PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer

Selenium won't really be impacted, as it's higher-level than PhantomJS.

This is also a great example of why it's smart to use Selenium or something like it for scripting the tests. You can easily swap out for another backend in Selenium, but if you wrote tests in pure PhantomJS, you're now stuck with a codebase that depends on unmaintained software.

I think that in the US, we've been fighting for some long about how much to cut government, the idea of proposing to create a new category of spending just doesn't occur to Democrats. The closest they can come to imagining something new is free college (which is the same what we have now [free high school, college scholarships] but more so) and free daycare (which is like free preschool but younger).

Anybody know how to port code from using PhantomJS to headless Chrome? I have been using CasperJS that wraps to PhantomJS. PhantomJS had its own set of commands. headless chrome will have to be different one way or another.

> It's a classic "public good" - an economic activity whose benefits are impractical or unworthwhile to deny to those who don't pay.

Open source software is not a public good, in the economic sense. There are two criteria for being a public good: non-rivalry and non-excludability. Open-source software satisfies the first criterion (my using it doesn't prevent you from using it), but it's fairly excludable (I can prevent you from using it legally).

As developers, our instinct might tell us that it's not excludable because "if the source is there, nothing prevents me from using it", but when we're talking about goods which fall under copyright law, the legal aspect matters as well as the practicality. And in fact, open-source licenses (such as the GPL and the Apache licenses) can contain provisions which prevent people from using the licensed software under certain circumstances, while still being considered both free and open-source by the FSF and OSI respectively[0]

The real classic example of a public good is national security. Practically, there is literally no way that national security can be applied to people within a country on an individual basis, as opposed to a geographic one. For most threat models (e.g. espionage, (counter-)terrorism), the mitigations are things like "prevent terrorist attacks from happening". You can't apply the benefits of that only to people who have paid for the service - a terrorist attack either happens or it doesn't, and you can't choose who's a victim of it.

> These are a classic example used by economists of a natural place for government in the economy.

Even for things which are actually public goods, like national security, that's overstating the case greatly. Public goods are used as an example of a good for which an individual market cannot exist, but that doesn't mean that the only alternative is a government one.

The so-called "tragedy of the commons" is an appropriate (and ironic) example - despite the way that most people use the term, the town commons was actually something for which there were plenty of well-established codified rights, and these were not always negotiated or enforced by a government entity.

[0] For example, the Apache license contains a patent retaliation clause, which terminates your right to use the software in the event of a patent lawsuit. (Technically it doesn't revoke your right to the copyrighted code, but it does revoke your right to the underlying patents, which amounts to the same thing, because presumably the copyrighted code utilizes the underlying patents, or else it wouldn't be covered by the license in the first place).

Unfortunately they limit app capabilities (such as iCloud, keychain access), so you can't use those even for your personal account.