I imagine that a cooperative can hire a person who measures the value generated by each worker/team, and then the cooperative members agree upon compensation readjustment.

Then each person/team can hire a manager to help them generate more value if they can't keep track of what's going on within the cooperative without that help.

This way you might get a completely flat structure where each IC decides if they need someone to boss them around or not, and to what extent. Or it might devolve into a typical hierarchy if every IC fully delegates their decision-making, priority-setting, and coordination to their manager, but that devolution will be a bottom-up process, not a result of top-down pressure.

Can this work? No idea.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48341578

Points: 956

# Comments: 348

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)

I know there are some services that send GDPR data removal requests on your behalf. I wonder if there are any similar services that send messages like "Why the hell do you need these cookies?" to website operators.

I hardly ever see these cookie banners as my browser blocks most of them, but I still think it would be great to rub the idea of "Your website doesn't need any non-technical cookies" in website operators' faces.

Piloted ornithopter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-qS7oN-3tA

Human-powered ornithopter: https://youtu.be/0E77j1imdhQ?si=Dd5hLla27Pz8gJNe&t=100

Also, Quetzalcoatlus northropi could've been powerful enough to carry a human.

[1] https://www.apple.com/macos/macos-sequoia/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44170545

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

That's a bold claim for glasses this comically thick.

If you're interested in more normal-looking glasses with a HUD, I suggest taking a look at Even Realities G1 [1] — I have not seen them in person, but at least in photos / videos they don't scream "a piece of tech".

[1] https://www.evenrealities.com/

[1] https://www.32al.io/projects/eloquent/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37630804

    if ('Bun' in globalThis) ...
    if ('Deno' in globalThis) ...
    if ('window' in globalThis) ...

> Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free. [2]

I believe you'd agree that everything-as-a-service and tivoized products do not make users free, even if they technically don't violate the terms of FOSS-licensed code that they incorporate.

> The Business Source Licence

Yes, I've heard about that license, but I think it's mostly applicable when an already existing company decides to make its product more open, while I was thinking of the opposite — a group of independent contributors realizing "hey, we've made something big, let's protect our work (and potentially get rewarded for our efforts)" and creating a more formal entity around it.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd/ [2] https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

> A license is like a constitution for an ecosystem for how people will interact, a check-and-balance on the monopoly power of the license-holder, and a community contract.

finally gave me an answer to the question that bothered me for a while: how do we reconcile the goal of making FOSS available for everyone to run/tinker with/distribute freely with the issue of corporations leeching off community-created FOSS? Now the solution is clear to me: less focus on licenses, more focus on people interactions and actual contracts.

Instead of writing some code and throwing it to the MIT-license winds with little hope to gain anything in return it should be possible to create software cooperatives, i.e. real legal entities, with a simple premise: the code is free for non-commercial use; any person whose contribution was accepted is free to join the cooperative; any company that wants to use software stewarded by the cooperative has to pay for it, with said payment being shared among the members and/or saved for later. That would be an overkill for a tiny personal weekend FOSS project, but for serious products the overhead of formalizing the community would likely be totally worth it.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to come up with such an idea, I wonder if anyone has already implemented it in practice.

Nothing, unless you have unit tests. Or use Liquid Haskell:

https://ucsd-progsys.github.io/liquidhaskell/

There are languages that let you express stronger guarantees/requirements via type system, but it’s better not to go down the rabbit hole of dependent typing.

That was the case in ye olden days of single-core CPUs, but is it still true today?

I can easily imagine a computer that has one always-on core for kernel chores and hardware management, and a dozen dormant cores that wake up when userland tasks need those cycles, all running in hard real time. Or even better, a mix of real-time for UI & audio on some cores + non-time-bound jobs on others.

And that’s exactly what disappoints me: everyone can benefit without giving anything in return. FSF didn’t find an approach to software freedom that incentivises participants to contribute. FOSS is not a business model, so we see what we see: https://xkcd.com/2347/

I believe there is a need to adopt more semi-free source-available licenses that will force corporations to finance the projects they rely upon, while granting the expected freedoms to individual users, tinkerers and contributors.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430227

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

I'd argue that this is an advantage of "funny" licenses: any megacorp can use your MIT code without giving you anything in return; if the same corporation really wants to use your funny-licensed project while being legally in the clear, they are now incentivised to approach you, potentially offering some compensation for a more "serious" license.

At the same time, funny licenses don't stop enthusiasts from working together, and that's what makes open source software good.