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US couple blocked from suing Uber after crash say daughter agreed to Uber Eats terms
  • you know they put shit like this in the agreements because they know nobody reads them

    That's only half of the problem: even if you carefully read what you agree to, if you refuse agreements that include a forced arbitration clause, you have no other choice because all companies foist it on you.

    In other words, if you refuse forced arbitration, you essentially have to opt out of normal life, because there are no alternatives.

  • US couple blocked from suing Uber after crash say daughter agreed to Uber Eats terms
  • Forced arbitration is unjust and should be outlawed. It's only legal in 7 other countries: UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, China and India.

    That's right: 4 countries that are essentially US lapdogs, two dictatorships and one that's on the fast track towards becoming one.

    Also, you can totally see how America is so much better and totally different than China. The more I look at both, the less I can tell the difference.

    But at least in the United States, there is hope.

  • Reddit is making sitewide protests basically impossible
  • Will be good for the quality.

    You speak as if there was quality left to lose.

  • SoftFoot Pro - The motorless flexible artificial foot

    What a fabulous passive articulated foot!

    It's very light - about half the weight of a real foot - and it looks easy and cheap to manufacture, so that everyone could afford one. In fact, it looks simple enough that most parts could be 3D-printed.

    More information here: Introducing SoftFoot Pro: a cutting-edge motorless, flexible and waterproof artificial foot

    From the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa in collaboration with the Centro E. Piaggio of the University of Pisa.

    0
    Pope urges members of the Church to never cover up abuse
  • Decades after the deed is done and left thousands of victims dealing with lifelong psychological consequences, everybody is perfectly aware of the scandals surrounding the Catholic church and - presumably - no priest today is stupid enough to fondle little boys anymore with all that publicity...

    Talk about kicking down open doors... Would that he had said that 20, 30, 50 years ago when the sexual abuses were ongoing: then I would have been impressed by his courage. Today, this is just cheap ineffectual PR.

  • I'm homeless after making and losing £1,000,000 and having a hit film
  • I'm not sure if this is a boring dystopia story. What I read is the story of a gullible man with no concept of saving for rainy days who struck it rich and lost it all. Sad, but hardly anybody's fault but his.

  • Couple tried to sell baby for a 6-pack of beer and $1,000 at campground, police say
  • See? Like all the others who posted the exact same comment before you, I managed to troll you.

  • Couple tried to sell baby for a 6-pack of beer and $1,000 at campground, police say
  • Your statement is slightly disturbing because it implies buying a child is somehow normal.

  • Couple tried to sell baby for a 6-pack of beer and $1,000 at campground, police say
  • Well, 14 states currently ban abortion. I am not a woman, but if I was and of child-bearing age, I would move out in a hurry.

    I know it's easier said than done for a lot of folks for a lot of reasons, but besides the risk of having to carry out a pregnancy I did not want for whatever reason, and having to go through that particular hell, I would be ashamed to live in a state that treats women like that.

  • Couple tried to sell baby for a 6-pack of beer and $1,000 at campground, police say
  • The is the America trump wants you to have.

    Surely you meant "This is the America you live in right now".

    There's no wanting involved. The deed is done.

    At least in this case, the baby boy now has a chance to have a normal life and is not in danger anymore. If there's anything comforting to take away from that sad story.

  • Couple tried to sell baby for a 6-pack of beer and $1,000 at campground, police say
  • that’s some top-notch contract writing.

    You jest, but for all its faults, this "contract" is a lot clearer and to the point than most real contracts and EULAs I've ever had the misfortune to review.

  • My latest Linux-convincing story
  • Well if you say so, I defer to your higher authority on bullshit.

  • My latest Linux-convincing story
  • Not cheers, no. But it increased my problem-solving reputation within the company and it made Linux more appealing to key people in the company.

    What's wrong with that? What's your butthurt? Are you bitter about something?

  • My latest Linux-convincing story
  • Well I'm sure they have very good reason and I'm not questioning them. I'm just talking from a user's standpoint (and I'm a very poor Windows users): whenever I try to port any of our tools to Windows, wham the damn antivirus kicks in and puts my stuff in quarantine. If I use an engineering application that talks to some device on an unusual port - and I'm talking outgoing traffic, not incoming, wham it's blocked. And unblocking it requires making a formal request to IT, that whitelists the application, until WithSecure updates itself and forgets about it, and here we go again.

    It's just a complete PITA. You constantly feel like you're fighting an algorithm with stupidity built in just to get normal, honest-to-goodness work done.

