No constitution, no hard checks and balances

I’m an American, but IIRC, the UK does have an unwritten constitution, one that incorporates all the landmark legislation over a millennium. That is to say, rather than a dedicated, singular document that “constitutes” the boundary of the law, the British look to their still-active laws to ascertain what core rights and responsibilities must exist, and extrapolate from there. If this sounds wishy-washy, it’s remarkably no different to how the USA Constitution is interpreted, under the “living document” doctrine. That doctrine in American law simultaneous recognizes that: 1) the exact text of the constitutional provisions must be adhered to (this is a basic tenant of “rule of law”, and 2) those provisions may extend to analogous situations. Right-wing conservatives over here attempt to ignore the second, adopting the so-called doctrine of “textualism” (which would only recognize strictly the first aspect) but this “doctrine” only seems to be cited out when it’s convenient, and hand-waved away when it’s not. Hardly a doctrinal approach.

As an example of what is universally understood as being part of the British constitution, see the Magna Carta. Many of its provisions might no longer be part of the formal British body of law, but were translated into formal statute law, with its lineage acknowledged when it comes up in civil rights litigation. The current status makes the Magna Carta more akin to the US Declaration of Independence, which formally grants or recognizes zero rights but is still important in American constitutional jurisprudence. In that sense, the Declaration of Independence is a part of the supplementary body of the American constitution.

As for checks and balances, since the UK adopts the notion of parliamentary supremacy – and still does, even after the creation of the UK Supreme Court in the 21st Century – the checks exist within the Westminster parliamentary system. As currently formulated, the UK Parliament is composed of a lower and upper house, with the former seating representatives of the people and the latter seating representatives of … nobility? The church? I’ll just say that the House of Lords represents the “establishment”. Not like “deep state capital-E Establishment” but just the institutions at-large. In that sense, the check-and-balance is one where the populist will is anchored by institutional momentum.

Is this alright? Personally – and again, I’m an American, not a UK citizen – it does seem rather backwards that the PM can advise the Monarch to create and appoint more hereditary peers in the House of Lords, which could stack parliament against the interest of the citizenry. I think the existence of bicameral legislative bodies to be an anachronism, especially in the USA where both end up being population-based (because prior court rulings ruled that land-based representation was unconstitutional, except the US Senate). The Nebraska unicameral legislature shows what can be done when the law-making process (committees, 1st reading, 2nd reading, floor vote, etc…) is consolidated, where testimony doesn’t have to be taken twice and citizens need only voice public comment at one committee.

But I digress.

No guarantee of stability, a new govt can repeal any of the previous govt’s laws

Yes, and no. The UK has a very rich tradition of inking out their party platforms, to the point that when a new government and party are in power, it’s not at all a surprise what laws they will change. Indeed, it would have been obvious for months to years, since the minority party forms the “shadow government”, which is basically a demo to the citizens about what the government would look like if they were in power. Note to fellow Americans: “shadow” in this case does not mean nefarious, but rather that each designated person from the minority will “shadow” the actual minister (eg Dept for Transport) and thus go on TV to give interviews about how the minority party would have done things differently. If a journalist needs to fill airtime with multiple points-of-view, going to the shadow minister on that topic is a quick way to get an opposing perspective.

The only question then, in terms of stability, is which party prevails after an election. In this sense, while there may not be absolute continuity, there is still practical continuity: businesses and individuals can make plans in advance when they learn what’s in the platform of the minority party, can start actioning those plans if the party has a likelihood of winning an election, can brace for change if a close election is called, and ultimately be ready for when the new party takes power and implements their changes. It’s a pragmatic approach: change is the only constant, so might as well give sufficient notice when things do change. I would offer Brexit as an example of managed chaos, since the lead-up to the election made it very clear that the UK might indeed fall out of the European Union. And indeed, they did, but only after 4-ish years of uncertainty and negotiations, which while extraordinarily tumultuous for the country, did not somehow devolve into wholesale governmental collapse or the sudden breakdown of civic life. So even in a near-worst case scenario that changed the very fabric of the UK’s legal situation, it’s still holding on. Not too shabby.

As for repealing “any” prior law, technically yes. But the institutional inertia is partially what blunts this power. Public advocacy organizations are – to this American – seemingly more transparent in their operations, and astroturfing is less an issue because of open-transparency when it comes to forming a legal company at Companies House. Likewise, the interests of businesses, the Church of England, the universities, workers unions, etc all find representation somewhere. So it’s much harder than, say in the USA, to ignore whole segments of the population to make sweeping changes.

