While that's an interesting thought experiment and there are definitely good reasons to make it more difficult to sit on an unused patent, it's already difficult enough for lone inventors and small organizations to get and keep a patent. This would require everyone to either have a lot of money up front to pay the maintenance tax or keep the license fees low thus ensuring that they will never have a lot of money.
There seems to be a trend on HN to assume every country in Europe has the same laws. Confusingly, most of these comments come from people living in European countries.
Can you actually use them without activation? Last time I tried getting one I was required to activate it using NemID/MitID before it would actually work.
If they do work without activation could you please enlighten me on who's selling these, it not one of the major phone companies, nor is it Lebara. Lycamobile maybe?
The author seems to be making an assumption that the average person cares as little about preventing centralization of power and having any semblance of online privacy as they do about the speed of their dishwasher and that the projects that focus on improving these things fail to gain a large user base because users don't care.
That's simply not the case. Talk to most people and they'd prefer that their entire digital lives weren't dominated by a few megacorps with access to all your private data. It's true that a lot of people have no idea how to begin achieving that, but that's not the same as not caring.
The problem is that when you develop a new system, privacy and decentralization generally aren't things that can be easily added in as later optimizations. If you care about those things then you need to build them into the design from day one, and they are hard problems to solve. Something as simply as resetting a forgotten password can turn into quite the challenge when there is no centralized authority. Getting to the point where your basic decentralized and secure platform works well enough that you can build stable, user friendly apps with all the expected niceties takes a lot of time and thinking by highly skilled developers and many projects never fully get there. This doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to attempt to develop such technologies.
There is also a weird fallacy going on here around building stuff based on a shallow perception of what consumers* supposedly care about. Looking at the current social media landscape and thinking "this exists because it's what people really want" betrays a particularly narrow way of thinking about the economics and power dynamics of the modern internet. This type of willfully naive thought process would have us optimize toward a highly profitable software skinnner box. The wetware equivalent would be to suggest that we design the most profitable and addictive drugs. After all, consumers are consuming them so that must be what they want, right? Why are you building something that isn't optimizing for maximum consumption? You must be blinded by your own weird ideology or blinded by interesting but irrelevant technical challenges.
Then there's the weird comment about exciting technical challenges not necessarily all being businesses. The author seems to have an underlying assumption that if it's not a viable business then it shouldn't be worked on.
*Thinking about participants in a two-way global communication system as simply "consumers" seems in-line with the rest of the author's thought processes
I'm not sure anyone truly is attempting that kind of tech. Making a private communication platform that people would actually use goes against the hacker mindset. People who care about privacy like simplicity.
Every Instagram filter is a GPU accelerated vulnerability to them, to the rest of us, it's a feature.
The ability to use selectable centralized relays for better performance like BitTorrent, so it doesn't eat 100GB a month of DHT traffic is absolutely critical to me, but needless complexity to someone who's priority is elegance.
Being free as in beer is critical. Sure, I'll donate to wikipedia when I can, but I'm not paying $8 a month for privacy unless I get a way higher paying job, and that job happens to involve privacy concerns.
That generally means ads. Open source can do ads, but open devs don't like them.
Self hosting is completely out unless it's P2P running in the background on phones when charging or some equally zero effort platform. I'm not doing unpaid sysadmin work at home and non-technical people certainly aren't.
It has to work well on hardware, that has to be cheap. Generally that's only possible because it's spying supported, although stuff is getting easier to make as tech improves. With Google keep I can tell my watch to add something to my shopping list. With YoLink my backyard motion sensor batteries last years. With Tile I can find my stuff if I drop my wallet in the street.
It has to work in all conditions. As in, if my phone is stolen on vacation I need to be able to replace it and get everything I need working. It can't involve heavy custom setup of any kind, it needs to be so incredibly boring you could trust your life to being able to set it up quickly, which you basically are if a cell phone is your only emergency communication.
There can't be any unreversible transactions for fraudsters to use, password reset has to work, there can't be anything that would make someone fire me for choosing it over a commercial provider if it decides to break.
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Finally, I'm not going to literally argue with anyone to get them to switch. At most I'll be like hey check this cool thing out. And if the thing isn't cool enough that they want it, I'll give up and go back to Facebook, because a platform is useless if nobody I want to talk to is on it.
I have absolutely no idea where to even start building a replacement for anything I use. Nobody seems to even be trying to make a full ecosystem, aside from badly performing Blockchain projects, that rivals the scope of Google and Facebook, and many privacy first devs don't even want such things to exist, they want separate small parts only connected manually or by custom end user scripts.
I'd love it if there was an open replacement for some this stuff. But I'm not sure how you'd attract interest or fund building it.
Is is, in fact, neither silly nor off-topic to discuss the politics, economics or ethics of the product being advertised. The fact that this makes you uncomfortable or annoyed is disturbing. As you well know there are plenty of different business models available that do not keep code secret and proprietary but even if it was a criticism of "business models in general" it still would be neither silly nor off-topic to discuss this in the comments. This reads like an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society and how they relate to innovation and software development in the context of your product and makes both you and your company look bad.
Jesus christ, man. We just spent a lot of time, money, and labor to make a software product and I posted it to Hacker News on a lark. It really sucks to have a bunch of people complain that we are asking people to pay for our work. We even have a free (as in beer) version you can use to make non-commercial projects!
We are hardly the first company to sell software, nor post about it on this website. Proprietary software is ethical.
Responding to your post is not "an attempt to silence discussion of perceived problems with our society". Such nonsense!
I don't believe this is true. I can't square creating something that can be duplicated essentially for free to provide value to people with denying that value to people in order to enrich myself.
