And when you do that, you lose access to your bank, because bank apps routinely refuse to run on devices that leave the user in control (e.g. unlocked bootloader, rooted phone). Graphene and similar would be a much more acceptable solution if remote attestation of a locked bootloader were banned.
I really don't see the issue with waiting 24 hours. These protections in general seem very likely to help unsophisticated users. It really seems like a nothingburger to me personally. I was going to make an analogy to the ethics of getting vaccinated (and getting mildly ill of a day) to protect the immunity compromised members of the community, but even that is laughable because it underscores what a nothingburger this is (far more of the community is technologically unsophisticated than is immunocompromised, and what sophisticated users are being asked to do is closer to wearing a mask once for 24 hours).
You can always find justifications to erode all civil liberties. I think it's a major gap in the way history is being taught that people think that the reasons to remove liberties sound like overt evil mustache-twirling slogans. In reality they always talk about a danger that the benevolent overlord will keep you safe from.
All these changes are attacks on general purpose computing and computing sovereignty and personal control over one's data, and one's digital agency.
More and more apps won't run, again allegedly to keep you safe. You can't run your bank apps on your rooted and custom software. TPMs of desktop, everything needing approval. Yeah you may say tough luck, just use the web. But more and more banks sunset their web UI. It's apps only. And then you'll say "tough luck, start your own bank and offer this feature if you think there is customer demand". Or tough luck, win an election and then you can change the laws etc.
Yeah I'm aware that we can only watch from the sidelines. At least we can write these comments.
The new world will be constant AI surveillance of all your biosignals, age and ID verification, only approved and audited computation, all data and messaging in ID attached non e2e encrypted cloud storage and so on. And people will say it keeps you safe and you have nothing to fear if you are a law abiding person.
This would be less of an issue if there were an explicit regulatory mandate saying "businesses larger than X may not limit any consumer capabilities for interacting with their business in such a way that it can only be accessed by proprietary applications running on locked-down systems that a user cannot modify, control, or install their own software on. Offering to have a person handle that functionality on their behalf does not constitute an alternative to functionality made available via such an application". (With appropriate clear definitions for "locked-down", and other appropriate elaborations.)
I don't know that sounds pretty dumb on the whole. The key challenge is determine who is at fault in the event of a breach. I don't think it's reasonable to hold companies responsible for privacy while also requiring them to allow privacy to be invaded.
The current situation is that banks regularly require the use of an unmodified, unrooted Android or iOS device, which reinforces the duopoly and makes it impossible for anyone to compete. (Even emulating Android doesn't help, as emulated Android won't pass the checks banks do to make sure you don't have control of your device.)
That situation is not acceptable. Got something better than insults like "pretty dumb" to say about how to resolve this abuse of the two-player oligopoly in the mobile phone market?
You are uncritically repeating the party line from banks who claim it is necessary for security, without giving any rationale or supporting evidence, and coupling it with an insult.
> But they also failed to learn any lessons from X
Why do you believe that the developers of X failed to learn lessons from X when developing the replacement of X? Perhaps they learned lessons from X and decided to build it differently as a result?
Which is exactly what they did, as I understand it.
For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display.
I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.
Anyway, turns out computers really didn’t do that. We’re all still using one or more monitors that are mostly the same, with a couple of common aspect ratios.
Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe it’ll just be some extra stuff in the code forever.
Of course one of the ways you find out that you did something wrong was by doing it. So many comments online seem to just assume that the developers should’ve had the foresight to know everything they did that people don’t like or care about was wrong.
I feel real sympathy for both the developers and people with serious accessibility issues it has been a problem for.
But “beat up on Wayland” is practically a meme. An easy way to score points without looking at the big picture of how we got here.
> For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display.
The other common example is that wayland is well-suited to AR/VR 3D compositing, and X... isn't.
> I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.
It had better be well suited to cars, seeing as how it was significantly made for and by car companies. (I hear, at least; I'm told that it was significantly pushed forward precisely by companies developing automotive displays)
> Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says.
