Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
Finland they made a few mistakes by becoming overly dependent on Russian reactor designs Russian sourced fuel for those reactors. Relations with Russia are a bit strained (especially recently, but they were always complex). Luckily, the wind sector is booming in Finland in recent years. They have a lot of on-shore capacity.
A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.
The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
A quick search shows that there are plenty of alternatives. First, all nuclear power plants keep a excess supply of fuel on site, about 2-3 years. If Russia says tomorrow: "No more nuclear fuel exports to any 'unfriendly' European nations.", there are plenty of alternatives. US-based Westinghouse already produces nuclear fuel that is compatible with many Soviet-designed reactors. Plus France (Framatome and Orano), Netherlands (Urenco), Canada and Kazakstan can easily backfill any European needs, be it raw material or final fuel.
You could add support also for the Woxi[1][2] for most of the symbolic math, also should be way faster than bunch of glue over different Python libraries.
Degate is even a bit overkill, it is meant for when you only have images of the physical chip. This challenge has the full GDS files, which are the files that are sent to the fab for manufacturing. They still contain information about all of the separate layers. In this case they even contained the stdcell names, making even full transistor and logic function extraction unnecessary.
The original idea for the ID verification was broken by design anyway. The only safe and secure way is a chain/tree of trust, e.g. with PKI, where you could generate some certificate just for that particular service, while keeping your root key safe. Then, in the case of leak, the most you lose, is one particular key for one particular service that could be immediately revoked. You could even slap zero-knowledge proofs for particular properties (e.g. if the person has a driver license or not) without de-anonymizing the account. In the rare even of root key leak you should be able to physically go to the authority and make a new one, while revoking the old key. I don't see any other better alternatives than this.
This is effectively the EU age verification system.
Your government (which already has all your details) generates certificates and you just give those out. The other side can the use simple public/private key verification to ensure the cert is valid. Also government does not get information who you gave the cert to and if you create a bunch and single use them the other side can’t follow you between uses using the certs.
The EU age verification system requires tying yourself to Google/Apple [0] (ie will not work with GrapheneOS) which is a non-starter. This means you will need a mandatory Google/Apple account. What if your Google account gets banned?
My Google account is in good standing but has other issues. In between startups and side projects I cannot link my phone number as it has been used "too many times". So apparently, to Google, if I want a new account or to set this up, I need a new phone number. Enquiries to support have gone as well as you'd expect with Google.
I have a gradfathered account from before Google Workspaces or whatever its name (Google Apps for Domains?) became a paid service, and it's in an extremely weird state after so many changes to what Google offers, integrates, fixes and unfixes, that I sometimes can't even login to Google services.
Ended up moving my mail and info from Google away, just not to deal with it.
The problem in the US is that the government doesn't necessarily have all of your details. Most people's ID is a driver's license, but you're not mandated to have one of those. The federal government doesn't control those databases (hi, REAL ID), and few people actually have passports. Your citizenship documents are just a birth certificate that is an image on file with a particular state's health department. A centralized identification system on that scale in the US would take generations to get up and running
And then there's the problem of undocummented / illegal immigrants that the US has, which nevertheless can often get some state services and have enough ID to pass by. Because it's a political issue, nobody can either legalize or deport them without getting into the political quagmire that is immigration reform.
In functioning ID systems (and not having or wanting one is a valid political position which both the US and the UK took) this is not an issue.
I live in Poland, and we force rotating IDs on a (staggered) 10-year schedule, just so we can slowly upgrade them and introduce new features like these.
I'm not quite sure what immigration has to do with a national ID system in the US. Seems like you just wanted to bring that up to be able to say "man that'd be so much easier if you got rid of all the immigrants" which it would have no impact either way on this particular issue
Also on the rotating schedule thing, driver's licenses expire in the US, usually on a 5-10 year cadence. Replacing the physical cards was not even remotely close to the issue we had with getting REAL ID implemented, the cards themselves aren't special they just have an extra indicator on them. It was about putting in requirements around new documentation and proof of identity, citizenship, and residence and most states not being ready to handle that
For example my home state of Alabama issues licenses through the state department of public safety. That's who does the initial test to see if you're fit to drive, etc. But, once you have it you can then renew your license at a city or county office. These offices take a HUGE burden off the state, but they're not qualified to do the verification needed under federal law for REAL ID. So, to get a compliant ID you'd need to go to one of the very few state offices and they were overwhelmed
This is the type of issue with the system in the US, not the physical card, not the big scary illegal immigrant problem
> I'm not quite sure what immigration has to do with a national ID system in the US.
