However, I hope you see that the behavior reported by Jeff here is just bad. They are either not understanding open source licenses or are acting in bad faith.

What specifically did you find dumb about this?

One thing I did - in response to them saying I could no longer do business, I told them that they also could no longer do business with me, requested a copy of all of the user data they had on me under CCPA, and told them to then delete all of my personal information. They did not actually comply and I didn't pursue. I probably should, though.

"Errors are values", sure. Numbers are values and Lists are values. I use them differently, though.

I wonder if there could be "stupid" preprocessing step where I could unclutter go code, where you'd make a new token like "?=", that got replaced before compile time. For instance, "x ?= function.call();" would expand to "x, err := function.call(); if (err != nil) return err;"

For a checksum, this isnt a bad thing and actually could be good.

In fact, I'm going to build a toy one in python!

Cool to see some other approaches, although I believe they've complicated theirs a bit more than necessary.

I also don't believe that content creators have any kind of legal or moral right to force the general public to "consume as intended". For instance, I've got a shelf in my office that's built with supports that are designed for plumbing. I have not consumed these pipes as intended.