In English, the example I would proffer is “attorney general”, which as-written refers to the chief lawyer that advises a state (sometimes exceedingly badly). But if reversed, “general attorney” could plausibly refer to a lawyer that can take on any type of legal work, not self-limited to ones within a particular specialty (eg divorce law, personal injury, copyright, etc).

This is in the realm of postnominal adjectives, although not all reversals will yield recognizable phrases, and some will be nonsensical, like “the incarnate devil”.

I have a suspicion that the closest that English gets to the Japanese kanji-switch might be in technical writing, specifically for the name for pharmaceuticals. Such names are often order-specific, because they draw from the chemical structure of a molecule. From the minimal Japanese that I know – thanks anime! – I’m aware that the word for “carbon monoxide” is composed of one carbon and one oxygen. But if I were a chemist or pharmacist, I might recognize the root components in the names “paracetamol” and “acetaminophen”, which are the same thing.

I was going to write about how an existing tax agency (the California FTB) is already aggressive at tracking down high-earning residents that leave the state – whether in-fact or on-paper – in order to collect precisely what the state is owed per the tax code. That is, the FTB already engages and challenges the precise amounts that these former residents write on their final California tax returns, with some more spectacular results being some incredibly detailed timelines for when someone finally stops being a resident in California, as defined in state law.

But then I noticed that because of California’s proposed wealth tax (aka Billionaire Tax) on the November 2026 ballot, the SF Chronicle has already started a series of articles to answer the specific what-and-hows of the wealth tax. This is the first article, pertaining to enforcement, and it agrees that the FTB would be capable of pursuing any high-wealth individuals that the proposal would tax. https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/ca-billionaire-tax-mechanism-21330110.php

This proposed tax in California is written as a one-time tax, so the question of whether high-wealthy people could flee the state is nearly irrelevant, because either they’re subject to the tax or they’re beyond the reach of the US courts (eg Venus). Almost. The remaining questions are legal in nature, and don’t really change how the tax would be pursued. Whether FTB simply hires a dedicated team or outsources to private investigators, the task is still straightforward: follow the money.

Unlike civil lawsuit plaintiffs, who have more limited means of chasing down a defendant’s assets in order to get paid on a judgement, the California tax authorities enjoy the benefit of the subpoena power, that can be used to compel companies and banks to tell the tax authorities about where and how wealth is being held. It is, after all, a core power of a US state to administer a tax, especially when the tax is authorized directly from the sovereign power (ie the citizenry). Any other result would conflict with the very purpose of a republic: to unyieldingly serve the people.

(short on time, so here’s an overview to answer part of the question)

All password managers that are worth their salt (cryptography pun intended) have to anchor their trust to something, be it the OS’s secret-storing APIs or a piece of hardware like a TPM (typically built into your machine’s motherboard), an HSM (eg Yubikey) device, or an external source of authentication outright (eg a smart card, akin to what the USA Military does). Without any sort of trust anchor, a password manager is little else than a random program that happens to invoke a few cryptographic algorithms. It would be almost trivial for a malicious actor to use a bog-standard debugger like GDB to read the program’s memory and steal the secrets, either after it has been conveniently decrypted by the program or by spying on the program while it performs the cryptographic algorithms.

Since a password manager runs within an OS, meaning that you already have to trust that your OS isn’t an NSA backdoor, it makes sense to rely on the OS for storage of secrets. What the password manager does is provide the frontend for adding/updating secrets from the OS’s store, while also making sure to authenticate the user prior to allowing access to the store of secrets. Once again, this is where hardware modules can come into play, but it can also be done using a main password. That is, you need to unlock the password manager before the secrets it contains are available for use.

Rather conveniently, the OS can also provide this authentication functionality: if you have already successfully logged into the computer, then that’s a form of authentication. The most basic-but-reasonably-secure password manager would use two APIs to offload the difficulty tasks to the OS: the authentication API and the secrets API. That’s the absolute bare minimum.

What Firefox’s password manager provides, by default, is exactly that. But you can choose to upgrade to a Firefox-specific main password, so that if you forget to lock the computer, someone can’t just open Firefox and use your secrets. This is one step above the minimum for a reasonably secure password manager, but it comes with the inconvenience of having to unlock the password manager every time you want to use a secret.