It was explained right there in the comment. Illegal immigrants are often able to get services because the ID system is such a patchwork that they can manage to slip through the cracks.
And attempting to implement any sort of widespread centralized ID is going to be met with resistance not just from people such as myself but also from those who attempt to shield illegal aliens on the basis of opposing those who want to reduce immigration.
You do not need to be a documented US resident to get a driver's license, it is surprising anyone would expect that. Immigration is federal — the state only wants to know if you know how to drive. The state cares very little about your immigration status for almost all things.
isn't the immigrant question a real obstacle for political change towards fixing this problem? That we would have to come to some kind of consensus on what to do for illegal immigrants
As long gangs are running the political discourse (anti-id, anti-flock, etc) - good luck in having functioning society. I say that as someone who just spent 3 months in Europe and witnessing farcical bureaucracy.
Hmm, so if you are anti-flock because you were disturbed by the girls swimming pool cameras being viewed hundreds of times by employees and cops, you are also a gang?
IDK seems opposite - these people are quick to summon simpsons meme if child protection is ever mentioned. Some are trying to protect their rights to delivering them mindwash porn and other sexual exploitation material that can’t even be mentioned in this forum without getting banned.
The photograph does have its own expiration timeline, which is not printed on the card. So yes, it was a little surprising to receive that letter, calling me into the office for another photo shoot.
eID PKIs have very little in common with the web PKI. There's a national root of trust with strong attestation. It's a very simple trust relationship. You already trust the respective government to issue IDs.
Plenty of European countries have an eID CAs and it works fine. The PKI part is a solved problem.
Doesn't even need ZKP, the CA can just issue an attestation.
I've experienced this "solved problem" when visiting Germany during COVID. On every entrance to a mall there was somebody with a scanner device, and they only let you in if the scanner showed a green mark. I've been fully vaccinated (not EU) but my code didn't show a green mark on their scanner and I was promptly denied entry. The solution was to show them my German friend's code on my phone, this registered just fine, so I could enter anywhere.
So the whole "eID/CAs/ZKP/PKI" mumbo jumbo can be easily fooled by a gif file.
That part seems to qualify as an unsolved problem. But could anyone have taken the scanned data (or the GIF file) and used it to open a bank account in your friend's name? That seems like the main issue that is genuinely solved by correct implementation of this type of system.
Already today nobody can open a bank account in my name with just a picture of my passport, as the original would be required. My passport doesn't have any of the "eID/CAs/ZKP/PKI", so the question of "what exactly the addition of it solves" remains open.
My national ID card supposedly has some of it, the 17-year olds who want to pass as 18-year olds usually show a doctored gif file of their ID card, with a year of birth one or two years before the actual one; this works in ~98% of the cases.
Actually it does. Biometric passports (and IDs) have a chip which is read via NFC and the information the NFC provides is signed by a CA which is the government that issued the passport. ICAO compiles a database of public keys corresponding to each government (plus countries exchange their public keys via bilateral agreements). Unless somebody is doing purely visual inspection, any time a passport is scanned there's PKI involved to validate if the information is genuine.
Not really, the attacker would just need a picture of you which he could then sign (since we're assuming here that he gained access to your key IIUC). That's a pretty low bar compared to the first step of gaining the key.
The three times I've needed to provide a scan of my passport were: to enroll in a university course, to buy from an e-commerce site, and to become an app developer. None of those orgs really needed a scan of my passport, which can't be revoked like a cracked password, and will now sit unencrypted somewhere until the end of time or until they are hacked and subsequently shamed into handling their customers data more like radioactive waste.
I sold a house recently, my lawyer/solicitor who’s physically known me for 6+ years had to scan my passport & licence to “verify” me according to new AML laws.
KYC & AML is poison.
Edit: to be clear, this lawyer also represented me when I bought said property.
In my experience, hotels in other countries also take a copy of the passports of all guests.
Also learned “know your customer” laws require US people to give passport + SSN to a foreign bank who then reports it back to the US. Given that such bank’s website involves disabling right-click for “security”, the only glimmer of hope is that the data is catastrophically lost due to stupidity before it can be compromised.
The US Government is one of the reference implementations of PKI.
Unfortunately, IDs are issued 50 different ways by the less competent states.
Combine that with accusations that getting new IDs constitutes systematic racism (a widely held belief on HN), ignoring that the ruralest of India has been able to do this successfully, and you're not getting digital ID any time soon.
