pwdisswordfish5's comments

> Basically you want free beer like Linux? Get a distribution from OpenJDK.

After the Oracle lawsuit, why should people feel safe believing that Oracle will respect the terms of the license instead of trying to extract more money and subject you to a costly lawsuit?

> With an internal repository, everyone in your enterprise will be able to view the Page with the same credentials they use to login to github.com

Public service announcement: "login" is a noun; as a verb, you should write "log in". (Consider "knockout" vs. "knock out".) Another thing to watch out for: writing "setup" instead of "set up".

I thought this was obvious.

> You can see the running version at https://bitchin.net

> 502 Bad Gateway

Yeah, it’s written in V.

Scott McNealy, under direct examination on 2012 April 26: "you can't license GPL code and then resell it for a profit"

Source: Official Reporters for the US District Court for the Northern District of California (regarding Oracle v. Google, 3:10-cv-03561)

Just like your last message[1], the answer is "but why male models?" (in other words, I just answered that[2]; do you want me to repeat it[3] or something?)

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25847574

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25846415

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25848980

This is a perplexing response. Oracle's case against Google is about copyright infringement. On that point, you are correct, but that's where your comments part from reality.

Oracle in its case against Google is not arguing that "Java wasn't open-source at the time Google copied it". Oracle in its case against Google is not arguing that there was "a specific license explicitly disallowing mobile use". You on the other hand are arguing these things. That's where the problem lies: you're asserting infringement based on two fact claims that don't even match what Oracle's legal team presented to the courts.

(For that reason, your remark that "Everything else is irrelevant" is just bizarre and ironic—it's your comments here that are irrelevant... _None_ of the things you're saying are what the case is actually about.)

Here are some simple questions: to what extent does your knowledge of Oracle v. Google originate from secondary analysis and commentary about the case vs. direct knowledge (e.g. the briefs and testimony provided by Oracle and those who testified)? Do you have any firsthand experience reviewing the material that was presented in/to the courts? This is the problem with Internet peanut galleries. The answer to the last question can be solid "no", and yet commenters are undeterred from spewing nonsense from their gut that has no basis in reality.

It's like we're not even having the same conversation. McNealy, founder of Sun, testified under oath that GPL doesn't permit commercial use. What was unclear about this the first time it was stated?

This comment is playing fast and loose with the facts. No part of Oracle's suit against Google relied on the claim that "Java wasn't open-source at the time Google copied it" (for good reason).

> they are really bad at shepharding, just look at the state of android java vs openjdk

This has nothing to do with copyright law―the thing that Google was sued for. There is no legal argument in this remark (which is the problem with about half the comments that appear saying that Google was in the wrong), just an assertion based on an appeal to emotion that Google deserved to be sued, and then working backwards from there to present a half-formed argument.

There's no reason to think that you're safe even if it were Apache-licensed. One of the things that was made clear in Oracle v. Google is that Oracle effectively treats litigation as an essential expense for exploring all revenue sources, leaving others susceptible to suits whether they have merit or not. Compounding this latter concern was that another thing made clear is that the terms of the respective licenses is something that Oracle doesn't consider important. Refer to McNealy testifying for example that commercial use of even GPL-licensed work is prohibited (despite the terms of the license not supporting this stance).

This is an argument about checked indexing, not about where indexing should start; after all, whatever the index base, you still need to check that the index fits within the bounds of the array. It doesn’t matter if a behaviour is technically deterministic and defined if it’s not what you want to happen. I mean, just read the explanation of the ‘wat’ talk: <https://stackoverflow.com/a/9033306/3840170>. Every one of these behaviours is defined by the ECMAScript standard, but they’re still useless.

But zero is an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number_(mathematics) .

The unintuitive step is apparently identifying the index with the cardinality of the collection from before the item arrives, not after it arrives – i.e. ‘the n-th element is the one that arrived after I had n elements’, not ‘the n-th element is the one such that I had n elements after it arrived’. The former identification results in 0-based ordinals, the latter leads to 1-based ordinals – and to some misconceptions about infinity, such as imagining an element ‘at index infinity’ in an infinite list, where no such need to exist.

Zero- versus one-based indexing actually matters somewhat for correctness. The real trivial ‘small syntactic technical’ bikeshedding is braces versus indentation (and: which kind of indentation) or semicolons versus no semicolons.

I don’t know why 1-based-indexing supporters insist on pointing out this distinction. Whenever one indexes some kind of a map with numbers – and it actually matters that they are numbers that you can perform arithmetic on, not just opaque symbols – chances are they will be computed from an ‘offset’ somewhere or vice versa, which means the notions are going to blend a lot.

> But we don't need to rely on Dijkstra's opinion at all.

I don’t. I refer to Dijkstra’s opinion because it happens to coincide with my opinion, it’s already written down, and it would be silly to spend effort explaining it over and over again.

IDDQD, IDKFA and I'm in.

It comes with the territory; aiding you in the quest for cool is one of GitHub's only value propositions. Because it's certainly not about productivity. People substitute having a conspicuous social presence for getting work done. Looking around at what everyone else is doing and copying that without thinking about what value it brings. Retroactively insisting they have value with subjective and unfalsifiable claims. It's all part of the tao of GitHub.

It's partially related the webmail-vs-IMAP problem: direct access and control over your data.

An example: There is a pending suit that will ultimately be settled with an insurance company by the courts. Crucial to the case is data collected by a mobile app that helps establish some relevant facts. The incident in question was >1 year ago, and we're going to move forward with the case this week (originally planned for last spring but put off due to COVID). Yesterday, I logged in to the site associated with the app, and it threw up a screen that cannot be dismissed, in the style of "please take care of <these issues with your account> before you can proceed". This is an account which is nowadays dormant, and there is in fact no way to take care of these issues. I dug out my old phone in an attempt to access the records in-app and take screenshots for the benefit of the court. The app itself had had an update released, and the records are now inaccessible, because the old version of the app is treated as an obsolete client. Fortunately, I'd already earlier exported all the data I could readily get my hands on—so the only thing I'm giving up are those screenshots that I determined in a last-minute decision would be helpful as supplemental resources—but this could have been a problem for someone who's never heard the phrase "move fast and break things" and who took it on faith that all this stuff wouldn't just disappear underneath their nose for seemingly no good reason.

If we transition to a world where apps are always writing to (and pulling from) data stores that are under your control, then this would be a total non-issue, even for people less paranoid/guarded than I was. The truth is that there are social hurdles, but there are technological hurdles, too, and dealing with the technological part is a precondition to society being able to be effective in doing its part. People can't solve problems with solutions that don't exist.

Right, there’s still the photorealistic CGI version to be made.