Or quit, and take the (Open Source) project and community with you. Companies sometimes discover this the hard way; see, for instance, the story of how Hudson became Jenkins.
The types of folks who make reimplemented game engines often do it as a labor of love towards the original. And the best companies often have great appreciation for their modding communities and preservationists. (Witness the good collaborations between some companies and SCUMMVM, for instance.) This may well have been a conversation that was entirely reasonable and respectful.
I just can't believe that given the outcome and the wording of the posts from the project. If there was respect here there would have been no threats. If there were no threats there would be no talk of "balancing commercial interests"
No, they don't. They own the game data, and the original game engine. They don't own the reimplemented Open Source game engine.
OpenTTD did not have to do anything here. It sounds like they had a very positive interaction with Atari, in which Atari is providing them with some support and collaboration, and in exchange for that, OpenTTD agreed to formalize the requirement for "you need to own the original game data" by having people on game stores purchase the original game through them before getting OpenTTD through them.
That seems like a pretty reasonable approach. It should be held up as a good model for collaboration. But it shouldn't be treated as "they have every right to [demand a] cease and desist".
Though it's no longer a clone, it literally was a clone when it first started (you were even supposed to supply your own totally legitimately acquired asset packs).
So it'd be pretty much impossible to claim the engine came about as a clean room implementation. And of course, even if maybe they could win a court case (honestly don't think they could) the mere threat of one would likely make openttd quit.
> you were even supposed to supply your own totally legitimately acquired asset packs
I don't have the impression that OpenTTD encouraged or sanctioned obtaining those assets illegitimately. They talked about how to extract them from the original game that you owned.
CorsixTH requires Theme Hospital assets but we didn't clone or otherwise steal anything that we ship, we require you to supply the assets precisely because we aren't. I presume that's true of OpenTTD as well. In the United States copyright protection for games covers the art and text but not the rules and Oracle vs. Google established reimplentations being fair even when exposing the same api. Truely novel game rules can be protected by patents per Nintendo.
Reverse engineering for compatibility, and implementation of a compatible system (as long as you don't copy the original) are not just legal, they're explicitly legally protected in many jurisdictions. You'll get in serious trouble if you copy the original, but there is specific case law supporting things like emulators. See, for instance, Sony v Connectix and Sega v Accolade.
But OpenTTD is explicitly a faithful copy of the original. It replicates the original product in appearance and behavior and is open about it. If you were to dig into source code history, mailing list archives, chat logs etc. I'm certain that you could find a lot of evidence to support this position.
Show a set of random persons gameplay video clips from TTD and OpenTTD in its default settings and ask them which one of the two games they are watching. They'll be struggling.
It is about the entirety of the product, not its parts.
That's the point of game engine reimplementations, but again OpenTTD has no original TTD worlds.
Simcity 2000/3000 and Lincity-NG can look pretty close at a distance too, the same with FreeCIV and Civilization 2000.
If the issue it's due to the menu layout and such that can be set with ease, GUI presets from original TTD and a 'new' one (as default) and call it done.
Arx Fatalis itself it's a Ultima Underworld inspired clone. It's more than obvious. Deus Ex it's a weird Shadowrun retelling with better hacking depictions replacing the magic shadow ruling overlods with a panopticon AI and ripping off every US conspiracy from the XFiles.
Both RPG's can be played in pretty much the same way: half stealth/half run and gun depending on your mood, augmentations, hacking to retrieve useful info, doing secondary errands, the cyberpunk theme...
Halo does the same with Marathon and Bioshock borrows a lot from System Shock.
It's... complicated; they own Transport Tycoon Deluxe, its code, its assets and its IP.
Back when OpenTTD first released, it was a decompile (?) of TTD that loaded the assets of the game itself. This was... legally dubious, since reverse engineering.
But over time they Ship of Theseus'd the game - all code rewritten from assembly to C/C++ (I don't know), open source asset packs, etc. It's still the same base game, same feel, etc but nothing of the original code or assets remain.
I don't know enough about IP law etc to judge whether Atari would have any leg to stand on in a court of law, but it would be Complicated to say the least.
