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Comment Re:GPL MIT BSD - Each project can pick what they l (Score 1) 190

That FuD is how BSD justifies maintaining a codebase based entirely on someone else's work but being ok with using it, improving it, and not at all sharing it back.

Those of us that maintain/maintained *BSD has absolutely been contributing back to it. And so has most of the companies that have used code derived from it.

Your lack of understanding of the licenses and their economics shows through. I think you've been hanging out with copyleft FUD providers, since you're repeating copyleft FUD. Companies will contribute changes back to BSD codebases - just not always *all* changes. But more changes than if they instead got a source license for something else, like QNX or Windows. As a former BSD developer, my clear impression is that since the formation of Free/Net/OpenBSD the vast majority of relevant proprietary changes have been offered back to the open source projects. And by "relevant" I mean "changes that had a meaningful chance of being merged back into the mainline project".

Relevant changes not being merged back (e.g. that FreeBSD hasn't accepted the changes from MacOS) has typically been due to lack of review capacity rather than the changes not being offered.

Comment Re: MIT vs GPL (Score 1) 190

Linus had a choice of licenses to start with. He chose GPLv2 over BSD or MIT because he thought that the freedom aspect was desirable for such a project.

Because he had been taken in by rms' propaganda about how the GPL increases freedom, as most of us was before we thought really really hard about it. Many haven't thought hard enough about it yet to change their minds.

Comment Re:MIT vs GPL (Score 1) 190

If you want companies to give back if they use your code, then use GPL.

This hides the cost of the GPL. A more appropriate formulation is

"If you want to force companies to give back all changes they make to your software at the cost of having them unable to make use of your software and contribute back at all in cases where they could only give back some of their changes, use the GPL."

I was a FreeBSD developer back in the day. I have worked for companies that made changes to open source software, both as the person doing those changes and in other situations where my team utilized open sourced code and other internal teams made modifications to it. My experience is that companies want to give back anything that is not strategic, and the changes they make to BSD-licensed code bases (really, all code bases) are mostly utilitarian rather than strategic. They want to give back for several pragmatic reasons: It avoids maintenance costs for their changes, it is good PR, their engineers feel good about doing it, and it creates a good relationship to the upstream project, meaning that if they need help, they're likely to get it.

In my experience companies contribute more to BSD/MIT licensed code bases than to GPLed codebases. It is very seldom that it would make sense for a company to make a change to a codebase under GPL and give it back and it would not have made sense to give it back under BSD/MIT. It may be different from individuals. Some individuals believe companies deriving from BSD/MIT-licensed code bases and don't give all their changes back are exploitative, and thus those individuals avoid working on BSD/MIT-licensed codebases.

Of course, if we convince people that companies working on BSD/MIT codebases is typically not exploitative, then the individual part will also impove.

Comment Re:So now we build a great big sieve? (Score 1) 44

From a cost benefit analysis he has spent a tremendous amount of money to pick up a modest amount of plastic. And he hit every problem that actual experts predicted would happen.

https://therevelator.org/why-o...

"plastic going into the ocean (via interceptors)"

The funny thing is people told him that would be more effective because people had already deployed river interceptors and they were effective, and it took years before his techbro ego let him finally do it. At which point he claimed to have invented the technology which was a lie.

Comment Re:Private property Social Justice. Every time. (Score 1) 100

Try to put two flappy pieces of linen in exactly the same place, and then tell me that they can't enforce any laws. Try to transport a flappy piece of linen from one side of the earth to the other in less than one second, then tell me they can't enforce any laws. Try to put make $6.3 billion worth of flappy linen formatted as $100-bills weight less than 60 metric tons, then tell me that they can't enforce any laws.

The laws are different, but they're there.

Comment Rationales & (dis)advantages (Score 1) 21

I have to think a bit to organize why and advantages and disadvantages of this, so I thought I'd share.