By and large, all password managers make these types of tradeoffs between convenience and additional layers of protection against certain threats. If your machine is inside the vault of Fort Knox and is actively guarded by people with machine guns and a keycard bullet proof door, then Firefox password manager is plenty acceptable.

Whereas a shared home computer in a situation where the disclosure of the secrets would cause a grave problem – eg if an irate person finds that their spouse has a login for the local family court’s online website, which might suggest a forthcoming divorce proceeding – this might make sense to add additional layers. Indeed, some password managers can provide a decoy set of secrets, as a way of forming plausible deniability. If your situation needs plausible deniability, then Firefox’s built-in password manager might not fit the bill.

I want to stress that using any password manager at all is already a massive improvement in security posture, and that any additional features and frills are merely refinements. Some folks are in high-risk situations where they cannot accept the possibility of off-device secrets synchronization, which would rule out Firefox password manager. But if you don’t have such requirements, and if you can trust your OS, then you can also trust Firefox to store and manage secrets.

I have a rule which is that when anyone asserts that something is “more secure” or “more performant”, they need to come with specific evidence for those claims. IMO, those two phrases are often used to “handwave” away any criticism for the asserted position, as a form of thought-termination. I would suggest that you always ask “more secure from what threat?” in response to such empty assertions. If they answer you with a specific scenario, then you can assess for yourself if that even applies to you. If they cannot answer with specificity, then Hitchen’s Razor should apply.

without always accounting for development speed, cross-platform consistency, ecosystem maturity, plugin/runtime complexity, UI flexibility, and the fact that some apps are doing much more than others

From the perspective of a user, why would they care about development speed? A user, by sheer definition of wanting to use the software, can only use software that is already developed. If it’s not actually developed yet… they can’t use it. So either they see the software at the end of the development cycle, or they never see it at all. Development speed simply isn’t relevant to a user at that point. (exception: video games, but I’m not aware of any desktop game developed using a web framework)

As for platform consistency, again, why would the user care? Unless each user is actually running the same software on multiple platforms (ie a Windows user at work, Arch at home, and BSD at their side-gig), this is a hard sell to get users to care. A single-platform user might never see what the same software looks like on any other platform. Even mobile apps necessarily differ in ways that matter, so consistency is already gone there.

What I’m getting at is that the concerns of developers will not always be equally concerning to users. For users to care would be to concern themselves with things outside of their control; why would they do that?

Was this question also posted a few weeks ago?

In any case, what exactly are the requirements here? You mentioned encrypted journaling app, but also gave an example of burning a handwritten sheet. Do you need to recover the text after it is written, or can it simply be discarded into the void once it’s been fully written out?

If encryption is to protect the document while it’s still a draft, then obviously that won’t work for handwritten pages.

At least for Lemmy – I have no idea about kbin or other ActivityPub software – there isn’t a user-accessible way to back up one’s account on an instance, nor to preserve any communities that you’re a mod for. So yeah, if the instance goes down unexpectedly like due to data loss or an FBI raid, the communities and users that were on that instance will disappear.

It’s true that other servers will have a cache of some of the existing community posts and the users on the departed server. But it’s exactly that: a cache, which will eventually be evicted.

A similar situation occurs when a Lemmy instance changes domain name: all prior posts to the community (and the community itself) were homed to the old domain. So a new domain cannot have the same identity as the old; it will simply be a separate entity, even if all posts were somehow preserved and reposted on the new instance.

Is this Lemmy-specific? No, Mastodon and I think all other ActivityPub software, plus BlueSky have this property, because they anchor identities to DNS names. From that, the posts to a community are anchored to the instance, and the instance is anchored to DNS.

So if the domain is lost, then it’s game over. But if the domain is still there but the disk got wiped, then it would be a matter of recovery from a backup. You do have a 3-2-1 backup strategy, right?

I will note that Mastodon has a user-initiated export feature, which functions as a backup, something that Lemmy doesn’t have. A Mastodon user can export their data and then move their identity to a new instance. Lemmy can’t do that today, but it should be possible. Though in both cases, only the saved account is preserved. To restore a Lemmy community would require a disk-level backup image.

