The advertising clause wasn't "non-free" as much as a practical problem that was incompatible with the GPL's ban on additional restrictions. It was largely removed when much popular software switched from the 4-clause original BSD license to the 3-clause or 2-clause version.
The appropriate copyright notice clause remained in 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. This clause is also present in GPLv2 and GPLv3.
Imagine it's ten years from now, and for $199 anyone can buy an in-home UPS from Home Depot with enough capacity to keep their lights on and their ice cream frozen for 48 hours. Once most houses have one of those, most power outages become more of a minor nuisance than a significant problem.
Part of it may be a dysfunctional corporate culture, but a lot of it is a consequence of Microsoft's business decision to maintain backwards compatibility at all costs. When you're committed to retaining every design mistake, forever, the complexity of the codebase just keeps rising, which means that less and less of it can fit into anyone's mind at one time, which means more mistakes are made going forward, and the technical debt just keeps compounding.
OpenAI envisions the device anticipating needs, surfacing information proactively and serving as an expert on its user, they said.
Will it have a Genuine People Personality? Perhaps a cheerful and sunny disposition?
Perhaps the real problem is that there is simply no reliable way to tell a real human's post from a generative AI's post anymore, since by the AIs are trained on the posts of real humans and are asymptotically becoming indistinguishable from them. You certainly can't simply go by post-quality, since the some of the smarter bots are better posters than some of the, err, less-well-informed humans.
Because of that, it's hard to feel good about putting any real effort into a social media conversation, because in the back of your mind you're always wondering: am I engaged in any kind of constructive activity here, or am I just unknowingly humping a rubber doll that Zuckerberg (or somebody) has provided for my amusement?
Now that most people have a fast internet connection
In the case of BitTorrent, even the fastest Internet connection won't get you a lot of successful peer connections if your ISP blocks all inbound TCP connections.
If youtube goes away, streaming video won't disappear, some new ecosystem will grow in its place.
Such a new ecosystem already has grown, as I understand it. It's called getting Netflix, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+/Hulu, Peacock, Prime Video, or Apple TV to accept your pitch and fund it. These take the place of cable television channels in the pre-broadband economy. And there are still a lot more pilot screenplays than budget to produce all of them.
2. Talk to real people. Touch grass. Etc.
With the decline of third places, particularly since the pandemic and as online shopping has taken over the functions of malls, how do people usually meet people in 2026?
Yes, I am proposing the internet be used as designed.
If only I could get my home ISP to add IPv6...
1. The same way 99% of content producers do it today. Less than one percent of youtube content is monetized in any meaningful way.
Would it benefit the public to completely do away with the other 1%? How could something like The Amazing Digital Circus have been produced purely on a hobby budget?
2. Word of mouth. Curated lists.
How does the producer of a video go about seeding "word of mouth" and getting onto "curated lists"?
3. The protocol already handles this.
Yes, by excluding a lot of viewers who lack an IP address that can accept inbound TCP connections, unless I'm missing something. It also excludes viewers who have an iPhone or iPad and don't have a Mac with which to build and ad-hoc sign an app because Apple has reportedly banned BitTorrent clients from the App Store.
The same way it all worked before youtube.
And how might that have been? I might be misremembering, but this was my recollection:
1. Movie studios and TV channels funded production of videos to be viewed by the public. Very few pitches got funded.
2. Movie studios promoted upcoming and newly released movies through television advertising, and TV channels promoted shows to the channel's own viewers.
3. Movies were paywalled, and TV was ad-supported (in the case of broadcast) or behind the combination of ads and a paywall (in the case of cable).
Also, before YouTube, most end-user devices on the Internet had an IP address, even if dynamic, which could accept incoming connections. Nowadays, a lot of Internet subscribers' devices are behind network address translation (NAT), and if you share your IP address with the whole neighborhood, the ISP is unlikely to forward a port to your device.
Under your proposal:
1. How would the producer of a video cover the cost of producing the video before it even reaches BitTorrent?
2. How would a viewer learn of a video that they are likely to enjoy?
3. How would the system work around users who "leech", or view the video without contributing to its decentralized hosting?
A Dyson sphere would have significant environmental effects too, and it's equally likely to be built.
If a company came out with a service that would burn your data into a crystal that you could wear as jewelry, and the crystal was reasonably durable (ideally diamond, or something similar), that would be a useful (or at least novel) way to store valuable data long-term. Assuming there was also a convenient way to read it back when required, of course.
This, however, isn't that. The whole point of git is that it distributes copies of your repository onto every client that clones it, so that the likelihood of everyone accidentally losing all copies at once is minimal.
This is as bad as Europeans crowing about "free" healthcare or higher education. It's not free. They paid for it with their tax euros.
...and wouldn't it be nice to get something in return for our tax dollars? Other than billion-dollar ballrooms and pointless wars, I mean?
What's this criterion does is provide non-falsifiable cover for rejecting anything.
Do they need cover to reject anything? In my projects, I reserve the right to reject anything, for any reason, solely on the grounds that they are my projects, and if someone doesn't like it, they can fork off (their own repository).
What's the incentive to pay the random then, if the attacker had encrypted the data without backing it up and wouldn't be able to decrypt it?
Never put off till run-time what you can do at compile-time. -- D. Gries