  • My latest Linux-convincing story

    Earlier this week my company bought a LIDAR from Ouster. The LIDAR is a network device: it has an ethernet interface, it gets its IP from a DHCP server and then it talks to whichever machine runs the Ouster application.

    The engineers and the marketing guy in charge of evaluating it installed the software on a Windows 11 laptop and tried to make it work for 2 days, to no avail. The software simply wouldn’t connect.

    So they came to me, the unofficial company “hacker”, to figure it out. And I did: the culprit, as always, was the Windows firewall. Because of course…

    But here’s the twist: because it’s Windows, you need some sort of additional antivirus on top of it. Our company uses WithSecure, which is phenomenally annoying and intrusive, and constantly gets in your way when you try to do any work in Windows that isn't Word or Excel. And of course, WithSecure wouldn’t let me punch a hole in the Windows firewall, because of course…

    Anyhow, after trying to work around Windows and the hateful compulsory antivirus, I called IT and told them I needed WithSecure disabled, at least temporarily. They told me to fuck off because they’re not letting an unsecured Windows machine on the intranet.

    Fine. I pulled another, older Windows laptop without any antivirus, connected it to an air-gapped router, configured DHCP in the router, connected the LIDAR to the router, launched the Ouster app and… it didn't work.

    After 3 hours trying to figure out what was wrong, I finally found the problem: the stupid app is an Electron app built with an older version of Electron that had a bug in node.js that prevented it from working if it couldn’t resolve some internet address.

    Sigh… Electron… Because of course…

    This was getting too painful and annoying with Windows. So I blew away the Windows partition, installed Linux Mint on the laptop, configured the ethernet interface as a private interface, installed the DHCP server so I could do away with the router, connected the laptop to the guest wifi so the stupid Electron app could resolve whatever it needed to resolve to work, installed the Linux version of the Ouster app, and hey-presto, it worked rightaway.

    So I made an account for the guys in Mint and handed them the laptop. They played with the LIDAR for a few hours without any problem, pulled records and files out of the machine on USB sticks without any problem, viewed some Excel files in Libreoffice without any problem.

    Eventually the marketing guy asked me:

    “So what was the problem then?” “Windows of course” I said. “What else?” “Wow. That Linux stuff is really good. We tried so hard to make this work but we never could. But it worked rightaway in Linux. That’s slick!” “Well yeah, I keep telling you guys Windows is crap. There are reasons and this is one of them.” “Yeah I can see why you don’t like it. And that Linux desktop is really nice actually. I might give it a spin at home.”

    So hey, I managed to impress a marketing guy with Linux 🙂

    It shows how polished Linux has become, if ordinary computer users can be convinced this easily now. It wasn’t like that for a long long time and it feels kind of rewarding to know you bet on the right horse all along and you're vindicated at last.

    35
    Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’
  • The DoJ will never touch EMV. They're much, MUCH more entrenched and powerful than even Google. They literally control payments worldwide - the very fabric of society. No government in the world wants to touch that rat's nest with a 10-foot pool, because if payments start to show even a hint of added friction, it can literally bring down a country's GDP.

    That's why EMV has been allowed to operate virtually unchecked, and dictates who gets to be on their network with zero pushback - especially since the people EMV strikes off their network are usually people the government would like to get rid of too, like Wikileaks. So the powers that be are very happy to maintain the status quo.

    A true case of fascist-style collusion between the state and the private sector. This cartel will never be broken.

  • Justice Department accuses Visa of debit network monopoly that affects price of 'nearly everything’
  • EMVCo has been a terrible monopolistic cartel for decades. They literally control who gets access to the payment network and they can cut you off instantly without a court order - virtually holding the ability of every company on Earth to conduct business at their mercy: if they don't like you, you're dead.

    EMVCo is the most egregious and most dangerous global cartel nobody is talking about. And the DoJ only figured that out now? Justice is not just blind, it's also asleep.

  • A lighter-weight kscreenlocker alternative (kscreenlocker uses a lot of VRAM)
  • Ah okay, I didn't know that. I personally try to stay away from Wayland as long as possible so support for it gets better before I have to jump in. I'm not an early adopter for that sort of thing - even though Wayland is 16 years old at this point, but amazingly it's still too green for my taste.

  • A lighter-weight kscreenlocker alternative (kscreenlocker uses a lot of VRAM)
  • The reason why I posted this is because there's nothing that prevents you from using any old screensaver / screenlocker out there in KDE. As I said, I use the Cinnamon screen saver in i3, which is not the Cinnamon environment.

