Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

code.mendhak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 585 posts

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

#321

Post by ndiddy »

bluGill wrote: post #200
ndiddy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Again I see no purpose in doing things this way besides trying to minimize the amount of people who look at your GPL code for some reason. Isn't it more annoying for the company to make someone in customer support read paper letters, burn the GPL package onto a CD-R, and mail it than it is to simply host the GPL package for each product on a support site or Github or something and include a link in the product documentation?

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

#322

Post by singingboyo »

tart-lemonade wrote: post #268
bongodongobob wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.

Do you not send thank you cards for birthday and holiday gifts?

Physical thank you cards are pretty dead. I don't even keep track of mailing addresses for a number of my friends (and a couple siblings, come to think of it) - how would I send them a physical card?

Even older relatives - we sent a physical gift a bit ago, but the response/thanks was by text. It just doesn't make sense to send a letter, have it take a week, never know whether it got lost, etc.

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

#324

Post by Tijdreiziger »

xmprt wrote: post #291
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…

> Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design I think it's important to note that this isn't actually true. For a lot of homeless people or people who move often postal mail isn't as good. Online communication is actually more universal. Most (all?) public libraries have computers now.

Not sure if this works in other countries, but here in the Netherlands, homeless folks can get a postal address at municipal offices. People who move can set up (albeit paid) mail forwarding for up to a year.

Other than that, there’s good old ‘poste restante’, in which you can supposedly address mail to any post office and they’ll hold it for the recipient (even internationally), although I’ve never tried this.

(I appreciate that not everyone may actually know about these options, though.)

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

#325

Post by tialaramex »

pasc1878 wrote: post #249
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…

For the UK in practice it is only distance measurements that are non metric now. For some things like small liquid amounts we colloquially use imperial - pints - which differ from US pints. I think the actual official volume is the metric it is just you could say slang that keeps to pints. Anything to do with STEM is metric.

If you buy beer "loose" like at a bar it has to be sold in pints. Most people will have seen a "half" and anybody who likes stronger beers or goes to festivals where you taste different ones will know a "third" of a pint is also a legal amount of beer to sell. You would not want to try out a few different 8% stouts if they were sold only in whole pints, unless they're going to make it a multi-day event and provide somewhere for you to sleep it off.

Milk is also allowed to be sold in pints, traditionally glass bottle re-usable milk bottles were one pint.

It is also usual (but not legal) to sell a pint or a half of various soft drinks, in theory you should be sold these in some other way, I always say "large" or "small" but in practice ordinary people say "pint" and after all the staff will probably more or less fill a pint glass so, whatever.

Spirits (e.g. gin) are measured in either 25ml or 35ml shots. An establishment can choose either, post which one they picked and use that consistently. Why two seemingly unrelated sizes? Well, historically there were two different non-metric sizes permitted in law, and when the government legislated to make these SI units there were lobbyists demanding they allow this to continue despite the opportunity to rationalize.

As in the US, containers you purchase in a store are labelled, but here the labels must prominently show SI volume units and EU-style value metrics are required on shelf markings, so e.g. 10p per 100ml of Coke is a good price, maybe the Pepsi is on a deal for 9.5p per 100ml, the store's terrible own brand is 5p per 100ml. This EU strategy prevents people screwing with sizes to make you think you're getting a better deal, that cheaper bottle may look like a good idea but hey, it's 18p per 100ml, ah, it's slimmer in the middle which makes it actually much smaller than it looks.

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

#326

Post by bongodongobob »

tart-lemonade wrote: post #268
bongodongobob wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.

Do you not send thank you cards for birthday and holiday gifts?

No. In person, text, or phone call.

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

#327

Post by eadmund »

pasc1878 wrote: post #245
eadmund wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM) Using French Revolutionary units doesn’t really matter in STEM, either: one can conduct science just as well in any units one wishes. One unit of measure is not more scientific than another. For example, degrees Kelvin and Rankine measure the same thing with different units. If anything, the Rankine degrees are more precise!

However the abbreviation is STEM. For S and especiually M you can do in different units. For T&E it really matters see NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter and the need for heroics in the Gimli glider. You need to keep to the same unit.

> For T&E it really matters see NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter and the need for heroics in the Gimli glider.

> You need to keep to the same unit.

Completely agreed. You’ll get similar issues if you have one set of parts using m/s and others using km/hr.

And you’ll avoid those issues with any standard, whether it’s m/s, knots or mph. The important thing is to have a standard.

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

#329

Post by wbl »

Someone wrote: post #161
alias_neo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but ordering stamps... on eBay OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps. As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to m…

> I have no idea where else I'd look for stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country I would try to buy them online from their post office. For the USA, there is https://www.usps.com/business/postage-options.htm : “Print Labels Online with Click-N-Ship With your free USPS.com account, you can pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online” Germany has ( h…

You use an International Reply Coupon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon

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

#330

Post by SpaceNoodled »

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).

I think the strangest part is that it had been years since they had used a pen.
Post reply on HN