BMD’s entire game here is that they are a hardware company first.

They hook you in with some really good software - and when you start getting in to professional workflows that requires specialized hardware (I.e. capture cards, I/O devices etc) you’re locked in to needing to use BMD hardware.

So it doesn’t cost them a great deal to offer the free version to most people because they have to have the software anyway to support the hardware.

Also, while they certainly make a profit on the studio licenses, it seems to be largely because offering those advanced features have costs they can’t eat. For example, the official (and expensive) Apple ProRes encoder SDKs, and advanced tech behind their noise reduction plugins among others.

The FAA very clearly has jurisdiction to “all navigable airspace” which is broadly defined as “all airspace immediately above ground level”.

Which is to say, there’s no minimum height threshold under which you could fly a drone (outdoors) where the FAA doesn’t have full legal jurisdiction.

You can say you feel it’s overreach, but it’s well established that the courts do not agree.

Having said all of that, I definitely agree that the states have been doing a pretty shit job of asserting their rights across the board.

Of course it isn’t just individual states. Congress as a whole has been happily ceding power to the executive branch for a few decades now - which is largely how we’ve gotten to this point.

I do almost all of it work in the terminal, so I had already been using chezmoi to manage my dotfiles for a few years. Eventually I added an Ansible bootstrapping playbook that runs whenever I setup a new environment to install and configure whatever I like.

I’m already living & breathing Ansible most days so it wasn’t a heavy lift, but it’s a pretty flexible approach that doesn’t bind me to any specific type of package manager or distro.

I WANT to love it - and if I was only ever working on one, or a small number of systems that I was the only one working on I’d probably do it. I’m ALL about customizing my environment.

However ssh into various servers through the day (some of which are totally ephemeral), and having to code switch my brain back and forth between vim mode and emacs mode in the shell would just slow me down and be infuriating each time I connect to a new box.

The good news is that they are actively working on developing their own hardware. The bad news is that it’s been delayed. But I’m watching closely.

https://www.galaxus.at/en/page/grapheneos-postpones-pixel-al...

I don’t at all condone being that guy. However….

It’s pretty amazing what an engineer can accomplish if you can actually get into a flow state because people are too afraid/intimidated to interrupt you every 10 minutes and you aren’t being invited to endless (and mostly useless) meetings all day.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m no longer using it professionally so I could explore other options but FreeCAD kinda sucks (I will die on that hill), and OnShape offers the choice between my designs to be publicly visible, or a subscription that assumes I have a corporate expense account makes it not viable. (I don’t mind paying for good tools but there has to be a middle ground).

If Autodesk ever ported Fusion to Linux… I’d probably pay for a subscription just out of sheer elation ha.