    That's the beauty of Linux: you can mix and match things to your heart's content.

  • File tagging software?
  • It's whatever works for you.

    Me, depending on the type of file, I either have a more or less full description (so I can find things with find and English words) and/or some sort of short coding system that makes sense for a given type of file. After using the same codes for a long time, I know exactly what they mean.

    For example, I would name an ebook "823-sf-rah-The_moon_is_a_harsh_mistress.epub": that way I can look it up by DDC number (823), genre (SF), author if they're well known (Robert A. Heinlein) and of course the title of the book, or any combination thereof. That's my own system for ebooks.

    For music, I make one directory per album or record named artist-comma-name (e.g. "Al_Di_Meola,Orange_and_Blue") and the individual tracks inside as e.g. "track01-Paradisio.mp3", "track02-Chilean_Pipe_Song.mp3"... The reason I only do one directory deep per album instead of, say, author/album/tracks is because most MP3 players back in the days, and most music apps today, understand that way of organizing music. That's my own system for music.

    Etc etc. Just make up your own system that works for you. Just stick to characters that are acceptable in all OSes' filesystems so you can move your stuff around without problems, and avoid spaces so it's not a pain to type.

  • File tagging software?
  • mv?

    Honestly, just prefix or suffix the filename. I've been cataloging all my stuff like that for the past 30 years - including, for things like music, the track number, which the filesystem and every portable device under the sun will naturally sort and play in the correct order. Finding things can be done with regular filesystem tools like, well, find. And it will work exactly the same way in all OSes that have a concept of filesystem.

  • EVs are cleaner than gas cars, but a growing share of Americans don't believe it
  • A lot of Americans believe a lot of stupid things. So what's new...

  • Our family mail server quit working today. Maybe it's a bit long in the tooth...

    Apparently I installed that thing in 2006 and I last updated it in 2016, then I quit updating it for some reason that I totally forgot. Probably laziness...

    It's been running for quite some time and we kind of forgot about it in the closet, until the SSH tunnel we use to get our mail outside our home stopped working because modern openssh clients refuse to use the antiquated key cipher I setup client machines with way back when any longer.

    I just generated new keys with a more modern cipher that it understands (ecdsa-sha2-nistp256) and left it running. Because why not 🙂

    72
    Turns out, I wanted a tiled window manager all along

    I got into computers when there was no GUI.

    Then years later I got a Win95 PC and I found the Windows GUI pretty good - although the rest of the OS was not. My personal Linux PC running Slackware 96 came with FVWM95 wich was a good approximation. So I switched to that.

    That was just for graphical utilities of course - of which there weren't very many. I spent the rest of my time in the Linux console or in xterm using screen for convenience.

    Fast-forward to today: I still do that. I still like the Win95 UI paradigm, so I run Mint / Cinnamon. But most of what I do with it is open a Gnome terminal, blow it up and start tmux - like screen but better.

    And, ya know, for almost 3 decades, whether it's Mint or anything else I used, that's pretty much what I've been doing: running screen in a terminal in a Win95-like GUI. And it works fine for me.

    I recently ordered a laptop that comes with Debian / Wayland and the Sway window manager installed by default. I learned a long time ago that it's often better to go with whatever is installed by default than try to reinstall everything and fight a system that wasn't designed for it.

    The laptop will take a few weeks to get here. So to prepare for when it lands on my porch, I decided to get into Sway on my current machine, to get used to it. I figured even if I don't like it, at least that way I'll be comfortable with it, and I'll know whether it's acceptable as it is or whether I should spend the time installing something more Win95-like.

    But my current machine doesn't run Wayland, just plain Xorg. 2 minutes of searching revealed that Sway is in fact i3wm for Wayland.

    Great! I promptly installed i3 on my Linux Mint box, switch to it, fucked around with the config file for a few hours and... I love it! That's pretty much exactly what I do with Cinnamon anyway but quicker!

    And just like that, I switch to i3. I felt right at home with it from the get-go. The whole Win95-like UI was just a familiarity: in fact, what I've always wanted was a tiling window manager.

    And yes, I did spend a few hours - almost half a day really - configuring the thing exactly how I like. But if I'm honest, I probably spent just as much time with Cinnamon way back when I switched to that too. So it's no different really.

