I worked at one company in 2001 that did it. We used IRC like a water cooler. Our boss tried dialing in to meetings for a week (nothing like today's webcam stuff then) and it was great for us. Now, he was always online. He moved to Kansas (from Boston).
Our group split up into 2. One had all the people that would ask a question & go away. The other had the water cooler people. The water cooler people expanded across 4 time zones. The other group eventually couldn't communicate across the building.

My current job, precovid, all my group was remote from my office. My team was in a 12 hour away time zone. Essentially, i was going into work so I could work remote. There wasn't much change after covid when I had to work from home.

I'm on another team now. 2 of us in MA, 1 in Ontario, CA, 2 in Banalore, India, 3 in France, 1 in Germany, 1 in Czech Republic and several in Israel. We need to work remotely and the company works hard to ensure the culture supports it.

Dilbert was the 1st syndicated comic on the internet. It was in a usenet newsgroup and your newsreader would decode it.

This was before web browsers existed.

Ubuntu had upstart, OSX has launchd, Solaris had SMF

Solaris supported mixing with SysV stuff, but was hard to convert
Systemd is easy to convert SysV, but doesn't support mixing reliably

At a previous job I had to train others in an environment where management wanted to avoid GPL code "because its viral". So they'd find a library that was GPL & their 1st instinct was to change the licence!

My manager also wanted me to change the name of the "Do Whatever the Fuck You Want" license because they were offended. Nope, that's the name, they didn't have an abbreviation like GPL.

Finding an apple and calling it an orange won't change the code or license. If they want to avoid the GPL, they need to redesign their code. Use an orange to begin with. Modify it to deal with peeling it which they didn't have do do with the apple.

Now I work at a place that submits all its code changes upstream, regardless of licence. If they buy a company that has closed source, they change it to open source. Sometimes that involves rewriting pieces that cannot be distributed.

1st step, getting them to use unique and long passwords for each site.

They might reset them via their email account.
Write them on paper so they reset less often

Keepass makes it easier to type in a longer password. But only on the device you have.
You can share the database, but there might be issues changing passwords on multiple devices.

Bitwarden does the sync well, can be updated on all devices.
I find it easier than Keepass. But if someone is stuck on paper/resets, its hard to get them to try either.

Minix was also around at the time (or a bit after). When you bought the Minix book, your got the binaries and all the source code. But you were not allowed to share that source.

What people did was share context diffs. You'd download them and patch your copies of the source. I went through patching v1.3 to 1.5 to upgrade my 286. The only thing you didn't have source for was the compiler so you could not upgrade it.

Back then, most people did not have CDs on their computers. You had floppies and a 2400 baud modem. If you were lucky, you could go to a local college *that had internet access* (most did not). Then you might be able to get to FTP sites at 9600 baud. The big site, simtel20 was a PDP-10(?) and you had to configure your client to deal with the 36 bit files. Sometimes you had to uudecode things. Some links only allow 7 bit characters and uuencode would convert 8bit to 7bit so characters would not get dropped.

Red Hat has been a server company for a long time.

Companies have been moving from data centers to cloud for a long time. That can have risks with vendor lock in. And you need to build your systems differently too.

Kubernetes (k8s) is a good way to go on cloud. It handles HA and horizontal scaling inherently. Its very different from having a bunch of systems (physical or VMs) talking to each other. Google open sourced k8s to change developers designed and operated systems. k8s still needs to talk to the infrastructure underneath and every cloud is different as are bare metal and VM hypervisors (vmware, KVM, HyperV).

Red Hat has a productized Kubernetes called Openshift. All the k8s APIs/CLI work and there are extended ones in Openshift for multiple tenants. It can be installed on every major cloud (including OpenStack), VM hypervisors and bare metal. Once your apps are developed to Openshift, they can be deployed to Openshift wherever it is running.

Cloud vendors all offer their own k8s system but each is different and none of them will make it easy to move off. Openshift is popular enough that the cloud vendors offer it (and maintain it so you don't need it ) on their clouds.

There are windows containers and they are supported in Openshift. You can make operators based on any OS.

Openshift can also run VMs running most OSen

I thought it became Meet

I want a computer I can carry with me.
I get directions with traffic reports
I can find out what song I'm hearing so I can listen again
I can translate different languages so I can order food
I can take photos and video
I can look up information
I can carry dozens of books to read

I just want something that can't interrupt me with a voice call

Brands were created so consumers could see who is responsible. Before, you didn't know who made the crackers w/ the worms because it all came from a generic barrel. Ritz branded their crackers so you could see its not generic.

The problem is that you can't reliably tell what brands are on Amazon. There are so many counterfeit batteries for example.

For other things where counterfeits are not the issue, Amazon could let us know how long the brand has been listed on Amazon. It would give incentive to keeping a brand (Taklife?) around for years and make brand of the month schemes less appealing.

Before the quarantine, I'd go into the office & chat on slack. I'm in Massachusetts, my boss is in North Carolina along with some other coworkers. My team was based in Beijing with other members in Italy and Brazil.

Later, I switched to another team. My boss & a coworker are in India. Other team members are in Czechoslovakia, Germany, France, Israel. There is another in Massachusetts, but too far from "the office" to really commute.

We regularly work with others in Australia, China, Poland, California, Washington, Oregon, Michigan. Now that I think of it, I don't think I ever worked on a project with anyone in the Massachusetts location as closely as I've worked with all the remotes.

If you set things up to work remotely, you can do "round the clock engineering". If you have to go into the office to interact, you're going to limit your work circle.

If you need "butts in seats" to manage, you either need to improve your management skills or empower your employees to do their work w/o you micromanaging.

Or you're using openssl in your linux app and there's a vulnerability with a specific configuration when run on Novell.

These tools are great for finding open source code so you can ensure you're complying with the license terms.

They're trying to have a checkbox for being a security tool. If someone in your org is looking at that aspect, you'll spend far more time refuting why its not a security issue than finding actual issues.

Lots of places in the US have a Walmart within an hour drive but not enough internet for streaming video, maybe even music.

Other reasons
Your streaming service drops the show you've been re-watching over & over.
You have a media server/portable device and want to rip media to it. And don't want to torrent it.
You want to support a band.
Your streaming doesn't let you repeat
Streaming doesn't work for you in the car/bus/subway/camping trip

Glaxo created zantac while being a British company and they have universal health care