By the time they’re about to go belly up, companies no longer have the resources to ensure they comb through the code to remove the parts licensed from 3rd parties, and the liquidators see all assets as something to sell in order to cover whatever loans the company got.

In an ideal world, consumers would never buy a non-open sourced car, or phone, or IoT device.

In the real world, regulators need to force companies to give consumers at least some basic way to control the products they buy.

Smart to have a buyback clause in the contract, otherwise this would’ve been lost and locked until the patent expired.

You say I don’t read… then proceed to explain the same that I already said? Ok.

This is going to get interesting:

The decision imposes a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) on individuals and companies that attempt to continue using X via VPN.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/30/elon-musk-x-could-face-ban-in-brazil-after-failure-to-appoint-legal-representative

A judge’s ruling on a previous case makes that ruling law.

Not everywhere.

Previous rulings are a precedent in Common Law systems like the US, UK, Canada, or Australia.

Only Supreme Court rulings become a precedent in Civil Law systems like the EU, Russia,most of the rest of America.

To draw an example, the EU never made a law about cookie splash screens.

A very poor example; Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive 2002/58/EC.

The EU at its top level creates “Directives”, which member states then are bound to transpose into their national Civil Law systems. Judges can interprete that law in different ways, none of which creates a precedent. Only a country’s Supreme Court decision creates a precedent for that country, but even then it can be recurred up to the EU Tribunal, which has the last saying.

Where I am, the news said:

• “Telegram is a social network” (it isn’t)
• “that allows terrorism from Russia and Iran” (it’s used by Russian and Iranian oppositors)
• “drug trafficking” (because it’s encrypted, I guess)
• “fraud” (scams are also part of email and the web)
• “money laundering” (…what?)
• “piracy” (sigh…)
• “and distribution of child pornography.” (so does email)
• “It doesn’t honor removal requests from the film/music industry organizations” (that’s piracy twice)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse

Terrorists, pedophiles/child molesters, organized crime like drug dealers, intellectual property pirates, and money launderers are cited commonly

Do we have a BINGO?

Senior talent tends to be “T people”, while juniors tend to be “I people”. Removing that T scaffolding, is how corporations end up like Boeing or the Titan.

somehow confirming that the binaries shipped by your package manager match what the code compiles to

Indeed, that’s why: https://reproducible-builds.org/

Right now, Debian seems to be leading with over 95% of packages being reproducible.

they keep reinstalling stuff I’ve ripped out purposefully

You’ll find every OS does that, it’s called “installing dependencies”. Even on Gentoo, there is only so far that you can go removing stuff before it turns out they either get reinstalled anyway, or everything comes tumbling down.

putting cloud run python functions in to Excel

People seem to like their cloud run functions in Google Sheets, Jupyter books, Mathematica notebooks, and similar. Can’t blame MS for trying to catch up.

X/X11 is a client-server protocol from the age of 10Mbps networks, intended for a bunch of “dumb terminals” connected to a mainframe that runs the apps, with several “optimizations” that over time have become useless cruft.

Wayland is a local machine display system, intended for computers capable of running apps on the same machine as the display (aka: about everything for the past 30 years).

Nowadays, it makes more sense to have a Wayland system (with some RDP app if needed), than an X11 system with a bunch of hacks and cruft that only makes everything slower and harder to maintain. An X11 server app acting as a “dumb terminal”, can still be run on a Wayland system to display X11 client apps if needed.