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I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

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Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#191

Post by int_19h »

coldpie wrote: post #111
andyferris wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other countries switched. Short term pain for long term gain.

The trouble is there is just very little gain. It really just doesn't matter. All the systems are fine, they all work. If you come live here, you'll adjust after 2 years. If I moved to Europe, I would adjust in 2 years. Once in a blue moon you have to bother with converting units but c'est la vie . There's bigger things to worry about.

I've been living in US for 15 years now and I still can't remember which unit scales are factor-of-3 and which ones are factor-of-4. How many cups are there in a gallon? How many yards in a mile? I don't want to waste my brain cells on stuff like this, yet it comes up all the time in e.g. cooking, or using maps for navigation.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#192

Post by Misdicorl »

ethbr1 wrote: post #166
NoboruWataya wrote: post #3

Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).

Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility Which changes as times change. In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access. Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult. But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thin…

> the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.

This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#193

Post by loloquwowndueo »

hayleox wrote: post #172
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being unaware of paper sizes is baffling to me - where I live, letter and legal paper are common but I’m entirely aware of ISO216 paper sizes.

One time at my old job I was trying to load the printer, and I said something like "Oh shoot, these are oversized sheets; I need the 8.5x11." My coworker looked at me like I was crazy. "The what?" "The normal printer paper, the 8.5 by 11 inch paper" "Why do you know the exact size of printer paper??" I did not know how to respond to this question.

Whenever someone questions what you know, the correct answer is “why don’t you?” - I will not be trivia-shamed!

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#194

Post by loloquwowndueo »

rswail wrote: post #174
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being unaware of paper sizes is baffling to me - where I live, letter and legal paper are common but I’m entirely aware of ISO216 paper sizes.

The problem is that the rest of the world is not aware of US sizes. Thus HP printers continually displaying "PC LOAD LETTER" on printers outside the US dealing with documents generated by people in the US.

On don’t worry, they also show PC LOAD LETTER in the US even when the correct paper size is loaded :)

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#195

Post by rswail »

echoangle wrote: post #59
School-Cotton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seems confusing if so It is no more confusing to Americans than the fact that Europeans use A4 is to Europeans. Why should it be? Just like you didn’t know standards other than A4 exist, Americans don’t think about the fact that standards other than 8.5x11 inches (I.e. letter) exist. All printers, binders, folders, hole punchers, etc. are made with letter size paper in mind, and most people unless they are involved…

A4 isn’t some random format, you can derive it with three pieces of information: A0 is 1 square meter An to An+1 means cutting the paper along the middle of the longer edge Each An has the same aspect ratio Those are pretty useful properties and precisely define the dimensions of A4.

Not only that but C envelope sizes match the A size. So an A4 piece of paper fits a C4 envelope flat.

A4 folded in half (size of an A5) fits in a C5 envelope.

An ISO standard that makes sense and isn't based on different professions like "letter" vs "legal" vs "folio" and other US sizes.

But also the reason that, for example, screens have 80 columns, (also related to punch cards), but that was about the width of a "letter" page at 10cpi.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#196

Post by int_19h »

thesuitonym wrote: post #54
HideousKojima wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Americans are just very obstinate about those things. It's not just obstinance, switching everything to metric in the US would likely cost billions (if not trillions) of dollars. And other countries that have made the switch have often ended up with weird Frankensystems of measurement, like the UK where they mix metric and imperial all the time (plus the weird UK-specific measurements they have like "stone", which i…

Also, switching everything to metric is just not necessary. We already use the metric system all the time. We also use imperial.

Yes, so you have all the disadvantages and none of the advantages.

And sure, of course metric isn't necessary. You can also write all software in COBOL and PL/I. But over the long term, the convenience of having a self-consistent system based on a few simple principles rather than historical precedent adds up.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#197

Post by wongarsu »

palata wrote: post #151
mytailorisrich wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but, on the other hand, this was overly kind of him. In general, unless it is explicitely requested that you must provide a stamped envelope for the reply the assumption of snail mail is that each side pays for its own envelopes and stamps.

And you could also put a dollars bill in the envelope?

How to get accountants to hate you in one easy step

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#199

Post by coldpie »

int_19h wrote: post #191
coldpie wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is there is just very little gain. It really just doesn't matter. All the systems are fine, they all work. If you come live here, you'll adjust after 2 years. If I moved to Europe, I would adjust in 2 years. Once in a blue moon you have to bother with converting units but c'est la vie . There's bigger things to worry about.

I've been living in US for 15 years now and I still can't remember which unit scales are factor-of-3 and which ones are factor-of-4. How many cups are there in a gallon? How many yards in a mile? I don't want to waste my brain cells on stuff like this, yet it comes up all the time in e.g. cooking, or using maps for navigation.

Yeah, every system has pros & cons. I think the lack of an approximately-one-foot (30 cm) unit in metric is clumsy to work around, and I think degrees-C are too wide. We can argue about the details if you find it fun ("yards in a mile" does not come up all the time), but they're all evolved from hundreds of years of usage, and that means they all work fine at the end of the day.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#200

Post by bluGill »

ndiddy wrote: post #186
terinjokes wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the test process be sending physical letters (edit: in 2025)? Nothing in the GPLv2 requires a physical letter. The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.

Some companies still do this mainly to make the GPL request process more annoying so fewer people do it. If you have to mail a letter with a check to cover shipping/handling and wait for the company to send you a CD-R with the code on it, fewer people will look at the code compared to if the company just put it on Github or something.

Most of the time the GPL request is a waste of time with no purpose other than annoy a company. You can download linux source code from many places, why do you want to get it from us?

There is a slight possibility we have a driver that you could get access to, but without the hardware it won't do you any good. Once in a while we have hacked the source to fix a bug, but if it isn't upstream it is because the fix would be accepted (often it causes other bugs that don't matter to use), and in any case if it isn't upstream, the kernel moves so fast you wouldn't be able to use it anyway.

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