    So the takeaway here is: even if you have decades-old die-hard habits and you don't want to change, you should expose yourself to change every once in a while: you might just get surprised 🙂

    41
    arm64 / aarch64 compatibility

    I'm about to step into the wonderful world of ARM Linux. I work with ARM32 as an embedded developer profesionally (Cortex-M3 specifically) so I'm not a complete newbie. But I've never used ARM64, and I've never used it with a desktop OS. So I'm doing my research, as one does, to know roughly what I'll be dealing with.

    I have a few questions regarding backward compatibility and architecture-naming. Maybe you specialists out there could shed some light.

    From what I could find, I understand the following:

    • arm64 and aarch64 are the same thing: the former is what Linus likes to say while the latter is what ARM calls their own stuff.
    • arm64 / aarch64 really mean "compatible with ARMv8" as a least common denominator, meaning ARMv8.x-y (x being the extension, y being A for application or R for realtime) will run it, just without taking advantage of any extension or realtime instructions.
    • ARMv9.x will run arm64 / aarch64 kernels and applications, as it's (supposedly) backward-compatible with ARMv8, just without taking advantage of the ARMv9 ISA.
    • If I want to create arm64 software that takes advantage of this-or-that extension or realtime instructions, I have to compile it in explicitely. I'm not sure if gcc handles special instructions, I haven't checked yet, but I suppose it does since it knows about the Thumb mode for instance.

    Do I understand correctly?

    If I do create some software that relies on extended ARMv8 or ARMv9 features and I want to release my software as a package, how should I name the package's architecture? Is there even a standard for that? Will it get rejected by the package managers of the few ARM distros out there, or will it be recognized as a subset of the wider arm64 / aarch64 architecture?

    3
    Non-invasive minor bone end corrections?

    Before I go see another doctor about this...

    One of my residual phalanges has developed a small bone spur over the years, and another is too long - always has been - and hurts my skin from the inside.

    I need to have the bone spur taken care of at some point, and I'd like to have the other residual phalange trimmed a quarter inch or so.

    One doctor I saw about this a couple of years ago proposed full surgery, complete with general anaesthesia and more stitches than I really want, and I declined at the time because it seemed like a lot for so little.

    My neighbor - who has all his limbs but is at the age when this sort of thing happens - had a bone spur on his heel taken care of, and he told me it was a simple, half-hour, local anaesthesia keyhole surgery with just one stitch and a week of easy recovery.

    Does anybody know if that's also an option for small residual extremities bones and whether I should shop around to find a more competent surgeon?

    2
    I'm curious: how do you say "VI"?

    When I was a student a few decades ago, everybody I knew pronounced it as "vee-eye". Then in the late nineties / early aughts, I heard the first people pronounced it as "vie" in a different city I had found employment in. It sounded odd to me, and it seemed to come from people who in fact didn't use it much. But the pronounciation I was used to still applied, mostly.

    Nowadays, I almost never talk about VI to anyone anymore, nor do I hear anyone say the name. It's become mostly a typed thing for me. But - coincidence? - this week I heard three people talk about it (younger, non VI users) and they all said "vie".

    And now I'm watching this video from the reasonably famous and definitely not young and not VI newbie NCommander and he too says "vie" in the video.

    I'm beginning to worry that I'm the one who's been saying it wrong all this time because of my misguided college buddies and teachers way back when 🙂

    So I'm curious: how do YOU say it? VEE-EYE or VIE?

    21
    Techlore - Unsubscribe

    After their shameless Synology shilling a couple of weeks ago, today Techlore is trying to sell me Proton Pass.

    Is Proton Pass a bad password manager? I don't know. It seems okay, but I have no opinion.

    What I do know is that Techlore is affiliated with Proton, which makes their newest 10-minute video - in which they reveal the affiliation only at the last minute - 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

    Unfortunately, In the business they're in, the merest hint of a bias kind of invalidates any advice they give. As the saying goes, when you point out other people's body odor, you'd better make sure you took a shower yourself.

    Unsubscribe...

    29
    Company brought to its knees by a cable

    Yesterday around noon, the internet at my company started acting up. No matter, slowdowns happen and there's roadwork going on outside: maybe they hit the fiber or something. So we waited.

    Then our Samba servers started getting flaky. And the database too. Uh oh... That's different.

    We started investigating. Some machines were dropping ICMP packets like crazy, then recovered, then other machines started to become unpingable too. I fired up Wireshark and discovered an absolute flood of IGMP packets on all the trunks, mostly broadcast from Windows machine. It was so bad two Linux machines on the same switch couldn't ping each other reliably if the switch was connected to the intranet.