(this is all conjecture based on my limited knowledge of Lemmy. A better answer would come from an instance admin or one of the Lemmy devs)

128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash

FYI, RAM and flash sold to consumers is always in Bytes (big B); it’s only RAM manufacturers (and EEPROMs) that use the bit (small b) designation for storage volume, I think. If you’re using both to avoid any confusion, I would suggest the following instead: 128 MByte. No one will ever get that confused with megabits, and it’s the same style used for data transfer, which does still use bits: Mbit/sec.

I wish you the best of luck in your search.

some people

they say that it’s definitely a thing

To borrow a phrase from the largest encyclopedia project in the world, citation needed.

This is not to say that you, OP, need to provide the evidence of a problem. But rather, whoever you’re hearing this from needs to proffer up more than just weasel words.

There is only so much time before each of us shuffles off our mortal coil, so why spend it contemplating nebulous “issues” when the real issues are readily visible: a pattern of physical violence against LGBTQ+ communities. It’s not exactly difficult to do a web search for “lgbtq violence”.

And to be abundantly clear, proof of “a pattern” has to show a pervasive, widespread, or organized/systemic series of events. LGBTQ+ violence easily meets this criteria, sadly. Whereas violence against white people because they’re white or violence against straight people because they’re straight is none of these things.

Demand better evidence from your vendor of talking points. Perhaps switch suppliers if you’re not satisfied.

I think it depends on which Amish community, since they all adopt different degrees of self-sufficiency. See https://nebula.tv/videos/hai-how-amish-people-get-around-not-using-electricity/ (or on YT).

When looking through the history of Windows, some of the major milestones included the very concept of a windowed user interface in 3.1, refining the concept into a complete desktop-oriented (as in, a physical table top, with files and folders and a recycling bin) experience in Windows 95, huge backend improvements in the kernel (eg networking) by merging in the NT kernel (last used intact in Windows 2000) and giving us Windows XP.

Note well that XP was the first juncture between a consumer-oriented OS (a la Win 95/98) and a business-oriented OS (a la NT Server or Windows 2000). The missing link here is Windows ME, which was the next consumer OS after 98 but it flopped so hard when it became apparent that this artificial consumer/business division wasn’t going to scale. Specifically, the Windows 9x kernel had too many DOS-isms whereas the NT kernel had no such issues. Hence, Microsoft undertook the massive effort to bring the two kernels together for XP.

In that sense, XP coupled a newer kernel with a polished UI. In essence, the company bet all its chips on XP. And fortunately for them, it paid off. But this came with a cost: XP has to carry the lineage of both the DOS/95/98/ME and NT/2000 into the 21st Century. This means the same OS has to support things like Active Directory (a feature only used by corporate customers) and Fax for Windows (used by anyone that wanted to use their dial-up modem for faxing, but also on fax servers, which are somehow still relevant today), while also supporting DirectX for the consumer gaming segment, plus multi-user support for “home computer” customers that still share a single machine for a household, despite a market trend towards personalized computing, and everything else under the sun.

And that’s before we get to some of the backwards-compatibility support they still have to upkeep, like 32-bit support on the x86 family of CPUs, and BIOS (in spite of UEFI being a decade old). Notably, Windows on ARM has never kept such backwards compatibility, with ARM32 being completely deprecated and only ARM64 being supported by Windows 10 and beyond (hence, Windows on Raspberry Pi).

And then, of course, the Microsoft own-goals and mistakes: somewhere around 8.1, they decided to meet the tablet/touchscreen market by having Windows be touch-oriented. But as was blitheringly obvious then and now, the desktop concept cannot possibly be similar when the controls (keyboard/mouse versus touchscreen) are swapped out. Thus, this compromised the desktop experience in pursuit of a relatively niche target market. Meanwhile, Apple essentially forked their Mac OS to support mobile, tablet, and smartwatches as iOS, and aren’t exactly itching to merge iOS back into the desktop OS.

A better execution might have been to port Windows for ARM (which is what most/all phones and tablets use today) earlier than they did, use that as the basis of a tablet-experience OS (like how Windows Media Center was just an application atop Windows XP), and then later introduce compatibility with desktop apps (like how Apple can now do full-speed x86 emulation using special ARM extensions baked into their custom silicon). That said, the latter was only technically achievable in the 2020s, but seeing as Microsoft was the market leader well into the 2010s, they would have been in the same position as Apple is in today.

