News
I've been making some changes to my life and work. It's been an improvement to my overall mental health and I'm looking forward to what comes out the other end of all of these changes.
In this issue, you'll find more thoughts on John Deere's assault on the Right to Repair, and some interesting links about licensing issues.
On [objc-retain];, Graham and I decided to take a project idea and use it to drive improvements to the tools that will make macOS software porters lives easier: XCake, xcodeproj, buildtool, and libs-xcode. And hopefully, something useful that enhances the GNUstep desktop effort will result.
I am thinking about a video series, where I tell stories about my life in software. Bite sized pieces: 20-60 minutes of random stories of my career. Please email if you think you'd enjoy this, it'll help me motivate myself to get started on it.
I'm still getting the hang of this, thanks to everyone who has subscribed already. Please share.
Copyright and Licensing
neo4j Licensing Final Thoughts
I worked at neo4j for the first three-ish years of living in Sweden.
I ended up leaving for a variety of reasons: the straw that broke the camel's back was that they got me deported through a simple clerical error that the Office Manager wouldn't take responsibility for. But the main reason for my dissatisfaction was in the way they lied to customers about the characteristics of the licenses they chose for their software.
There are three articles here, but the first two are mostly bad-take bullshit. The meat is in Kyle Mitchell's analysis.
What does this mean for Free Software, licensing, and open source in general? Not a fucking thing. It's one judgment, in one court, in one jurisdiction, which is explicitly excluded from precedent.
I had thoughts and feelings on what this ruling means. And then I realised, it's two groups fighting over two pieces of software I'll never use and I don't care about.
I still think it's interesting, so here you go!
Court says non-open 'open source' code is false advertising • The Register
Strap in for a wild ride of forks, trademarks, and licensing
Court affirms it's false advertising to claim software is Open Source when it’s not | Open Source Initiative | Guaranteeing the 'our' in source...
Right to Repair
More on the John Deere Problem
My analytics show that nobody gives a shit about John Deere or the problems they create and/or exemplify.
But this is my newsletter, and I care. So you get some more links.
Deere John: Researcher Warns Ag Giant’s Site Provides a Map to Customers, Equipment | The Security Ledger with Paul F. Roberts
The land grab for farm data | TechCrunch
Farmers are adopting smart-sensor technologies and connected farm equipment more quickly than ever, stretching each season to eke out greater yield from finite acreage. This rise in so-called precision agriculture has precipitated a massive influx in unstructured “bushels to bytes” farm data, creat…