IDs being required for voting is essentially a poll tax the way that it's argued for in the US. There's a minimum amount you have to spend to even get one that will expire in a certain amount of years.
That's also assuming you can get all the documents you need for the initial ID. If you don't already have all the essential documents you'll need multiple appointments at government facilities. The local social security office usually has just one location. Mine required time off from work because they were open from 10 till 4 four days a week. This was just part of the process to get an ID for a child when we only had a copy of a couple documents instead of the originals.
Getting an ID for my grandma who made the mistake of being born black in the rural South during Jim Crow was a year long process, since she didn't even have originals of most of the documents. It took that long and was handled by one of her children that was a lawyer. For her we were getting an ID so the family could take her traveling, years before it was turned into a political issue to disenfranchise people.
Nobody arguing for the ID laws ever argues for raising their taxes for an ID that all citizens are guaranteed with the supporting infrastructure. They're arguing for it because they know people they don't want to vote will have trouble getting one
Taxes on guns are completely constitutional. The 24th amendment explicitly outlaws poll taxes.
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to lay pill tax or other tax" - 24th amendment to the United States Constitution
The difficulty for the US is people seem to be against a Federal Government ID. India doesn't seem to have this stigma and hence rural India can solve this problem.
I don't think people are against it, we already have the social security identifiers as a government layer... it's just that no one in the government is willing to do it for free in a way that is accessible to everyone
Every time national ID gets moderately serious discussion it is revealed very clearly that yes, the people are against it.
RealID—which was simply national standardization of state issued ID (when used for a variety of important purposes) had intense resistance, too—and its the closest policy to national ID that has passed.
Social Security identifiers are not ID for the person, and anyway were adopted nearly a century ago at a moment of higher-than-current trust in the federal government.
It would help if the federal government didn’t show itself to abuse ID databases every time it gets ahold of one.
I don’t see how we could develop a national ID in an environment of such low trust (bidirectionally). You need a government that’s responsive to citizens and obeys constitutional guardrails, and citizens who trust the government to protect their best interests. We haven’t had that since the prior century (and last century the government was still breaking our trust, it just didn’t make the news).
People are against national IDs because of privacy, not racism like a previous comment in this thread suggested
People are against requiring certain types of IDs to vote as racism or other forms of voter suppression because it may cost money to get those IDs or be very very hard to do so, when there are other methods to authenticate a person for voting
Just to add a bit. In a few different places in the US I've had multiple ID offices within easy driving (or bus) distance and wait times ranged from short to annoying but bearable.
When I lived near the ghetto in a different state I had roughly 2 choices, one 30 minutes out and the other over an hour (by car without traffic). Bus? Hah! Have fun. Arriving at the nearer of the two within an hour or so of opening in the morning there was already a multi-hour line for service.
Don't worry though, there's definitely not any sort of institutional racism behind the various efforts to require certain forms of ID to vote. /s
before you could get a social security card replaced online I lived in a poor area and getting a replacement took most of the day between getting there and sitting in an awful waiting room for hours... god forbid you forgot something or they rejected your proof of identity and you had to do it all over again
Yes, very rural place or the woods. No idea about taxes, etc. I remember him explaining that you only need a SSN if you want to receive it and a diatribe about the mark of the beast.
When the guy was trying to get a passport, he asked if anyone could show a picture of him from our high school yearbook.
America has a substantial fundamentalist christian population who was handed a conspiracy theory about ID cards being a sign of the antichrist as depicted in Revelations decades ago and just will maintain that conspiracy theory for eternity.
The minimum size of this population, people who are adamant that the world is 10k years old, that god created everything as it currently is within those past 10k years, and therefore that all of science is a conspiracy in league with satan to deceive you from god, is about 30 million people. That's the percentage of Americans that willingly state such a belief when an alternative survey option is "Earth is old but god is still real and meaningful and doing everything" ie the current Catholic Dogma.
That exact same cohort is the singular reason for the Satanic Panic back in the 80s, for every child that "wasn't allowed" to participate in Halloween, for kids that weren't allowed to read Harry Potter because it "promoted witchcraft". These people insist we are in a constant and active war against actual physical demons that have infiltrated much of society. They believe they are losing this "war". They believe they are following God's orders. They believe anything is permissible in this war
That's not a conspiracy theory. It's a cautionary tale in the same vein as Don't Create the Torment Nexus. Some people proceed to take it overly literally and engage in wild fantasy (ironic considering the typical views of that population on things like D&D).
every application packet for a US National Security clearance for twenty years, was stolen in bulk, by Chinese agents. Your characterization of the perfection of US Federal data management appears to be lacking nuance.