I define "tokenizing shares" as using a distributed blockchain with universal ability to transact as a way to trade shares.

Advantages of tokenizing shares:

* Universal access to fractional trading, not just inside a single trading platform. (Most likely, anyway.)
* Near zero transaction costs outside the spread. There are trading platforms that offer $0 commissions for regular retail customers, but there's still regulatory fees and these could potentially be skipped. (NOTE: There is likely a larger spread on a distributed ledger than a regular exchange, due to slower transactions. See below.)
* Ability to trade 24h
* Access to purchasers that don't want to or cannot use traditional platforms (e.g, crypto fans, people in developing countries). This may be stopped by "Permissioned ledgers", where there contracts that stop the transfer of stocks into a wallet unless it's on a whitelist.
* Resistance to total failure (due to the distributed nature of the setup)

Changes with good and bad sides:

* Slower trades; expect max speed of milliseconds rather than 1us
* Thus, a loss of the ability to do HFT (High Frequency Trading), which means that we lose the information transmission and market making ability of HFTs, but we also lose their ability to do front-running and decrease their ability to cause flash crashes and similar
* Loss of ability to shut down the trading. This remove an abusable tool of power, but it also lose a tool used to stop bad situation (like flash crashes), which is used to deal with bad market situations (like flash crashes due to trading software bugs), to avoid insider trading when major news is about to hit, and to deal with regulatory concerns.
* All trades are final. In the regular market, trades can be reversed by the courts or banks if done quickly (clearing in the US is in one business day, in Europe it's mostly two business days); in an anonymous, immediate clearing system based on a final distributed ledger, trades can't be reversed. This removes some types of risk, but adds in risks of theft (as we've seen with cryptocurrency) and makes mistakes more difficult to reverse.

Disadvantage if both on a regular exchange and a blockchain:

* The slower trades on the blockchain will lead to latency arbitrage. To avoid losses from price sniping, the blockchain market has to have wider spreads. Market makers will also typically provide limited liquidity in the slower market, to minimize the amount of loss the times they do get sniped.

Disadvantages of stocks on a blockchain in general:

* The distributed nature of the blockchain will allow frontrunning: A retail investor place an order in a market, and a frontrunning company with faster routing setup will then buy the stock elsewhere at a lower price, and re-sell it to the investor at the higher price. If there are distributed validators for transaction order, frontrunners may instead use techniques to bribe the validators (e.g, they may run validators themselves, and have their purchase jump the queue). The net result of both is that instead of negative spread going as profit to the retail investors, it goes to the frontrunners.
* It provides larger liquidity pools for criminals and terrorist organizations to do money laundering; e.g. Russia may be able to move billions around outside sanctions (though there are protocols in place that try to stop this)

Disadvantages for this particular blockchain at this time, for the companies that are resistant to getting on it:

* It is cheap to say no now, and they can't say no later
* There is little time to evaluate
* There is likely some level of legal risk

That's a quick attempt to sort my thoughts - they're not strongly researched for this particular blockchain, though I did a couple of searches to fill in details that I wasn't certain about.

Comment Re: This is not about crypto (Score 2) 21

That's nowhere near true. The current system is administered by regulated entities that have a decent amount of information about most owners. Are there ways to play the system? Yes. But it's nowhere near the same level of anonymity and flexibility as making stocks into tokens that can be freely transferred to anonymous accounts.

Comment Re:Shocking (Score 0) 131

"Point us to an post about a guy given a job he is clearly unqualified"

That's literally my point -- the post isn't about the person in charge of the ministry! It's about them testing Collabora and the users just having too many issues with it. I guarantee if it was the same exact story and the minister had a male name none of you would have done this deep dive and criticism.

And why do you think she is unqualified? The Minister of Digitization doesn't need to be an expert on digitization, they need to be competent at high-level management and understanding how laws and policies work. Did she do something wrong? Would someone else have somehow convinced the 37 or however many employees who tested it not to hate it?

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