Who says it can only be a gravity vehicle? If they leave the floor open, they could walk the car, while saying 'yabba dabba do'.

What's amazing is that as dumb a product as the Pin was, that was the *best* Humane had to offer. Why in the world would anyone spend that much to acquire is beyond me, especially while recognizing how bad an idea it is by shutting it down.

Compaq spewed $300 million to get Zip2 back in the day, so HP is just continuing that tradition of tossing bags of money at dubious companies that might have relevance to the buzzwords of the day.

Note that the attorneys may not say "slam dunk you are in the clear" and instead assess that the risk (likelihood and severity) and the business determine it's worth a shot to try. Here in a hypothetical where someone actually brings a case and RedHat loses, the remedy would likely be be "restore the contract of the plaintiff", or basically just back where they would have been if they didn't even try.

On the FSF side, well, even if they wanted to try out an argument, they don't have standing. They'd need a subscriber who was penalized by RedHat that might have standing if it's clear it was termination over exercising GPL rights.

Broadly speaking, currently the ecosystem has settled into two general camps. AlmaLinux, that decided to play it the way RedHat ostensibly approves, and work off of stream and tolerate a bit of deviation from RHEL sources (and play up scenarios where they beat RedHat to issuing security updates, which turns out not to be hard to do) and Rocky, who basically says they'll keep getting an exact copy by whatever means and keep going even as it means some unspecified people are technically violating their subscription agreement to make it happen.

Frankly, they wouldn't even have to go that far. They'd only have to shut the door on non-copyleft content and they've pretty much already made it impossible to clone.

A quick review shows that a random RHEL I could find was only about 66% copyleft. So a full third of the distribution could close up as much as they like. It's already severe enough that you couldn't credibly claim to be a source based clone with so much missing.

The question is whether a license like GPL is able to impose restrictions on those terms and conditions on related. It's quite likely that, as written, the subscriber agreement lets them do whatever they want in terms of cancellation. The question is whether the copyleft suppliers license is compatible with retaliation over exercising rights in the license.

I'd say that the rights are restricted, when stated point blank that while you can *technically* do something, you will be penalized with retaliatory behavior on another agreement. Now if your user agreement is terminated on other grounds, then so be it, but it seems as a retaliatory measure for distributing copyleft code it would be against the letter of the license. So you aren't promised an ongoing relationship no matter what, but if the grounds for that termination is GPL retaliation...

Note the GPL does *explicitly* speak to providing a persistent supplier relationship: "valid for at least three years ". It doesn't say you are entitled to updates to the binary code, but it does say that if an enduser has the binary from 2024 from you, then you need to provide the source code in 2026.

All that said, I think there is no appetite as while it may state you can do further restrictions, pushing this may throw a wrench on how much of the GPL is fully legal, if the courts rule that a license can not have such a term.

This was also pretty old news, like 2 years ago this happened, and the FSF statement was also 2 years ago.

I think the counter argument leans heavily upon the "without further restriction" part of the GPL. That your rights to GPL are "further restricted" by the subscriber agreement saying that any attempt to exercise your rights under the license shall terminate your subscriber agreement.

I don't think anyone wants to push that issue though, as if such broad licensing terms can be in effect, a lot more misbehavior would be possible than prevented. Forcing an ongoing forever customer relationship due to a license term seems too much.

The funny part is the biggest threat is not the difficulty with landing an unambiguous use case, it's that competitors have shown 'fast following' can be done super quickly and at a fraction of the cost.

Investors seemed relatively content pouring money into unclear results, until they find out that competitors can replicate the behavior and in the process point out to the casual investor that self-hosting models is a possibility, which really destroys their "everything must be rented" dreams.

So far if I ask it something that is neither obvious off the top of my head nor pretty much verbatim in the top two or three results in google, it comes back confidently incorrect. It mashes plausible sounding words together in ways that will tend to be on theme, but useless.

For some folks it may be useful, but at least for me it hasn't provided value. I could imagine it augmenting my development with somewhat fancier autocomplete for obvious but tedious snippets that come up, but the crap shoot is currently just not worth the hassle, particularly with good libraries and pretty good autocomplete already. I have caught myself writing a for loop that I was 100% sure an LLM could guess what it was going to be, but it's rare enough to have not bothered trying to get it set up more.

Well I didn't say xor...

Those who are able to or believe they are able to use LLMs to do their jobs may not have the same cognitive load as those who have failed to find LLM approaches up to the task of doing all their work?

There's an executive I know that has gone hard in on LLM. Thing was he never impressed me before, and his switch to using LLM to generate his correspondence and digest meetings for him hasn't really made him any worse than he already was. He is really bad at his job now, but he was before too.

The scale may be different, but the concept is analogous.

There's a false equivalency, that any "smart phone" was in the same category and somewhat interchangeable as the potential winner. The thing was that the winner was "handheld device with multi-touch capacitive screen and capable, intuitive handling of desktop oriented websites", and Microsoft was no where near that design. Even in 2009 as anyone barely paying attention knew that approach to be the winning paradigm, the new Windows Mobile *still* didn't support it.

The "smart phone" (maybe more like cellular PDA?) market between about 2000 and 2007 was a niche market that failed to provide a value except for a select few that just *needed* to be on all the time and was able/willing to put up with the severe constraints on the device. Microsoft had years of iterating on their vision and were no where near aligned with the mass market. The participants pretty much had settled into handheld computing being a business tool with some enthusiast market, but not a base consumer thing. iPhone was the first to really resonate, with the multi touch display, porting a full desktop web browser to it, with auto rotation and pinch to zoom making it actually viable to kind of, sort of deal with the websites of the day that largely ignored the mobile specific browsers. Android followed quickly in 2008 and Palm got with the program by 2009, though they had issues and it might have already been too late anyway. Microsoft launched a platform that was consistent with the 'cellular PDA' design as late as 2009, when everyone else in the industry had seen the writing on the wall. Microsoft's competitive answer arrived in 2010, just way too late, and with essentially zero continuity from previous ecosystem to make up for their late entry.

Microsoft was never anywhere near the possibility of the "smartphone market being theirs for the taking", as the market came to be after 2007. They were playing an entirely different game and they didn't have a culture that would have even dreamed of producing a Windows Phone 7 like thing before the competition proved that was the direction to go. If they came out with Windows Phone 7 in 2007, they might have made it. If they managed their Windows Phone 8 approach by 2009 or so, then maybe they could have come from behind with some desktop affinity. But they were always just years behind the competition once the actual market got defined, with no whiff of them possibly coming up with what the industry was going to need in order to flourish.

I mean by that logic, I was positioned to be a tech billionaire because I had a website in the 90s, but my web site just sucked but if it hadn't, I'd be big.

MS smart phones were competing with Blackberry and Palm as credible "smart phones" of the time. They were far from alone in the nascent market. They all botched what was the "right" UI to reach the masses (capacitive touch) and failed general UI design especially failing to produce web browsers capable of competent interaction with desktop targeted websites.