I think with passkey you don't own the private key. It's in your device and managed by the OS. That's one of the reasons I don't use passkeys (the other being that if I lose the device I can't access my account)
Yes, you can. Either you can physically own the key on the physical device (i.e. Yubikey/Google Titan/HSM) or you can use software (KeepassXC, Bitwarden).
Most operating systems and browsers come with a sync mechanism that many people default to, but it's no more than that: the default.
As for account recovery, most websites have a way to recover your account when you lose your password, there's no reason why that wouldn't work for passkeys. Every website with passkey access I've used so far makes passkeys optional and forces you to set a password already. If they switch their default to passkeys and add a password as an optional step, nothing would change.
> Most operating systems and browsers come with a sync mechanism that many people default to, but it's no more than that: the default.
Assuming the FIDO Consortium approves. Otherwise you might be like KeePass, being unceremoniously threatened with revocation of attestation, for offering to do what the big players are able to do.
My passkey is synched with iCloud which has all hardened settings set to on, so if I switch devices (I have) its seamlessly. You can also export Passkeys is my understanding but I have not tried it.
When I'm on non-Apple I can scan a QR code on my phone and it will validate it the same way, using bluetooth to send enough info to the target computer to get me logged on.
Bluetooth is actually only used to establish proximity. Both your phone and the browser connect to an internet relay, which lets the phone essentially pretend to be a USB security key connected to the computer.
> think with passkey you don't own the private key. It's in your device and managed by the OS. That's one of the reasons I don't use passkeys (the other being that if I lose the device I can't access my account)
It is not true. You can move passkeys between OSs if you have a password manager or an OS that has this ability. For example, I store my Passkeys in iCloud Keychain and I have them synced on all my Apple devices.
There are cases though, where the website can force the requirement of a device bound passkey, but that is something it is not very likely you will encounter.
I have considered making a website that specifically enforces the use of a hardware passkey such as a yubikey since you can verify that it it is a real device signed by yubico meaning that if you want a bunch of users to come discuss a subject they are verified by means of having to purchase a physical key. Obviously, there is nothing stopping someone from buying a bunch of yubikeys but you can then ban said users with those yubikeys
I think the OS is needed to sign the challenge, but the private key can be taken wherever. And passkeys are multiplatform. Not Apple-only, by a long shot.
And I suspect that most geeks, hereabouts, could set up their own signing system.
My passkeys are in my self-hosted Vaultwarden. If I can't put them there, I don't use them.
It's not all sunshine and roses, though. Despite having Bitwarden set as the only passkey provider in my Android setup, the phone persistently only offers me Google. Which is empty, because as I said, I won't use one tied to things I can't control. Works great on desktops, though.
Passkeys can theoretically require you to be on hardware, I haven't found anything yet that requires that.
I don´t think I've ever come across a service that only used passkeys. Username/email + password + 2FA is usually the primary form of verification. There's usually a way to recover your account through email.
I use passkeys only, for the backend admin app for my app.
They work fairly well. I use a login ID/PW to set up the passkey, then the passkey, for everything else.
Passkeys work well, but I feel as if they are still a bit too “fiddly” for your average mensch.
I’m pretty sure the private key is transferable, but Apple keeps them in the Keychain, so they seem locked into the OS. On my machine, I can also keep passkeys in 1Password.
You can, with for example KeePassXC. But following passkey development it does seem that in time they will want Google or Apple to own your private key and for you to use it through them.
Would be nice if they donate to LibreOffice then, to improve the support of various MS Office features in files, as well as comparison/diffing features. Win-win to everyone.
Do you mean that it's good that companies can profit over people's mostly voluntary efforts for free, or Free Software is meant to be used for free and never supported in any way, or what?
They just imply them not having to doesn't dismiss the original comment, thread being more about morals than laws.
That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.
> That being said, hoping for any financial support from AI companies would be really naive. Using others work without retribution is at the core of their model.
I have no such expectations. They believe that they own the world and owe nothing, as you said.
You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to.
I think it would be immensely cool if OpenAI donated some of that crapload of AI money to the people behind LibreOffice to help with development - and then having like a blog post about it or something would already improve the project's visibility a bit more (hey, every bit helps). What's peanuts to them could help with the sustainability of the project a whole bunch!
> You are allowed (and encouraged) to do good things without being obligated to.
We're absolutely on the same page with you, and I try to do my best with what I can in that regard.
