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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)

#201

Post by ryandrake »

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).

> 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.

It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!

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

#202

Post by rswail »

therealpygon wrote: post #142
diggan wrote: post #4

> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier. I guess I shouldn't be surp…

> Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so) Yes, it is just our standard like A4 is yours. When you pull a paper out of the pack it is A4 when we pull it out it is ANSI A, commonly known a US Letter size. Instead of 8.27”x11.69”, we use 8.5”x11”. We also commonly use US Legal size, which is 8.5”x14”. Slightly longer and can fit in the same envelope…

Except pretty much all printer drivers these days can down convert from letter to A4.

Margins on left/right might be skinnier, but length wise US letter fits.

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

#203

Post by mattl »

pabs3 wrote: post #27

The FSF has moved address at least once, and more recently, now closed their offices entirely. I wonder if the new owners of their old addresses will or did get confused by copy-of-GPL requests.

I used to work at the FSF and one of my jobs was replying to these letters. They would be so infrequent by 2008 that I think I handled less than 10 in my time there. I sent way more copies of books to prisoners who requested them, gave more tours of the office, etc. I also did some other stuff when I worked there but if you were to look at the FSF website today you might think I’m still there as pages often have the name of the person who created the page listed as the author still.

The FSF has moved a few times.

* 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge.

* 59 Temple Place, Boston

* 51 Franklin St, Boston

* 31 Milk Street, Boston

The first address wasn’t around for too long, but does still exist. It’s an office building above a bank in Central Square, Cambridge right above the Red Line stop.

The second address was around for a long, long time. A few years ago, the building was demolished and turned into a hotel. I don’t know if 59 Temple Place is still a valid address or not. For this one, I found many of most frequent places and filed bugs to get it updated. Greg K-H helped me update the kernel and many of the issues I opened got resolved with other projects. Worth noting too that the FSF had two different offices in the same building but mail would go to the building. Mail did forward from here to the next address for a while, but I’m not sure if it’ll forward again to the latest address.

51 Franklin St is just around the corner from 59 Temple Place. When they moved here, many staff were able to walk their stuff over to the new office. This one finally closed last year. I worked here my entire time at the FSF.

The final one is a PO Box but also around the corner from 51 Franklin St.

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

#204

Post by int_19h »

mrob wrote: post #108
graemep wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a weird mix in the UK, distances are measured in miles, and speed limits are set in miles per hour, but fuel is sold in litres, for example. People get very worked up about it too. People got very worked up about a government proposal to allow people to put imperial units on food in larger type than metric (at the moment it has to be metric larger - or at least the same size). Everything in engineering and scie…

Distances in the UK are measured in miles and yards (or fractions of a mile). Google Maps gets this wrong and uses miles and feet. I don't think many people in the UK have a good intuition for how far 500ft is.

The whole yard vs feet thing is especially weird. Indeed, in US as well, feet are normally used to measure sizes - at scales where it's reasonable - while yards are normally used to measure distances. Even though the two units are in the same ballpark / order of magnitude. And yes, as you rightly point out, it means that few people can estimate distances in feet.

OTOH on road sings, US at least seems to be using miles alone consistently, so you end up with labels like "1 3/4 miles" every now and then, which I find to be difficult to parse quickly.

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

#205

Post by alberto-m »

voidUpdate wrote: post #46
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #18

This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author. I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash c…

What places don't have postcards? Whenever I go to places in the UK, tourist tat shops will often have hundreds of them in every flavour of souvenir

It seems to be a cultural thing. As an European I am used to find postcards in every town, but when I went to Singapore I had a hard time procuring them. None of the souvenir shops had them, and when I asked the employees they often looked at me as if I were some kind of strange animal. I finally found a small, dusty selection in the darkest corner of a huge department store.

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

#206

Post by low_tech_punk »

Exploring implications of an absolute physical address. FSF basically claimed a physical "domain name" and no future organizations will be able to reside in that address. FSF can move out and ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.

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

#207

Post by creaturemachine »

Misdicorl wrote: post #192
ethbr1 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're paying that cent, but in the form of endless ads hijacking your consciousness.

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

#208

Post by jraph »

low_tech_punk wrote: post #206

Exploring implications of an absolute physical address. FSF basically claimed a physical "domain name" and no future organizations will be able to reside in that address. FSF can move out and ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.

they actually did move in the meantime :-) [1]

Can this redirection be forever?

> no future organizations will be able to reside in that address

You are supposed to put the name, no? "Some Organization, " would unambiguously refer to the new org.

[1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party

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

#209

Post by petesergeant »

ryandrake wrote: post #201
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).

> 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. It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot…

> I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned.

Some adults were born in 2007

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

#210

Post by int_19h »

coldpie wrote: post #199
int_19h wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think the lack of an approximately-one-foot (30 cm) unit in metric is clumsy to work around

What's clumsy about 30cm though? If you are working at scales where this level of precision is needed, you can just use cm throughout, and the beauty of metric is that even someone who has never had to do that before will know immediately how much it is because conversion to meters (or millimeters, or whatever the primary unit is in their usual applications) is so easy.

Similarly, I've heard similar sentiments expressed about lack of pound equivalent in metric. But in practice we just say "500 grams" etc (and for bonus points you get 400 grams, 300 grams etc).

Miles and yards are both used as units of distance, so conversion is obviously relevant. The only reason why "yards in a mile" doesn't come up all the time is because Americans work around it by subconsciously (?) avoiding any such cases where the conversion is non-trivial. E.g. a road sign in Europe might say "400 m", whereas in US a similar one will be "1/4 miles".

And "evolved from hundreds years of usage" generally means a lack of internal consistency, because most units originated a long time ago as a way to measure something very specific - in many cases, something completely irrelevant to most people using those units today. Nor did those units remain consistent through history - just look at how many definitions ounce has in US in different contexts, all of them historical! Or regular vs nautical vs survey mile. Even just cleaning up that mess would be a massive improvement.

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