I also take issue with the practice of software as a service specifically, and while I see that you provide a perpetual license, without pro-rating monthly payments toward a perpetual license you're creating a psychologically abusive system to extract value from people with that model same as most SaaS.
I'm not sure what you're doing is bad on net, probably the world is better off for the solution you've developed despite the aspects of it that I find problematic. I understand how hard it is to make "good" choices with regard to this stuff on a personal level, and I place most of the blame on the systems that surround us.
I think the ideas/memes I'm sharing/championing here are deeply important to the continued freedom/growth of the human race in concert with computers. I'm not trying to be mean to you or put down your product or belittle your effort. I understand probably deeper than most what it takes to do this and what you have done is impressive. That doesn't make it right. I don't have the answers, I'm not even trying to tell you "stop selling your shit and open source it immediately". I live in the real world too.
I'm very worried that most people are not even thinking about the questions/implications of artificial scarcity and how tacitly okay we are with it as a society, that's why I'm so loud about this.
I’ve of course heard all this before, and I think I understand where you're coming from. I just reject that angle. For me, what we’re doing is not even in sight of a grey area.
But it’s so interesting to imagine a world where it’s unethical to release a film for purchase on your website, or for HBO to make an original show, or an independent journalist to publish a newsletter on Substack. Or where the only way to access music is by unnecessarily creating disposable petrochemical discs.
If we were to imagine a future society where our basic needs were met, with UBI or some other form of welfare for all (which I thoroughly support) — selling all these things would be even less unethical!
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
In such a world people who enjoy the physicality etc. would get petrochemical disk based music, most people would just download a file or stream. The unethical thing is denying others the right to copy and modify, the unethical thing is intellectual property.
Yes, I too support UBI but I think your conclusion is wrong, it becomes much much LESS ethical to try and deny people access to data if you don't need to make money to be alive/healthy/happy. Why try to create inequality in a situation where it's so unnecessary? What's the point?
I suppose you could argue that intellectual property is privacy and self-determination. All else being equal, I shouldn't have to share my ideas, thoughts, writings, diary, code if I don't want to. Nor should I have to give it to you under terms I don't agree with. Try to make that enforceable and you get IP.
That said, IP laws are too strong. Exclusive IP rights should probably only last about 20 years, among other changes. I think someone who was alive when Star Wars came out should be able to create their own Star Wars movie before they die. I had a very interesting and stressful conversation with David Simon, creator of The Wire on Twitter about this, where he vehemently disagreed.
Re: UBI "happy" is doing a lot of work there. It relates to the "basic" of UBI. Where's that line? IMO, an optimal target is to guarantee the approximate lifestyle of someone making perhaps $100,000 a year or so. Something comfortable but you're not buying yachts. Maybe a canoe or two. We should start at literally any number (probably somewhere around the poverty line) and raise it as politics allows as quickly as possible. I'd imagine that would take about 100 years. In that situation, I still think market effects would be useful to encourage and incentivize people to create new things and improve the world. Obviously we'd have a lot more information at that point to decide on the details!
Is there a license akin to AGPLv3 for something like this?
As in, one where you'd release the source under a modified GPLv3, but any project created with it would also have to be under GPLv3 or CC-BY-SA? That'd allow your project to have a truly free software version for people who create free media projects (e.g., blender open movies).
Nice feature but what is the use case for saving to PDF? If you want to save a web page for later offline reading then epub would be both much easier to implement and more useful given that it retains ability to reflow to fit different screen sizes. Are there good reasons to prefer a non-reflowable format?
Absolutely not an expert here and would love to be corrected but my poorly informed personal impression is that the whole idea of a sustainable amount of fishing and whether all species even have a number that is safe to harvest (especially given that no species exists in isolation), let alone what that number is, is on fairly shaky grounds scientifically. Meaning that a lot of this is guesswork based on too little information and "doing something is better than doing nothing" compromises with the fishing industry. If a species population has appeared to be stable for x number of years with y amount of fishing, does that mean that it's sustainable? Indefinitely? Given other changes in ecosystem and environment?
Thank you. The problem with a lot of the discussion around this topic is that most people are heavily biased as they derive great pleasure from consuming these animals, and so certain ideas and theories are ignored or under represented.
It's actually simpler than a table of voltages. It's a series of trinary values that indicate whether to use positive, negative or zero voltage. The actual voltage used is static (even the specialized EPDC PMIC (which _is_ a separate chip) doesn't allow changing it on the devices I've seen). The waveform (as they call the lookup table) is sometimes actually stored on a separate flash chip soldered on to the display's built-in cable. Years ago I wrote a tool to decode and convert the proprietary formats used by the E Ink corporation for these: https://github.com/fread-ink/inkwave
Just curious, I previously saw claims on HN that E-Ink is a very brutal cruel company that is evil and attacks everybody. That didn't line up with how their staff, at least the materials science guys, seemed to be when I encountered them at SID. I've been asking for evidence for this on HN. Did they try to take down your tool or anything like that?
Yes, but at the same time I think it is more complicated than a table of voltages. I don't know about the OG kindle, but more recent e-ink displays have a multi-parameter look up table. The applied voltage and duration also depends on this history of the cell (the current color you think it is showing) and the temperature. Depending on how many color and temperature steps you use, the tables can become very big.
In hobbyist displays, the tables are very simple, and I'm pretty sure this is one source of quality differences.
I just tried the example zxing-cpp Python module wrapper script and it worked with datamatrix.png from the pylibdmtx test suite. Hmm, but read_datamatrix from pylibdmtx detects two values while zxing-cpp detects one.