So to summarize my long-winded comment, Windows carries a lot of weight. It is the result of successfully merging two very-real market segments into one product (business users and consumer users), then MSFT dropped the ball by chasing the Next Big Thing and adding more diametrically-opposed objectives to an over-burdened OS, with nary a plan for how to eventually relieve it. Had they instead did a separate OS for tablet and mobile (rip Windows Phone), they could have merged that one into the XP-based kernel and got the refined best-of-both-worlds.

Instead, they now have the worst of both. The Windows 11 desktop experience sucks, with bad icons, near-invisible text boxes, confusion where there wasn’t any, and all while pushing consumers towards web browser-based apps. And to make it sting harder, because they’ve been feeding this mess to their corporate customers, those customers now demand that everything be kept the same (“better the enemy that you know”) which prevents Microsoft from making XP-level wholesale improvements.

They’re stuck, they know it, and they can’t really fix it unless great leadership shows up to take command of the ship. But similar to Amazon (which makes most of its revenue through AWS, not selling/shipping products), Microsoft makes the majority of its revenue in two segments: Azure cloud and Office 365. It’s hard to revamp Windows when it’s now playing third-fiddle.

(I’m sure I’ve got some of the historical details wrong, but it’s Saturday morning so full send)

The absolute first thing is to establish the jurisdiction of this scenario. The answer will be vastly different if the jurisdiction is California/USA than if the jurisdiction were South Susan. No shade against South Sudan, but we are talking about criminal and civil law, so the details might be very different.

But supposing this is a jurisdiction that follows in the Anglo-American common law (such as California, and I’ll proceed using California as the setting), then we can make some generally-true statement, some of which confirm what you’re already written:

1. Criminal law exists to punish bad acts committed against society at-large
2. Criminal law can only punish the persons or entities which have committed an act or omission that is proscribed in law, and only those persons or entities within the territory
3. Dead people or dissolved corporations are beyond the reach of criminal law
4. The notion that the next-of-kin will “inherit” the criminal liability was abolished long ago; see US Constitution “Bill of Attainder” prohibition, and equivalent in other jurisdiction like the UK or Australia
5. Anyone that is still alive and collaborated to aid or supply the dead assailant can be pursued using criminal law or civil lawsuits, or both
6. In parallel to the criminal law system, civil lawsuits can be filed against the remaining property of the dead assailant. This is known as the “estate” of that person, and the lawsuit would be captioned as “XYZ v the Estate of [dead assailant]”
7. A civil lawsuit can only win as much property as the respondent (ie person being sued) has, or any insurance policy they had which might apply, or any debt which was owed to the respondent at the time of their death.
8. Mass murder commonly result in civil lawsuits that do not obtain anywhere near the full amount to compensate for the victims’ families’ loss.
9. As a result, the target of civil lawsuits can be expanded to include adjacent parties, such as the manufacturer of the weapon or materials used, under a claim of product liability or something similar. This is not a guaranteed result, but they often have deeper pockets and good insurance policies.
10. Civil lawsuits can only bring a monetary compensation. The law cannot revive the dead, cannot erase or amend history, and cannot salve the void left when victims are removed from this world unjustly.

With all that said, the entire line of inquiry into the dead assailant’s will, or to their parent’s will, or anything like that, is entirely inapplicable. Children or parents do not inherit the sins of others, at least where criminal liability and civil lawsuits are concerned. Unless, of course, the parents participated somehow or willfully neglected a duty to report (very few of these exist in California, unless the victims were undoubtedly known to be children; see mandatory reporting laws). Thus, these other people cannot be sued nor criminally punished, usually.

The other commenter correctly said that what we call the “justice system” is more accurately called “harm reduction”. That’s not wrong, but I would post that the crimimal law system is about harm reduction (nb: I do not endorse the carcereal state of imprisoning huge segments of the population, disproportionately by race), whereas civil lawsuits are about equity and compensation.

Both systems exist in tandem to prevent people from achieving a bloodier form of justice in the streets, like in days of yore: pistols at dawn, dueling in general, lynching, “bigger army” diplomacy, shakedowns, midnight slaughters of whole families, and other such unpleasantries. It’s definitely not perfect, and it needs reforms in many parts, but the structure serves a purpose and so far, it’s what we have and the best that we have.

I think this would easily qualify for !brandnewsentence@lemmy.world

I’ve even seen people vibe code ethernet drivers for freeBSD.

