or to Apple to patch the build or read the memory or something to get the unencrypted data
This current demand isn't blanket access to your device, it's access to things uploaded to Apple's online storage service. Having to get a backdoor that works with every app's encryption takes a lot more work while running the data through an authenticated encryption algorithm is relatively trivial for a developer
> I've already consented to tracking at the OS level
That's very wide and obscure. Even the bullet points for how the OS can track you go past what can be considered informed consent. If that consent covers every 1st party app that will ever run on the phone then it's a guarantee nothing in about it is really informed.
If you think a vague, blanket consent is all it takes then every company will get one in a jiffy. Just touch any company's real estate in any way whatsoever, get a prompt that "you consented to being tracked in any company related app forever", profit. You "consented".
Remember when Disney tried to get out of a wrongful death lawsuit by citing some agreement the family of the victim accepted for a Disney+ trial years before? [0] Well you're describing the same principle. Consent should be granular.
>Remember when Disney tried to get out of a wrongful death lawsuit by citing some agreement the family of the victim accepted for a Disney+ trial years before? [0] Well you're describing the same principle. Consent should be granular.
That case was wildly mischaracterized. The restaurant that allegedly caused the wrongly death was not owned or operated by Disney, but Disney was dragged into the lawsuit anyways on the basis that they listed the restaurant on their website. Disney retorted that if they could be on the hook for a wrongful death under such tenuous circumstances, that they should be let off the hook on the basis of the tenuous waiver the plaintiff signed years before.
[1] "Disney made no mention of arbitration, instead arguing it was not liable because it has no control over Raglan’s operations or management and merely serves as its landlord."
You're shooting blanks from the hip. Jumping to answer without even understanding the question or the point of the article.
When I activate a brand new iPhone I don't get presented with Cnet/Zdnet articles from 7 years that tell me that the OS tracking I'm consenting to now will be pooled with any tracking collected from any Apple app now or in the future.
Apple does not allow 3rd party apps to cross track. Insta app can't collect tracking from the FB app. And that's great. But Apple's apps are excluded from this and allow cross tracking. Apple pools together all the tracking it has access to between OS and apps. OP says they're fine with it because they already trusted the OS. But the OS and the apps are different things. What the OS does is at technical level, the apps know what medication I take, how well I slept last night, or which stores I buy my things in. Combining that is way more intimate than "OS tracking".
I trust Apple more than most other big tech companies but such policies still don't sit right with me. They advertise "privacy" but then eschew their own rules.
Downloading my takeout data after the fact won't prevent Apple apps from pooling tracking data in the first place.
Again, I'm responding to your "obscure" characterization. The information Apple collects is well-documented by Apple and others, and available for anyone to validate.
> Insta app can't collect tracking from the FB app.
Meta absolutely aggregates user data across their different applications/services.
Or even one individual on different days. It should be all chaos and noise and yet it's not because these "general" numbers get translated to a realistic "it's more/less likely" not "it's guaranteed".
You're arguing against comparisons you don't like, or feel make you look worse than others. In other words you want to get to arbitrarily define the brush width presumably based on where you feel you sit in the comparison.
It looks like you're rejecting every concept of averages, or probabilities, or statistics, or generalization because you feel slighted by the resulting comparison.
When considering the US as a whole then Loudoun county will get the appropriate weight in the resulting number. If you zoom out to see the map of the world and no longer see your street, it doesn't mean the map is wrong. It's perfect for the purpose of visualizing the world.
I'll bet you're fine with "the US people are richer than the Burundi" or "Dutch people are taller than US people". These also don't tell you anything about the short Dutch people or ultra-poor in the US. But you accept them because you don't feel slighted by them.
Or else you reject the premise because you zoomed in on a place which is not right on that average so the whole concept gets thrown out the window.
It's like negotiating with the mafia, you might get something out of it but if you cross the line you'll end up face down in a ditch and authorities will look the other way. Megacorps have stolen, copied, reverse engineered, replicated, etc. things since forever and it always worked out for them.
In this case MS didn't need any help. They could very well take everything and face no real repercussions (this is the reality when the majority is uneducated, and their elected representatives are greedy and spineless). So playing along gives some chance to get something positive out of it.
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