I miss win2k personally. the UI was decent, and I was able to install enough oss on it that it felt like I could do most of the things I did with linux, but with good font rendering. there were also, to my surprise, a couple of apps (winmerge and proxomitron) that felt like they should totally have been linux apps, but for which I have yet to see anything as good over on the linux side.

What were those applications about?

winmerge is an open source diff/merge tool with a really good UI. comparable linux apps are meld and kdiff3, but winmerge is more capable than meld and feels a lot more polished than kdiff3. I'm actually surprised no one has ported it to linux, though I presume a lot of the polish is due to focusing on look and feel in a way that is tied to the underlying windows gui libraries.

proxomitron is a rewriting proxy, which I always thought was a very nice approach to webpage filtering. again, I remember it having very good UI/UX as well as being fast and capable.

chuck norris roundhouse kicked it so hard it became an iOS app!

I loved "chuck norris had a fight with superman. loser had to wear their underwear outside their pants."

dallas was huge in dubai in the 80s. like to the extent that people would plan to sit home on the evening it was on.

(I didn't watch it; my parents believed soap operas were unsuitable for kids)

I remember watching a few episodes on TV as a kid but I could not have told you who acted in it

I don't think it's inconsistent to think that a person's right to their IP is worthy of respect but a faceless corporation's isn't. you can disagree, but it's not an inconsistency.

It is somewhat, because you then have to say you respect their right to the IP, but don't respect their ability to sell said right.

You can make that argument, but you need to actually do so and not just leave it unsaid.

The distinction is that people respect people who make things they like. That's good, and noble: no matter what kind of topsy-turvy economic system you live under, making stuff is a valuable (not always the most valuable, but valuable nonetheless) skill, because people need and want stuff.

People who merely buy stuff to extract rent from it are, at best, a necessary evil. There's nothing admirable in rentseeking behavior. It's just playing the game.

If we're hanging around a campfire in the paleolithic, the guy who figured out how to make beer is going to be everyone's best friend. The guy who won't let anybody drink from the stream because it's "his" is liable to meet an unfortunate end.

I think the difference in sentiment is between "I created this and I would like to continue deriving benefit from it" versus "we bought this and we would like it to retain its value". again this is not about the legal difference, just how people personally feel about it.

Eh, Sawyer's career has left him a multi-millionaire, and Transport Tycoon is the foundation of that. If you've already made several lifetimes worth of income, I also don't really care about your IP rights anymore.

i don't care so much about his IP rights (legal) as about the fact that this is his project (moral)

Sort of. Releasing something into the world is, in a real sense, giving it up. At some point, you don't have ownership of it anymore. You're the one that created it, but you're no longer in control of it.

Copyright being as extremely long as it is makes us think that making something once means we should profit from it in perpetuity, but that's not really beneficial for society to work like that. That's exactly why patents don't work like that.

Remember, the purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works. Well, if you can create one work and profit from it effectively (i.e., your entire career), why would you create another work? That's just a waste of effort. That's literally the business model of IP holding companies. They don't create. They just own. They're rent-seeking.

as someone who works in the python tooling space I think you underestimate the number of people who would be willing to do this. i would personally help maintain a community fork of ruff if it got to the point where one was needed, though I draw the line at moving to nebraska first.

It is proven by the amount of projects that eventually falled by the wayside after the first wave of volunteers run out of steam to keep it going post-fork.

that is a fair point, but I also believe that that happens when the project gets superseded by something better. I do not think ruff or uv will die because people went back to earlier solutions, if openai does kill them and the community fork runs out of steam it will be because someone made an even better tool, possibly incorporating the lessons learnt from astral's efforts.

that makes zero sense to me. developing something like ruff from scratch takes a lot of things happening - someone having the idea, the time to develop it from scratch in their free time, or the money to do it as a job, and perhaps the need to find collaborators if it's too large a project for one person. but now ruff is there, there's no need to build it from scratch. if I wanted to build a python linter or formatter I would simply fork ruff and build on top of it. as others have said in this subthread, that's the whole point of open source!

> the time to develop it [not] from scratch in their free time, or the money...

How do you think the magic of open source resolves this issue? Think about this for it to make some sense

> I would simply fork

The only simple part here is pressing the "fork" button, which only gives you exactly the same code that already exists, without user awareness or distribution

you're moving the goalposts now. I never said it would be easy to get used awareness or adoption, just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking and continuing ruff development than it would doing so from scratch.

as to how the magic of open source resolves the time and money issue, it literally gives you the building blocks you need to not have to invent everything from scratch. how is that not significant?

> just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking

And I never said about the relative ease, you've moved the goalpost there yourself. $1m required to maintain is much less than $10m required to create, yet when you don't have $1m it doesn't matter - you'll still fail, and reasons are the same as the reasons you couldn't build the original.

Blocks lying around does not a building make, so you haven't addressed that magic either.

it does not take $1M to maintain a linter, these tools can and have been built and maintained by people in their spare time. astral built a better one, for which I am genuinely grateful to them, but it's not like they invented linting or that the open source community was just waiting around for some business to supply their tooling. indeed developer tools are notoriously hard to make money off simply because so many good ones have been developed as either solo or community open source projects, largely by people in their free time.

i'm very familiar with that genre of story, and also not a great fiction writer, so i could well see myself consciously imitating the style if i wanted to tell this sort of story.

google knows how to do research, at any rate.