On the other hand, I see a perspective which thinks that companies are entitled to use everything for free and don't need to support the Free Software ecosystem because it's an externality that they don't have to care for, which bothers me a lot.
What I was trying to understand that whether this comment was supporting that perspective, or is there something I'm missing entirely.
You are not allowed to do good things. The penalty is more subtle: instead of cops showing up to arrest you, you will be outcompeted in the market. It's really hard to see when this is happening and course-correct, so all rational actors are doing their utmost to prevent it at all times.
What does donation does for open source? Surely it wont come close to pay talented developers who create it. For cloud cost, there are few companies already giving generous free tier for open source.
The only thing that donation could pay for is marketing e.g. events and meetups.
That's not true at all. Donations are the biggest source of income for The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, and have been used to pay developers who've joined the team in recent years:
* Michael Weghorn (accessibility)
* Jonathan Clark (language and scripting support)
* Neil Roberts (scripting improvements)
* Dan Williams (macOS support and general UI improvements)
It obviously depends on the project and the scale and duration of a donation, but plenty of open source projects have benefited from donations. Donations can and do pay for developers, as well, part time or full time. With LibreOffice, you can answer your questions directly by browsing https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ and as a non-profit you can easily find more detailed reports: https://www.documentfoundation.org/financials-and-reports/
I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing, because people looking to make money will not care about what's right. So, it makes sense to point out the disconnect when people use and promote pro-corporate licenses and then get upset when corporates follow them to the letter and provide them nothing but demands in return.
If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.
> because people looking to make money will not care about what's right
This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual.
How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?
That is not the problem of GPL. I'd rather have high quality software with patches shared back and always being able to see the code than some popular software that eventually is used in some corporate environment without the ability see what they changed.
Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.
> and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there
Related: how do you think you can attract more people, by setting a restrictive copyleft that some people will use in their spare time or by attracting even corporations with money that will end up committing to a repo that is used in half of the world?
Note that I am talking about adoption bc thanks to adoption things just do not get rotten. If you make a piece of software and set a license that noone wants to touch, you will see it stall and die in front of your face.
Do not take me wrong, I mean, I think it is fair to contribute back, collaborating, sponsoring and so on. But it is a fact of life that if you make certain choices you make adoption more difficult with all the consequences it entails.
I do know what the original spirit of such licenses is. I was talking about real side-effects these choices have.
Why would I care about attracting more people? Not every piece of software needs a hundred contributors. As long as it works for me and maybe someone else gets use out of it, that's all that's needed in the eyes of the original spirit of the licenses. Stallman just wanted to fix his printer, not continuously work on that code for ten years.
> Not every piece of software needs a hundred contributors
I see it more as a piece of software being feasible to be maintained over time: if it is only me, it is more likely to end up dying soon, if it attracts adoption, it just gets better, more battle-tested, etc. independently of the economic factor.
Well this goes into the debate of "is morality absolute or relative" which gets religious fast and there's more books on the subject than we have time to read.
The question of "are laws there to enforce morality, or enforce public order?" is the key one. And, I think, very easily settled by looking at the laws we choose to implement. Almost none of them enforce moral behaviour (e.g. you must give 10% of your income to charity), they're all about enforcing how we interact and how we're ruled.
It's not really that "absolute". Laws are not all made the same. Some start as a reflection of what society considers "right" at the time. Then the laws fall behind as society's morality reaches a tipping point. So the society pulls that part of the legal system behind it. Other laws are progressive, and they pull society's morality behind them. Some are driven by/for the majority, and some by/for the elites.
But they all reflect the morality of society to a degree, whether the democratic majority, or the powerful minority.
It is somewhat interesting that the version of morality an individual possesses always feels to that individual as an absolute.
"Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years).
"Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against and/or illegalizing slavery (USA circa 1866 +/- 10 years)
They say this not knowing that had the event of their births been moved a few decades in the wrong direction their morality would have shifted with it.
Those same people might have said "Of course its wrong to beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb!" or "Of course its ok to own slaves as long as you treat them well!" at the same point in their lives had they been born maybe 30-50 years earlier.
We currently eat animals as a normal part of our diet (for most of us, including me, anyway). To do this we treat the animals horribly. Incredibly badly. And we know it.
It's very easy to see how society's morals will probably change on this, in fact are changing on this, and how in 50 years' time our current stance on eating animals could be seen as monstrously immoral and indefensible.
Animals eat each other. Often in ways more "horrible" than what we do to them (in quotes because nothing in nature is horrible. Horror is a human notion).
Animals are not moral agents, and eating them is not different from eating plants. Both are part of the biosphere that we manage to our benefit.
