flushit

It's sad because it basically gives a huge drawback to picking a copyleft license that has little to do with the actual contents of the license but mostly with market share of the license.

(I won't start discussing the merits of copyleft itself, if that's what your "why do you care?" question was aiming at.)

Cheat mitigation needs to be server-side. Anything coming from the client has to be fair game. No matter what you do, this is inevitable in the light of reverse engineering and AI progress.

Chess is already there. It's really easy to cheat. You can though analyze games after the fact and pretty reliably conclude whether somebody cheated. That's one example of server-side cheating mitigation. No matter what the client feeds you, cheaters are detected and eventually banned.

This is pretty sad. I believe there needs to be a critical mass. If, say, 90% of all FOSS projects were copyleft, then it would be much easier to introduce copyleft-licensed FOSS in companies, since they'd already know how to deal with it and it would not be a big deal.

Today, many companies basically ban GPL-licensed or otherwise copyleft software projects, perhaps apart from a handpicked list of exceptions, because they don't want to deal with the hassle. MIT, fine, GPL, no. And that's pretty sad. Because it means that if write a new project you need to choose between "people will use it but it won't be copyleft" and "copyleft but a sizeable part of the community won't touch it with a 10ft pole".

> I see very little reason in cancelling profitable projects.

Happens all the time everywhere. Money wants to maximize profits. If company A brings you 2% return and company B 5%, then the money will gravitate towards company B. It's not that company A doesn't have profitable projects, perhaps all of their projects are profitable. But just less so than company B, on weighted average. And that's not bad. A reasonable society prefers to use its resources optimally. That's where market mechanisms and society objectives align, and that's why we are embracing a market-based economy. (There are other factors than profits of course, and that's where government regulation comes in. But all else equal, the above example of companies A and B holds and illustrates my point.)

I encourage you to try a management role in a for-profit business and after a few years we can chat again.

> Also, framing my comment as a "misconception" is kinda indisgenious.

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend. I just see this line of arguments now and then and it seems to me that there is some fundamental knowledge of the involved mechanisms lacking.

> Unless Sennheiser can prove that the 555s are being sold at a loss, there is no "cross-subsidizing" happening here.

Nope. That's part of the misconception here. It suffices that they are being sold for less profit than the target profit margins of the company. And that's very likely the case, given the situation with the premium-tier offering. Every reasonable company cancels projects not bringing in enough profits, since shareholders want to see a return on investment. Non-zero profit is not enough.

> You talk as if "the markets" and "the economy" are some naturally occuring phenomena that are matter of fact and non-negotiable.

I'd indeed claim that market mechanisms can be treated like natural laws, just like gravity or natural selection. You can steer them with taxes or other incentives, just like you can steer how gravity or natural selection impact you. But the mechanisms themselves work no matter if you like them or not, or if you find them "evil" or not.

And I say this as a lefty who is in favor of radical inheritance tax and such. It's important to understand the thing you try to regulate.

> What’s “evil” is that the folks who’ve spent their life designing, optimizing, investing in, and producing these products aren't doing it purely out of the goodness of their hearts, but selfishly in the pursuit of a better life.

Sure. That's true though to different degrees for everybody participating in a market-based economy. You can call all of us "evil", but then the term loses most of its meaning.

The alternative to the "'expensive headphones' vs 'less expensive headphones'" choice is not "less expensive headphones". Best case scenario, it's "slightly less expensive headphones but still more expensive than the originally less expensive ones". Or perhaps "they stop manufacturing headphones".

We're not living in a dream world. The conditions you set have consequences in how people behave. Not just individuals, but also companies.

Everybody arguing like this in the thread seems to be missing that the company is offering cross-subsidized headphones for $150. If you actually make them stop the two-tier system, then they would stop offering those for $150 and would need to sell the single-tier product for over $200. There will be some people who can't afford that. So your activism would prevent them from getting nice headphones for $150. Who's evil now?

No, sounds like "maximizing profits". Nobody is suffering here, so I don't really see how this should be illegal.

> That's not "re-use design and manufacturing processes for multiple segments", it's intentionally breaking half the product line to sell at a lower price.

Sure, you can call it like that if you will. You are free not to buy any products from a company doing this if you don't like it.

As I explained above, they could stop doing that, but then the product would cost more. That may be nice for somebody who wants the premium product version for $280 instead of $350. But I'm sure there are people around who are fine with the simpler ("broken") one if that means they only need to pay $150. And since there are, there is obviously a demand, so it's obviously not all bad what the company is doing.

Again, if you don't like it, don't buy it. (Oh, and in this particular case, you can just buy the cheap one and do the mod. Be happy that you saved $200 instead of ranting that this is wrong in the first place. The more you rant, the harder they will make it for next time.)

> rip-off

This term demonstrates a lack of understanding of market dynamics.

As a company you aim for a certain profit when developing and later manufacturing and selling a product. The market has multiple segments and ideally you re-use design and manufacturing processes for multiple segments. Simply speaking, you can basically sell a single tier for $250 or differentiate by different means into a $150 tier and a $350 premium tier. In the end, people with higher quality demands will pay a significant, dis-proportionate premium. So, you can tap into that, which means the premium tier essentially cross-subsidizes the cheap tier. Everybody angry at this practice needs to understand that they couldn't just sell the premium tier for $150. They'd need to sell it for $250, or whatever the weighted mean is. Worse, they'd likely sell fewer items in total, so $280 or some such is more likely to reach the same total profit.

Really, it's not about being evil, it's about economy.

There are enough companies out there without such managers.

Drawing a comparison to slavery is quite shocking, tbh.

I suppose there is a difference between companies that are tech to the core (where everybody in the management chain up to CEO is actually a sw eng) or a company where software engineering / programming is just a dept. somewhere on the side.

Gotta appreciate if you're working in the former. Drawback is you can't BS your way through issues. Everybody above me in the chain (which is like 4 people) could write a quicksort blindly. If anybody tries any BS they don't have their job much longer.

> Guess Problem is that a lot of managers also don't know, and have same understanding as your Grandma.

Well, nobody forces you to work for a company with managers like that. I personally wouldn't.

My experience with sw eng job interviews is very different and I've been interrogated quite intensely about data structures, design patterns, computer architecture internals, and have done the same on the other side of the table many times. It brings a good perspective on whether the candidate knows their way around the box and has a deep understand of what happens inside it. And I also appreciate if my colleagues know how an L2 cache works, what an RB tree is and what's good and bad about microservices. Whether that's been acquired through a university degree or through self-learning or experience on the job, I don't care though.

Might not be true for this particular posting.