    So we suspected a DDOS attack initiated from within the intranet by an outside attacker. We cut off the internet, but the storm of packets kept on coming. Physically disconnecting machines from the intranet one by one didn't do a thing either.

    Eventually, we started disconnecting each trunk one by one from the main router until we disconnected one and all the activity lights immediately stopped on all the ports. We reconnected it and the crazy traffic resumed.

    So we went to that trunk's subrouter and did the same thing. When we found the cable that stopped all the traffic, we followed it and finally found one lonely $10 ethernet switch with... a cable with both ends plugged into the switch. We disconnected the cable and everything instantly returned to normal.

    One measly cable brought the entire company to a standstill for hours! Because half of the software we have to use are cloud crap or need to call their particular motherships to activate their licenses, many people couldn't work anymore for no good technical reason at all while we investigated the networking issue.

    Anyway, I thought switches had protections against that sort of loopback connection, and routers prevented circular routes. But there's theory and there's reality. Crazy!

    35
    GPL violation follow-up - some bad news and some good news

    You might recall a few weeks ago that I requested from a well-known large and somewhat litigious company the source code of the modification they made to a certain GPL debugger, and that they grudgingly agreed after a long time.

    So I set out to work on the pile of code they sent me and managed to extract their modifications and port them fo the latest version of that GPL tool... apart from one driver for their debug probes that we use throughout our company: the cunning bastards left a stub in the open-source debugger (I have the code for that) and that stubs talks to the rest of the driver in the form of a closed-source TCP server.

    It's a blatant trick to go around the GPL by taking advantage of the grey area surrounding linking in the GPL - i.e. the question of whether a closed-source program can be linked to GPL code and not become GPL itself, which still hasn't been tested in court to my knowledge. If I recall correctly, the FSF is of the opinion that anything that dynamically links to GPL code becomes GPL too, but that's just an opinion.

    And of course, here in this case, the aforementioned company added one degree of separation between their closed-source driver and the GPL tool that uses it by making it a server, so whatever argument against linking to GPL code becomes even weaker.

    Anyway, as you can imagine, I'm disappointed: my work is 90% there, but I still don't have that one driver and their closed-source faux-server is half-broken and dog-slow because of the time it takes to spawn the server and communicate with it through TCP, and I can't fix it. And I'm 100% certain that if I asked them to send me the source code for that, they'd tell me to suck eggs.

    But here's what happened: I got so tired of their shenanigans that I started investigating other debug probes I could use instead of their proprietary junk. And after quite a lot of investigation, I found one solution based on open hardware and open software that, with some careful configuration, works 2x to 3x faster than their proprietary debug probe. Wow! I didn't even know it was possible, and I probably wouldn't have researched it if I had had all I needed to make what we already own works.

    Long story short: I proposed that my company replace all our existing proprietary debug probes with the open hardware one and my boss agreed. That's like 20 probes in total, between R&D, testing and production, and at the tune $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one, that's $5339.80 the egregious GPL-violating company won't get from us. Not to mention renewal of the license for their IDE that we've been using for almost 2 decades, because finally, at long last, after over a month of solid work, I finally managed to free up our source code from their vendor lock-in and make it compile, debug and flash using open-source tools from start to finish!

    So yeah, I didn't get what I originally wanted from that company. That's the bad news. But in the end I ended up better off without it, and that's the good news 🙂

    45
    Has Techlore sold out?

    I like Techlore (https://www.techlore.tech if you don't know) and I usually regard them as one of the most impartial and most trustworthy Youtubers out there. But for the past few months, I couldn't help noticing their somewhat heavy bias towards some of their video sponsors. Still, everybody has to eat right?

    This time though, it looks like Synology flew them over to Taiwan, and if you watch their video at the event, it's wall-to-wall Synology shilling. I'm really disappointed.

    50
    My quest to find a simple, unobtrusive autocompletion solution is finally successful

    So I'm very happy with vim, and have been for the past quarter century (I used Elvis before that. Remember Elvis? It was awesome! - But I digress...)

    I have to admit though, while I pity the fools in my company who use VSCode and mock me for using vim in the terminal, yet in fact produce code much slower than I do, I envy their IDE that suggests function and variable names in other project files.

    So I've been looking for a nice, easy-to-install solution to get some of that goodness in vim. Nothing fancy, just autocomplete suggestions to avoid having to grep names I forgot or having to yank/put text manually to prevent typos. And mostly easy, because for some reason, I'm properly allergic to any sort of vi configuration - be it vim or any other vi flavor.