Please make sure to read what considerations that developer had before undertaking that effort using an LLM: https://github.com/Aquantia/aqtion-freebsd/issues/32#issuecomment-3997341698

Specifically, they (the human) were kept in the loop for the entire process, which included referencing the working Linux driver to do a clean-room reimplementation. This already means they have some experience with software engineering to spot any issues in the specifications that the LLM might generate.

Also, Aquantia (before the merger) already had a published FreeBSD driver but it hasn’t been updated. So this port wouldn’t have to start from zero, but would be a matter of addition support for new NICs that have been released since, but Aquatia hadn’t updated the driver.

This is very much not an example of an Ethernet NIC driver being “vibe coded” from scratch, but a seasoned engineer porting Linux support over to FreeBSD, a kernel that already has a lot of support for easily adding new drivers in a fairly safe manner, and then undertaking a test plan to make sure the changes wouldn’t be abject slop. That’s someone using their tools with reasonable care. In the industry, this is called engineering.

Admiration for what people can do with the right tools must always be put into the right context. Even with the finest tools, it’s likely that neither you nor I could build a cathedral.

I don’t think they can be force applied to everyone who contributes

This is certainly an opinion, but here is a list of major projects that have a code of conduct: https://opensourceconduct.com/projects . How well those projects enforce their CoCs, idk. But they are applied, otherwise they wouldn’t bother writing out a CoC.

it’s not fair to hold people to standards they didn’t personally agree to

Software development is not the only place which holds people to standards. The realm of criminal and civil law, education, and business all hold people to standards, whether those people like it or not. In fact, it’s hard to think of any realm that allows opt-out for standards, barring the incel-ridden corners of the web.

this guy might have just decided to make a project

Starting any project – as in, inviting other people to join in – is distinct from just publishing a public Git repo. I too can just post my random pet projects to Codeberg, but that does not mean I will necessarily accept PRs or bug reports, let alone even responding to those. But to actually announce something, that where the project begins. And to do so recklessly does reflect poorly upon the maintainer.

I’ve not heard of Booklore or the critiques against it until seeing this post, but I don’t think this take is correct, in parts. And I think much of the confusion has to do with what “open source” means to you, versus that term as a formal definition (ie FOSS), versus the culture that surrounds it. In so many ways, it mirrors the term “free speech” and Popehat (Ken White) has written about how to faithfully separate the different meanings of that term.

Mirroring the same terms from that post, and in the identical spirit of pedantry in the pursuit of tractable discussion, I posit that there are 1) open source rights, 2) open source values, and 3) community decency. The first concerns those legal rights conferred from an open-source (eg ACSL) or Free And Open Source (FOSS, eg MIT or GPL) license. The details of the license and the conferred rights are the proper domain of lawyers, but the choice of which license to release with is the province of contributing developers.

The second concerns “norms” that projects adhere to, such as not contributing non-owned code (eg written on employer time and without authorization to release) or when projects self-organize a process for making community-driven changes but with a supervising BDFL (eg Python and its PEPs). These are not easy or practical to enforce, but represent a good-faith action that keeps the community or project together. These are almost always a balancing-act of competing interests, but in practice work – until they don’t.

Finally, the third is about how the user-base and contributor-base respect (or not) the project and its contributors. Should contributors be considered the end-all-be-all arbiters for the direction of the project? How much weight should a developer code-of-conduct carry? Can one developer be jettisoned to keep nine other developers onboard? This is more about social interactions than about software (ie “political”) but it cannot be fully divorced from any software made by humans. So long as humans are writing software, there will always be questions about how it is done.

So laying that foundation, I address your points.

Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing.

This definition of open-source is mixing up open-source rights (“we al have the choice to use it or not” and “anyone can write anything”) with open-source values (“for fun or seriously” and “doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful”). The statement of “open source means open” does not actually convey anything. The final sentence is an argument in the name of community decency.

To be abundantly clear, I agree that harassing someone to the point that they get up and quit, that’s a bad thing. People should not do that. But a candid discussion recognizes that there has been zero impact to open source rights, since the very possibility that “Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project” means that the project can be restarted. More clearly, open-source rights confer an irrevocable license. Even if the original author exits via stage-left, any one of us can pick up the mic and carry on. That is an open-source right, and also an open-source value: people can fork whenever they want.

