There appears to be a push to control open source software, in the guise of protecting children via age control.

With OSS, anybody can tweak the code on his device to pass the control, so the idea would be to only allow certified software. Which is expensive, and out of reach of most open source projects. Enter big, reliable companies that can afford the ticket for the certification of horrendous piles of slop.

see this recent HN post about it, I find it resonates, so to speak, with what you explain :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960155

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-intelligence-database-83-perc...

In the 90s, the French IRS seized massive amounts of files from Elf, then a major French oil company under investigation for various frauds.

Their offices where burglarized maybe a couple nights after that. All that was seized disappeared.

So yes, you can swear you read that same story before, and I could swear you will read it again :-\

https://www.agroforesterie.fr/la-trogne-arbre-paysan-aux-mil...

Other countries do it too :

https://trognes.fr/trognes/trognes-a-travers-le-monde/

Can confirm : I'm reading this from France, we're in the 8th day of the meanest heatwave the country has known since records exist, and it's expected to last two more.

And as GP wrote, it would take a substantial amount of time to explain to a normie (infinite I'd say, but let's not despair).

There is also the long time friend you do a site for, with an agreed upon price. And he forgets to renew the bank transfer every year... for months.

Haha! tell me about it.

A client of mine ended his contract in 2010, pretending he did not use my software anymore. He had the source because I had to compile on site for technical reasons.

A disgruntled employed called to tell me and my associate he was still using it. It took me 3 years to find a proof, lawsuit started in 2014, the expertise began in 2016 and ended in 2021. I have a first trial hearing scheduled Feb, 12 2026. Expect 6 to 12 months before a decision, and of course, an appeal after that.

The guy had stocked up 5 million dollars net when I stopped him with the lawsuit [0], he is using the money to pay well known lawyers to delay the procedure every which way.

I'm out largely over 100 000 euros in court, expertise and lawyer fees, plus the countless hours spent responding to the endless, senseless dribble their lawyers produce.

As far as I'm concerned, my services are now hosted by me, and failure to pay shuts down the service, it's in the TOS.

[0 : he subcontracted for a big entity. I would never had gotten that contract myself, lacking the thief's network; said big entity never replied to our mails about our software]

Audiophiles tend to have firm stances on what is acceptable or not, I find.

Fun project I'm sure, but out of curiosity, is this something that you can monetize somehow? because the fun only goes so far.

https://compta.libremen.com

Did not intend to at first, but having quit Windows, I had to replace the Access application I had built with an accountant friend of mine to manage my small business. Looking around the web, I could not find something I liked.

I ended up re-writing the thing as an SaaS for my own use, but then figured that if I'm using it, others might want to, and all I had to do was to add an 'id_client' field to the database. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, as users tend to come with different needs, and to think of ways of using your app you did not anticipate.

Also, when I tell an accountant that I wrote an accounting application, his eyes pop, his head tilts slightly, and he appears to be evaluating whether I'm the dangerous kind of crazy before ending the conversation. Must be due to the horrors they have to deal with all day.

It's a hard sell, revenue is closer to $500/year than $500/month, because I have very low fees and very small clients. But I take great pride in counting one accountant using it in his professional practice. It's also great fun to tune as the number of lines grows, however odd this may sound.

When one clicks on 'Play tutorials', the text at the bottom reads :

>Start by follow the instructions

Should be 'Start by following the instructions', I believe?

Just yesterday, I moved some 100 lines of code using a hash quite a few times from the main module to a function using a reference to the hash.

if %args is the hash holding the data, '$args{key}' tells me the value of 'key' in the main module.

a reference to the hash passed to the function is noted like so : '$args = \%args';$args->{key} tells me value of 'key'

All I had to do to adapt the code was to replace '$args{' with '$args->{', done by the time I typed the replace command in my editor.

Funny that it just makes sense to me, must be something with the brain's wiring.

I see some people disagree with you, but reading this reminds me of this anecdote :

My brother has a very high IQ score, but poor social skills. He once found employment in one of the very early companies developing websites in our area.

There was a process requiring to manually check hundreds of links for validity, which took large amounts of time to do (as in several developper hours weekly), and was error prone at that. The details are fuzzy as this happened some 30 years ago or so, but essentially he found a logical way to do the thing without error in 15 minutes.

The other developers went on a rampage to dismiss the solution, for fear of looking like idiots, and even though the solution was provable, my bro go fired, and went on to become a mechanic. What a shame though.

So, your comment rang a bell.

Also : I make a living developing and maintaining a handful of custom made SaaS for small clients on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache Mod_perl Postgresql). Very thrifty.

Little money, but loads of fun as far as I'm concerned

The amount of requests I get on my servers for WP related files is insane

You did not say what system you use on them, but don't you need to reboot them to apply kernel upgrades, for instance?

We have since translated the software in several languages. It appears that marica in spanish means something like queer in English when used against homosexuals, only _more_ derogatory amongst these macho people :-(

May be the model could work for developers?

Excuse me, you must have forgotten about a certain global financial meltdown in 2008?