Joe

I think you miss the point here, to be honest. Free as in freedom is typically considered more important than free as in gratis - at least in the open source / free software community.

Don’t get me wrong - I love that I don’t HAVE to pay for lots of quality software and tools, but the value is that it is developed openly and collaboratively, allowing me and others to adapt it to our own needs and optionally contribute back.

It’s often the software that would struggle to be successfully supported as an independent commercial product that ends up as open source. It’s natural for building block products like Operating System libraries and tools, UI toolkits, and other foundational technologies. It can also works for bigger or niche projects with enthusiastic developer communities, corporate sponsors, etc. Often companies sponsor existing useful OSS projects to maturity and beyond, as it suits their purposes.

Back to your question though: Who would decide whom receives funds on my hypothetical donation platform? Those who donate, as well as curated lists maintained by the platform and other users of the platform. eg. I choose to donate 50% to Project X, 40% to the “John’s Foundational GNU/Linux Libraries Collection”, and 10% to platform’s choice (which might be used to pay for the platform, then sponsor a competition, a project-of-the-week, etc)

Honestly, if people and companies could just pay $5-10/user/month to support their entire OSS ecosystem, many would. It’s far from that simple though. There is no central fund. If you are lucky, you have a favourite project or two with a registered charity in your jurisdiction, or a BuyMeACoffee, etc. That requires individuals to think and plan, and won’t have companies contributing in the same way.

Similar could be said for news - I’d happily pay $10/month for the news I read … but I am not going to sign up to 30 separate subscriptions just to read 1-2 articles per site each month. Microtransactions would be ideal for news, but the industry is obsessed with subscriber-lock-in. So instead I pay nothing, block ads, and use archive.ph and similar.

I could imagine central donation platforms, which OSS projects can sign up to, allowing individuals to influence where their contributions go. It would be a nightmare to administer globally - so it might have to be regional / jurisdictional initiatives. Allow companies to contribute more and choose centrally, or purchase subscriptions for employees and let them choose. Projects could set goals and redistribute donations over that amount. This could be a good EU funded project, actually.

One of the biggest benefits that I see these days comes from the use of workflow-as-code systems like Temporal or Restate. They make it super easy to add reliability and observability to normal procedural functions - no custom databases, state machine logic, message queues, etc.

I can write straight-forward code like I used to, and if something breaks, I can usually fix it on the go.

https://archive.ph/OLWGI

https://archive.ph/JkMcR

If it helps to accurately fill in the details correctly in the backend system, which are then properly validated or escalated for human review/intervention (and let the human requester choose the escalation path too, as opposed to blindly submitting), then it sounds great.

Guided experiences, leading to the desired outcome, with less need for confused humans to talk to confused humans.

I want the same for most financial approvals in my company. Finance folks speak a different language to most employees, but they have an oversized impact on defining business processes, slowing down innovation, frustrating employees, and often driving costs UP.

https://archive.is/aHnvH

DMOZ forever!

Is this the right room for an argument?

https://archive.is/0cRhz

It sounds like one should be building deliberate AI workflows with extra checks (automated or human in the loop) that make careful and cost efficient incremental progress toward a measurable goal.

Sounds like hard work… when we could just build 1,000,000 MCP servers instead. (raises pinkie to corner of mouth)

https://archive.is/b0S4D

There are so many time-saving things that can be done with a little bit of scripting. It’s one reason why excel is so abused. Now that the bar to real scripting is dropping significantly, and we’ll see more and more people solving their own small problems rather than relying on others or suffering through repetitive work. Good stuff.

It doesn’t mean that they are ready to design, build and maintain reliable software or services…

We’ll see more APIs and libraries being used directly by end users, though.

AI agents are a counter-force to this, letting LLMs interact directly with APIs, meaning users don’t have to even touch code.

It sounds like a wilful lack of investigation & enforcement, in that case. The US gets what it votes for, I guess.

Some countries do it simply: You can hire from abroad if (a) you can demonstrate problems hiring in the local market for that position, and (b) the position is at/above market rates.

There’s still room to game the system, but it’s no longer a ridiculously low bar. And there is scope for investigations and legal action, which most companies try to avoid.

(Don’t get me started on social insurances… the US super majority seems irrecoverably brainwashed, and would probably cheer on non-contributions by gainfully employed foreigners)

Just wait until they release the list … it’ll have a few holes.

Unfortunately, it’s very hard to trust any such list. If he had any sense, he would have also added a few extra names over the years of people who he just didn’t like, or those he wanted to manipulate. Scumbags be scumbaggy, whether rich or poor.

That said, all implications and accusations should be thoroughly investigated, and if corroborated by victims and/or witnesses, and then be brought to public trial or just made public if the reasonably accused is dead.

I don’t think you need separate laptops, but a separate router may be useful.

If you use Linux, you can have apps isolated to their own lightweight network namespaces (like containers), using different VPNs. Otherwise VMs can serve a similar purpose on Windows and Macs.

Iptables can also be used to block traffic, and force it through proxies (which can be whitelisted by uid/gid) or VPNs.

If you want a more secure VPN setup, I’d even recommend having the VPN(s) running on the router (eg. portable OpenWRT setup) so your laptop never gets offered a public IP / connects directly to network. Put a proxy on it for special (eg. DNS based) routing exceptions, like banking from real IP, reddit via the US, etc.

Disable IPv6 on your router or primary interface, and enable it on your VPN. If anything can discover an Internet IP on your PC, the link can be formed. Worst case, you are not using the VPN for IPv6 at all.

It sounds like another benefit of the free plan is safe experimentation without getting a huge bill when doing something stupid like making IAM credentials public (then going cap in hand to AWS to ask for forgiveness).

Watch who rages publicly now, and you’ll know where they get their (slightly profitable) clicks and kicks.

It’s a sad state where an entire alt-news circle-jerk industry develops because influencers can be bought with streams of bot & fake outrage clicks.