And to complete a particularly cultural PoV, there are many people eating "pet" chickens, "pet" guinea pigs, goats, et al about the world.
Good arguments, particularly in Australia, for eating wild pigs, clean skin bulls, camels, donkeys (mainly for pet meat IMHO), etc. Kangaroos, unculled, explode in number past the sustainability of their landscape and litter the ground with bones - humans estimate a cull target and shoot to reduce populations, only eating a few themselves (leaving many on the ground for "nature").
I'm native, and my ancestors were called "dog soldiers" because we would bring dogs with us to war, and when rations got a little tight we would throw fido into the pot. Eating dog is generally considered abominable when you love them as pets but it's a common thing in many societies and not wrong.
I will say though, I would only ever consider eating a dog in a life or death situation.
If there was no absolute need for me to eat a dog then I would not do it, and even if there were it would be a difficult moral dilemma for me that should I survive could possibly haunt me for life, but for my ancestors it was a common occurrence.
Mostly individuals decide what they will do, and then communities decide if they respect that or not. Doesn't exactly apply to companies tho, since they're functionally sociopaths.
"you people" means people that always mix up the legal thing with the right thing? It's tautological to say they're always doing that because that's how you defined them! Are you trying to say that you've encountered other people doing that before too and you've built up an annoyance with them?
Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated.
In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.
They clearly would like donations, but choose not to require any payments.
Your line of reasoning seems to be along the lines of "anything not forbidden is compulsory" which is not a good place. Having the choice to donate but not being required to is good.
And yes, I think that if OpenAI is choosing to include an entire copy of LibreOffice in their product, it is definitely the right thing to do to sling them a donation. Note that the moral thing to do is not always the required thing to do, or even the legal thing to do.
"It's the right thing to do" in reply to a moral query is the "begging the question fallacy".
The question at hand is of the form: Is it right to do X (to donate, in this case)? Your reply amounts to: yes, because X is the right thing to do. This merely restates the query as its own conclusion.
"Donations" are - by definition - entirely voluntary.
If people want to donate, that's fine. If they don't want to donate -- also fine. That's what "donation" means.
Therefore anyone's decision not to donate is entirely consistent with the author's own expressed preferences.
Whether an actor happens to be large and rich (OpenAI) is irrelevant. The license -- the author's formally expressed preferences -- does not say anything about "free unless you are rich." They could certainly have done so if they had wanted to. They didn't. You are taking it upon yourself to claim that you know what's best for them.
More like, don't expect anything if not forced. Most people only generally pay for things if there is no other option. It's about what's moral (even then debatable as everyone has different morals) versus what's realistic to expect.
That article has no detail. How much did they make? They said they hope to break even in 2019 so they weren't profitable, what are the latest stats? Compare this to NYTimes which has been crushing it after implementing their paywalled subscription.
> Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated.
It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear.
> In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone.
Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.
So.... Since they explicitly chose not to require any payment, there is no moral obligation to pay them. That's the point.
Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine.
"Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant.
> So.... Since they explicitly chose not to require any payment, there is no moral obligation to pay them. That's the point.
Requirements are about legal obligations, not moral ones.
> Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine.
It's in general fine not to donate to libreoffice. But that doesn't extend to 100% of circumstances.
> "Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant.
As a third party I can judge someone for not donating based on their circumstances. It's not irrelevant. The moral implications are not part of the definition of donation.
Street maps are already in a good shape. What's not in a good shape - public transportation software and data - metro, tramway, commuter rails and big railways, buses. For example, OpenMetroMaps[1][2] barely gets any attention. And usually such maps are limited to particular cities or countries. Creating something like MetroMan app that supports so many cities, would be great. There are also Transportr[3][4] or abandoned (it seems?) Transito[5]. More people should collaborate on such projects. So far, most of them tend to be just solo developers.
Similarly OpenStreetMaps has some sidewalk/pedestrian access layers but as the name suggests is still biased towards the one-to-one assumption that most streets have sidewalks on both sides (and the opposite problem that pedestrian connections without corresponding road connections are often missing). It's improving slowly (as I recall, Apple Maps and Bing Maps have both dumped a lot of data into it in some major cities), but there is still a sense that a more coordinated effort might be nice. Especially in regions like Florida where sidewalks are uncommon and traversing roads is dangerous and pedestrian travel estimates feel wildly unreliable and unsafe, because Florida is always sinking back into a swamp and sidewalks are more difficult to maintain than seas of roads and parking lots.
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