You don't. This is the kind of problem created by vibe coding.
Escalate upwards, challenge the policy, cite this as an example. Also cite things like https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04427 : "transient increase in project-level development velocity, along with a substantial and persistent increase in static analysis warnings and code complexity".
If the policy doesn't change, find a new company.
Now, all that said: it would also be a good idea to have better testing infrastructure that actually tests the services in concert and not just individually. That testing infrastructure will be useful for the humans who take over from the vibe coding and start cleaning up the mess.
Yeah, well, the fact is that every person who ever touches Python needed uv, but only Astral folks created it. So, nope, there's no one capable of filling the void, just accept that it's fucked now. The best die first.
Need is definitely too strong a word, but I think we can agree that uv has so far been the best solution to a problem that plagued python development for a really long time.
If that were true, Astral wouldn't have been able to build it in the first place. It's an Open Source tool. Perhaps folks excited about working on it can move to the Python Foundation and maintain it there. Perhaps companies who saw today's acquisition and became deeply worried about the future of this tooling could help support and fund such an effort.
Part of the reason Astral as a team is so well liked is precisely because they are not part of the main fold or related to "Core Python"; they are an independent vendor, one that delivered high quality code and listened directly to users and their own (extensive) experience to do so, and they succeeded at that repeatedly. Python packaging has {been seen as, actually been} miserable for years, and so by the same token the capacity to believe in/buy into solutions from the "core project" has dwindled. "If it took Astral to fix it, why would it be any different going forward?"
So that's all it really comes down to; uv isn't loved just because it's great but because it is in good hands. This real/perceived change of hands pretty much explains all the downstream responses to the news that you see in this thread. Regardless of who bought them, any fork is going to have very, very big shoes to fill, and filling those shoes appropriately is the big worry.
Does that not also suggest (cautious, make sure we back it up with our actions) optimism about this acquisition? We're not breaking up the band. These tools will be in the same hands as before. And it would be extremely value-destructive to bring in a team like ours and then undermine what made us valued and successful.
Just to be clear: I think uv and the other Astral projects will probably be just fine! I don't really think this the end at all.
I was just trying to explain why people are so upset by the perceived change of hands; that perception isn't perfect of course, it's a mixture of fear, honesty, skepticism, truth etc. I think some people here are just being absurd (e.g. the idea that community projects are magically more sustainable by the fact they are community projects is literally just wishcasting with a mix of Red-Dots-On-Plane syndrome). But I can definitely understand the source of it.
Fair enough. But that does seem like something that'd depend more on the people than the organization. Whoever forks it will need to be trusted to continue to be "good hands", whatever organization they operate under the auspices of.
You're assuming a rational, reasoned process, rather than an instinctive punishment of a perceived status challenge.
When you observe someone acting in a way that seems obviously against their self-interest, it is always worth considering the possibility that there's some interest you don't understand...but it's also worth considering the possibility that they're doing a bad job of considering their own interests.
This is an event that took course over 3 years! I could understand the initial actions, statements and whatnot from the department to maybe be instinctual and emotional reaction to events/messages, but during these 3 years, at least one of them must have had some still time to reflect on what they're doing.
It's very easy to double down and reinforce your own past thinking rather than re-examining it. It's also very easy to "play a role", even as consequences play out; "reasoning" like "I will do X, then they will do Y which I don't want", rather than stepping back and thinking "if I do X, Y is likely to happen, I don't want Y to happen, so what should I do differently".
They assumed they were going to win, and thus enact punishment for questioning their authority.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have already spent money in anticipation of a favorable judgement. Cops are largely immune from facing negative consequences so it was probably an incredible shock to lose.
They thought they were going to get a payday at the end. That tells you how d much they actually cared about their privacy/the privacy of their families, they were willing to sell it for a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Most "rational actor" theories of human behavior actually only work in the large (where the average can dominate outlier behavior) and in systems where rational action is a positive feedback loop ("a fool and his money are soon parted").
If those assumptions break down (especially the second, i.e. if foolish use of money results in more money accruing, not less), what we perceive as rational behavior should not be expected.
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