JacobKfromIRC

If someone decides to charge businesses more than individuals, that is arguably discrimination based on fields of endeavor, but if the discrimination isn't written into the license, the software could still be free. Corporations are still free to use free software however they wish, but they can't force software repositories to choose to distribute software to them directly.

It's true that someone could set up a different software repository that offers largely the same software to corporations at no charge, so the proposal only works if companies would prefer to pay the fee rather than set up a different repository. It sounds like companies already pay to use an intermediary repository, if I'm correctly understanding what Artifactory is, so maybe the proposal wouldn't actually work.

If 99% of the public used a piece of software, there's a good chance people really would be forced to pay for it through taxes. This apparently already happens with some proprietary software (though I didn't look into it); see "Public Money, Public Code" [2]. Taxes are a different situation though.

Software freedom can't exist without free software. The better funded free software is, the more free software will be able to compete with proprietary software, and the more free the world will be, with regards to software freedom. The proposed system of charging corporations could conceivably be better even from the perspective of the corporations, if it leads to free software becoming more reliable.

I know you don't mean "nobody" literally, but I actually have asked people to write free software and to license existing nonfree code with a free license. It might be true that you didn't ask for people to make free software, but would you prefer a world in which they didn't?

An action like this could split the community, but I don't think it would be very visible to people contributing to the software, since I imagine the source code would still be available on a public git repository with the same license, for the purpose of development. Do people complain about Krita being on Steam [1]? It's not exactly the same situation, since Krita never was on Steam before, but do you think the situation would be so different if Krita had been free-to-download on Steam and then they changed it?

There's also the problem of most free apps not doing a good job of providing license info and a link to source code, but this could be sidestepped by a trusted repository which provides license info itself.

It's been on my mental to-do list to do a 911 test call (with pre-authorization from my 911 center) from the device at some point, but I've been procrastinating. I decided to try this today.

I didn't expect updates to get in the way because they are usually not required immediately. For example, Windows will force an update eventually but it has to download it first and you can use the computer while it is doing that. I've never had a problem with being unable to use a device due to missing updates, except for an Xbox One which I think was new out of the box.

I did expect charging the device to take some time, like 5 to 10 minutes. I know this isn't good for some kinds of emergencies, but for others it might be okay, so I think it would still be better to have than not have; however, I severely underestimated the time it takes to charge the device though. It took between 60 and 80 minutes to power on. After that, it said the temperature was too hot to operate, which I think was because my car was off and it was hot outside. I took the phone inside at this point and let it cool off while charging connected to my laptop. Then I tried to call the non-emergency number (the one listed here: [1]) from my JMP VoIP phone, and I got no response. I'm not sure if it was because they didn't answer or because of an error in the software I'm using [2], as I've made other calls to Vanilla (the gift card company)'s automated systems today and some of the calls seemed to get no response. I don't want to spam them by calling over and over again until it works though, so I'm going to wait until a different day to try this.

I found a YouTube video [3] that suggested buying a pre-paid feature phone for $20 at Walmart [4], with the caveat that this will not send GPS location data. Maybe I'll end up buying one of these. Ideally I would get a cellular-enabled device that is designed to hold a charge for years if unused, but I'm not aware of any device like that. Or maybe I could get a USB modem like this $20 one I found on Amazon [5], and then I could connect it to my laptop, but I'm not sure if those can make 911 calls.

Good catch on the typo. I saw your message right before I went to sleep and considered editing it, but I thought it would be weird to edit but not reply so I decided to wait until today to do both, and now I'm out of time to edit the post.