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You're right, the law text doesn't specifically call out the Windows operating system or the Linux operating system. The example you gave of Open Source Windows drivers is valid.

The Grandparent's point about that "it double-dings open source developers" is still correct and poignant even with this clarification.


> The Grandparent's point about that "it double-dings open source developers" is still correct and poignant even with this clarification.

I feel like I'm missing what subset of people this is, exactly. We're talking about businesses here that would struggle with these tax rules. Which I guess is, mainly, contractors or startups. How common is it for such businesses to release their software as open-source, vs. as closed-source? I would've (naively) expected most paid OSS developers to be funded by large organizations/businesses that have plenty of money to fund them, not small businesses/contractors that would be severely impacted by this law. Is this actually a large set of people?


There are lots of small OSS businesses that are contractors to the big companies you mention. My go-to example is Igalia, who work on web browser and other core OSS tech, but there lots of others, some mentioned on the FOSSjobs wiki.

https://www.igalia.com/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources


Watch other people shop at the grocery store. They buy the vegetables, beans, raw meats, and dairy. They spend more time there than anywhere else on the store.

Watch what other people eat in their day. How many of their calories came from meals created with only the above ingredients? 25%?


A couple of years ago, I was researching modern food science (for unrelated reasons). What really struck me was how focused we are on product longevity. Everything must have low available water in order to survive warehouses, transit, and shelves. Sugar, sodium, oils, and phosphates are all just tools to accomplish this.

Put another way, the bag of chips at the American grocery is _designed from concept to factory_ to be unable to support living beings. Microorganisms would die from dehydration trying to eat the chips. But due to a bug in human psychology, when we eat them we just feel more hungry. There only regulating feeling we get is guilt.


> Put another way, the bag of chips at the American grocery is _designed from concept to factory_ to be unable to support living beings.

This is a weird leap. Yes, there is some degree of modern engineering in packaged food to prevent spoilage but "unable to support living beings" is the wrong conclusion. You're implying the food lacks nutritive value, which is not true.


That is because Americans shop every 2 weeks so things need to last 2 weeks.

In other countries that shops more frequently there is less need for that, and there these products has much fewer additives.


Business continuity. If you don't have access to your backups, there's nothing you can do to work around a vendor issue.

Well written! Would you mind sharing how you came up with the "middle out" numbering system? I can never seem to come up with something this inspired when I'm doing math problems by myself.


The post presents it a bit out of order, but it was mostly from realizing at some point that the way the fractal grows by a factor of 5, base 5 number systems, and the "spiral" mentioned in the post can all fit together. I also thought a lot about how to programmatically draw the fractal and a natural way would be to start from the middle and zoom out.

There's an apocryphal story about Richard Feynman about how he used to keep a dozen or so random problems in the back of his mind and made a little bit of progress on them every time he saw a connection, until finally he'd solve one and everyone would think he magically figured it out instantly. This was a bit similar except I'm not nearly at that level and I've only been able to do that for one problem instead of a dozen.


https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

Guix bootstraps (in 2023, no clue about now) from a 357-byte program. You audit the bytecode.


Those are done at compile time. Many languages (including Rust, which this story is about) also remove unused symbols at compile time.

The comment you're replying to is talking about not pulling in dependencies at all, before compiling, if they would not be needed.


I just read the article and feel I learned nothing. It's all the obvious lessons, without any real implementation advice. Am I the wrong audience?


Unfortunately despite how obvious all this is, they are common real world problems that management all over gets wrong time and time again.


Yeah, but unfortunately the SQLite team doesn't include that tool with their "autotools" tarball, which is what most distros (and brew) use to package SQLite. The only way to use the tool is to compile it yourself.


Yeah, that’s a bummer. It does appear to be in nixpkgs, though:

  nix-shell -p sqlite-rsync


Realistically, are you using SQLite if you can’t compile and source control your rev of the codebase? Is that really a big deal?


Yes, it's extremely common to be using it and not even be compiling anything yourself, let alone C or any support libraries.


`sqlite3_rsync` must be installed on the remote host too, so now you're cross-compiling for all the hosts you manage. It also must be installed into the PATH the ssh uses, which for a number of operating systems doesn't include /usr/local/bin. So I guess you're now placing your sshd config under configuration management to allow that.

These tasks aren't that challenging but they sure are a yak shave.


Allow -> Tarpit -> Block should be done by ASN


You probably want to check how many ips/blocks a provider announces before blocking the entire thing.

It's also not a common metric you can filter on in open firewalls since you must lookup and maintain a cache of IP to ASN, which has to be evicted and updated as blocks still move around.


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