    So I gave Neovim a shot. My plan was to ensure Neovim was at least as good as Vim, then try to install Treesitter. But that plan immediately went south, then kept on being a proper pain in the ass until I finally realized this was going nowhere fast and I didn't want to spend countless hours configuring that awful thing, so I gave up. I wasn't asking for much but Neovim totally failed to deliver.

    And then I found the solution I was looking for all along: YouCompleteMe. It's as simple as installing the handy vim-youcompleteme .deb for my distro (Linux Mint), running vam to install it and voila: a working autocompleter that actually works in 3 minutes flat and doesn't get in my way.

    0
    Beware of mosquitoes

    A mosquito bit me smack on a stump, right in the middle of a scar, and the entire scar flared up overnight over half its length like I had a chemical burn or something. It happened last week and it's still red and inflamed.

    This scar has been well healed 6 years ago and is normally invisible. The doc says wait and see, but it's mildly disturbing considering it was a single mosquito 7 days ago.

    So beware y'all: your skin might look nice and healthy on your tender bits, but evidently it can still be weak and vulnerable.

    2
    How to disable automatic identation

    I'm normally a straight vim user (just out of habit, no particular preference) and I'm giving neovim a spin. So far I like it but...

    For the love of all that's holy, how do I disable automatic indentation?

    I have noautoindent set, nosmartindent set, filetype indent off, but neovim keeps inserting indentations. The only thing that works is setting paste on, but that's not the right solution to this problem.

    Please help. This is driving me nuts!

    14
    What's the most suitable small EV to disable all internet connectivity?

    I have a very old diesel that I maintain religiously to make it last as long as possible, and whenever possible, I ride the bus. It's not that I wouldn't like a new car - and particularly an EV, those cars are attractive for a lot of reasons - but they all spy on their users nowadays and that's a big no-no for me. For that reason and that reason alone, I've refrained from buying a new car for years.

    But now I have a good reason to buy an EV: my employer has installed solar panels on the company's roof, is in the process of installing charge points on the parking lot, and is offering all the employees free charging.

    So I'm on the market for a small electric econobox to commute roughly 30 miles per day. I don't want anything fancy: just an honest-to-goodness little car with a steering wheel, an accelerator, a brake pedal and doors that lock. That's it. I don't care about creature comfort, I don't care about radio, GPS or anything else. I just want a car. And of course, of upmost importance to me, I want a car without telemetry, that doesn't spy on me and doesn't report to the mothership.

    So far I think the best option is to buy one of the first gen EVs with a 2G or 3G connection that plain doesn't work anymore, and have it overhauled. The problem is, I might want to buy a more recent, possibly more efficient vehicle. Also, good luck finding someone competent to service a battery pack in my area.

    If I went for a newer vehicle, what would be the best make/model to disable the internet immediately after purchase without any side effect? I've read that some models report a fault until the internet connectivity is restored, so those would be out of the question. And of course, if the antennae / SIM / 4G PCB or whatever needs to be disabled are super-hard to find, it wouldn't be ideal either.

    Any way to convert a modern car into an honest vehicle, or should I keep riding the bus and give the opportunity offered by my employer a pass?

    22
    What to do when a giant company refuses to honor a GPL claim?

    So this very large company who shall remain nameless distributes a proprietary software development environment that includes a patched version of a certain, well-known open-source debugging tool.

    The patch is to make said open-source tool support their products. It's not even hidden or anything: the binary is sitting right there in the installation directory, it's called the exact same thing the vanilla debugger is called and when I run it on the command line, it clearly says "patched for xyz".

    The tool in question is distributed under the GPLv2 and I need to modify it for my own project. So I sent an email to the company to request the source code for their modification, but they refuse by playing dumb and pretending they don't understand the question. They keep telling me the source code to their IDE is not public. I keep telling them I don't want their IDE but the source for the modified GPL backend tool they bundle with it. But no: they claim it's part of their product and they won't release it.

    Anybody knows the best course of action to deal with this? It's the first company I've dealt with that explicitly refuses to honor the GPL. I don't even think it's malice: I'm fairly sure the L2 support guy handling my ticket was told to deny my request by his clueless supervisor who didn't bother escalating it. But it's also a huge company that's known to be aggressive and litigious, whereas I'm just one guy and I'm not lawyering up over this. I have other hills to die on.

    Who should I pass the potato to? The FSF?

    41
    ExtremeDullard ExtremeDullard @lemmy.sdf.org
    Posts 62
    Comments 709
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