How they were contributing is irrelevant

This is in the realm of community decency because other people would disagree. Plagiarism would be something that violates both the values/norms of open-source and also community decency. AI/LLMs can and do plagiarize. LLMs also produce slop (ie nonfunctioning code), and that’s also verbotten in most projects by norm (PRs would be rejected) or by community decency (PRs would be laughed out).

We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

I would draw the focus much more narrowly: “We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted”. Open-source rights and open-source values will persevere beyond us all, but how a community in the here-and-now governs itself is of immediate concern. There are hard questions, just like all community decency questions, but apart from Booklore happening to be open-source, this is not specific at all to FOSS projects.

To that end, I close with the following: build the communities you want to see. No amount of people-pleasing will unify all, so do what you can to bring together a coalition of like-minded people. Find allies that will bat for you, and that you would bat for. Reject those who will not extend to you the same courtesy. Software devs find for themselves new communities all the time through that wonderful Internet thing, but they are not without agency to change the course of history, simply by carefully choosing whom they will invest in a community with. Never apologize for having high standards. Go forth and find your place in this world.

I second the option of Git + SSH. That will scale to one hundred repos. And if you don’t want the repos to be checked out, use “git clone -n” to not do that. It’ll just be dozens of repos which only have the minimal .git/ directory. All other repos that specify this one as the upstream will have no issues pulling or pushing code.

You won’t have PR features nor a web UI though.

Castle builders

In Anglo-American common law, if a party has previously argued a position in one of their own cases, and later argues a different position in a subsequent case that they’ve a party to, then the doctrine of equitable estoppel would foreclose on certain claims from that party. As usual, the devil is in the details.

Firstly, they must be a party to both the prior and prospective case. A motorist that is injured in a multi-vehicle pile-up cannot assert different facts when suing each of the participants in the crash. However, an advocacy group that files a petition on behalf of another is, by definition, not the party that is bringing suit. Nor is anyone that offers an amicus (ie “friend of the court”) brief that advises the court on how a case ought to be decided.

Secondly, the exact things which are foreclosed will depend. The most common benefit available under equitable estoppel is the loss of a presumption of good faith. So if party A is a corporation and claimed in an earlier employer/employee case that their CEO’s crass, sex-pest behavior was a result of substance abuse (in an attempt at a medical defense or a defense about temporary inability to perceive the situation), then that assertion – irrespective of whether it actually won them that earlier lawsuit – could be used against them in a later case litigated by the shareholders. If the company is sued for the CEO not conveying accurate business info, the defense that their CEO acted in good faith is not going to carry water, if the events coincided in time.

As you can see, the exact remedy that equitable estoppel provides isn’t exactly clear-cut in every instance. But the goal is to prevent the same litigant from abusing the judicial system. One cannot come into court on Monday claiming the sky is blue when it’s convenient for them, then claim on Wednesday that the sky is not blue when it’s inconvenient for them. Two-face assertions are not allowed.

To be clear, these must be actual assertions. Sometimes a civil case can be won merely by the likely possibility that someone else is at fault, making it impossible to determine fault. And so no assertion may be needed as a defense. If a pedestrian is struck and injured by a hit-and-run motorist driving a red car, and five red cars are identified later, any of those motorists can correctly state that there were four other such cars in the area. Pointing out facts unfavorable to the plaintiff is exactly what the defense is supposed to do. But if a motorist actually says “I didn’t injure her”, then that’s an assertion. And judicial estoppel means they may not later claim, for some reason in a later case, that they did do it.

Predominantly in Texas, Buc-ees is nominally a chain of gasoline stations but they’re known for the stores attached to the station, selling all manner of kitsch but also fast food. Ok, they’re also known for having 100+ pumps at each location. But that’s important because it means they’ve always been located at the periphery of city boundaries, on huge lots, usually on the highways into or out of town.

When the gasoline business dries up, Buc-ees still has other business interests to keep them going in the road travel market, and they have real estate along major corridors that could be redeveloped. One option is to invite businesses that occupy motorist’s time while parked charging their electric cars, like wayside attractions (besides Buc-ees itself, obviously). Another would be to fully entrench themselves: develop a hotel so that visiting business people always stop at the Buc-ees before leaving.

So while neighborhood fuel stations would see a slow demise, Buc-ees can turn their fuel locations into new cash cows. This is why diversification is so important.