smcphile

They were all over 60: a man (a doctor) in his early 60’s with no apparent previous health problems; a woman in her early 70’s with a major previous problem, a cancer; and a woman in her early 90’s with no life threatening problems, but mobility issues, who was living in a retirement home (some other people in her retirement home also died from COVID-19).

> Do you know many people who have died? Who have gotten seriously ill? Are you afraid? Do you think the response in your own location is too little or too much?

I live in France. I know of three people who have died and of many people who’ve been ill. I’m not afraid myself, I avoid crowded areas and getting physically too close to anyone (other than my wife). I think the response by the government here in France has been acceptable, other than that for a long time there was a shortage of both masks and tests. (It would have been better to have had both a stockpile of masks available and the capacity to manufacture them here locally.)

> I am partial to the idea of someone getting to decide, in advance, who they can see or hear. Letting the mob in, and then muting or banning after the fact can be exploited too easily.

I see that that could be done in a private group setting where everyone knows each other. In a forum for the general public though I have difficulty seeing how that could be done. Do you have any implementation details in mind?

> Also technically I guess (IANAL) you might have to prove that you obtained the source code prior to the license change.

I don't see why. If some code is made available under an MIT license and then the copyright owner switches to a new license, nothing stops others from continuing to use the original code under the original license.

Of course to do this you would have to know the code exists, but you could learn about its existence after the license change from someone other than the copyright owner.

No, open source licenses impose no obligations on the copyright holder for their own code. For example, if the copyright holder releases their own code under a GPL licence, no law prevents them from also releasing a modified or unmodified version under a proprietary licence. This is allowed by law, but the proprietary version doesn’t of course negate the rights already given to those who received the GPL version.

If a project has many contributors (copyright holders), they would all have to agree to a license change, so in practice something like the Linux kernel is very unlikely to ever change to a proprietary licence, but it’s theoretically possible.

The copyright holders are never bound by the terms of a user licence.

> My question to you, gentle reader – are there any licences which compel the distribution or publication of the development history?

No, other than that any given project has to give proper credit to code used from other projects / copyright holders.

My understanding of why this is so is the following: A free software or open source software licence is based on copyright law. As such, it restricts what users can do with the source code, but it never restricts what the copyright holders can do with the software (assuming all the copyright holders collectively agree).

A user can never (theoretically at least, there may be a few edge cases) sue the copyright holders for anything, because there’s no warranty. No warranty on the code source history (or anything else). So code source history is always optional.

The submission appears to be available only as a video. It would be helpful to prefix the title with "[video]", if that's possible.

> Ending at-will employment is a legal solution to a cultural problem. Unlikely to work, but more importantly, I’d argue it’s unwise to rely on legal codes to solve non-legal problems.

Let me prefix my remarks by noting that I'm not American and that I live in a country where at-will employment for the most part doesn't exist.

I disagree that getting someone fired from their job is merely a cultural problem. It's also a financial problem and hence a legal problem.

As I see it, if someone burglarizes your home, they're depriving you of the goods they steal. If you're arbitrarily dismissed from a job that you're performing perfectly well (including treating coworkers, clients, etc. correctly), you're deprived of the lost income. In either case, there's a financial loss involved and I fail to see why the law shouldn't try to protect the victim of such a loss.

I do agree that laws will never offer a complete solution to cancel culture, but a solution doesn't have to be complete to be justified, various partial solutions are OK.

> But if most employers were to go fully remote, at that point the shortage-driven Silicon Valley wages would drop near the national average, regardless of how much more it costs us to live here.

Yes, and, using the same reasoning, at some point the cost of living in Silicon Valley would also go down so as to approach the national average.

> But the arguments I see from Facebook and in this article are about cost of living. That's wrong. Price it based on value created by the employee.

Salaries aren’t based primarily on the value created by the employee and never have been. Salaries are based on supply and demand. Workers are in a market and they sell their time and skills to the highest bidder. They’re in competition with other workers capable of doing the same work.

Of course not all workers are equally capable of doing the same work, so in that sense the value created by an employee does come into play when determining what they’ll be paid. But if two equally skilled and competent workers are competing for the same job, the one who will accept a lower salary will get the job. This will tend to favour employees living in an area with a lower cost of living.