This is almost word for word what I said in another friend group today. Protecting individuals is literally why LLCs exist. It's what "LLC" stands for.

Nintendo Hyper Beam'd them into oblivion but they got a Substitute up first. The defense strategy was smart. The strategy that put them in the position of needing to use the defense strategy was idiotic, yes, but the defense was smart.

Short of Nintendo doing nothing at all, this is probably the best outcome that could have realistically happened.

There are really only three licenses you should ever consider when making a new project in earnest: GPL if you want it to stay free forever, MIT if you don't care. Put an L in front of GPL if your project is a library. The end.

Any CC license including CC0 looks fine on paper, and they are court-tested, but anyone with a legal department won't risk dealing with one in the context of software, because CC licenses are for creative works and scientific research, not software. The main thing they're missing is a warranty release.

The Unlicense feels like an earnest attempt to fill the void that CC0 fails to fill, but it isn't a tested license. Everyone with a lawyer won't touch it with a 10 foot pole because they don't want to be the ones to find out how enforceable it really is. Besides, the only thing it gains you over the MIT is the ability to go uncredited. Which is nice feature; if people didn't want this we wouldn't have so many attempts to make a license that has it. But I feel like of all the features of a free software license one should be concerned about, explicit lack of credit is a pretty low-rung one.

Direct public domain insertion is good and effective, but is not global. Many places in the world have no formal legal system to do this (Germany is a famous example). PD dedication without a permissive fallback license makes your code completely unusable in these places. It's exactly why the CC0 and Unlicense exist in the first place.

Every single other license is either a meme license not worth the toilet paper it's written on, a weaker version of the GPL/MIT, or the GPL/MIT with extra steps.

In a rather unorthodox way, yes.

Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.

The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It's about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it's Linux underneath is almost meaningless.

Blender has got to be one of the most hilariously vertically integrated apps I've ever seen. Next thing I'll hear is it can file my taxes.

Flash as an embedded media platform was a blight on browser security. But strictly as an animation tool, it was pretty nifty. You can even use tools like Swivel to render Flash animations to video.

In the year of our lord 2024 there are probably way better tools than Flash ever was to do this sort of thing. But back in circa 2011 it was the best tool of its kind I knew of.

Indeed, it is my choice. And as of now, even in light of all of this article's information, I have chosen Discord. For now.

Deal breaking flaws to others are not necessarily deal breaking flaws to me. If their differences in principles prevent them from reaching me on my preferred platform, tough noogies for them.

You'd certainly think so. But never underestimate a user's ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn't designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.

I don't think I've ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a "just ask around on the Discord" link serving the role.

Discord probably isn't used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it's a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn't outright disabled, it's a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.

Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don't update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.

Fwiw I've also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.

I don't mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.

Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.

Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don't care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that's fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.

Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.

It can also better integrate into the dev's personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I've had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I've held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I'm terminally online on Discord. So if I'm gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I'll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.

Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it's the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I'm hanging out.

Back in the early 10's I paid $200 for a year subscription license to Adobe Flash Pro, as I had convinced myself I was gonna learn to use it to produce sprite animations like the ones I grew up enjoying on Newgrounds. Never booted it once.

Search engines no longer exist. There are only content recommendation engines now.

I don't think there are any desires I carried over from childhood that I finally fulfilled later. Most things I wanted in the past I simply stopped wanting as I changed with age.

I have, however, on numerous occasions in my adult life, looked at something that probably would've made my kid self go into orbit with excitement and thought, "Man, if only I could get an adult to buy me this..." only to blink a couple times, see the lightbulb turn on, and go, "HEY, WAIT A MINUTE..!"

A guy at a deli counter slicing cold cuts and assembling them into a sandwich is "processed food". Using the term as a health concern marker is meaningless.

Even Kraft Singles, the posterchild of "processed food", famously disallowed to legally call itself "cheese" on its packaging, what is it made of? What hellish process hath humanity wrought? Cheddar cheese, sodium citrate (a mundane variety of salt), and water. That's it.

It's not forbidden from being called "cheese" because it's a bastard concoction of mad scientist chemicals that approximate cheese to ruse consumers. It's simply cheese, literally watered down to the point that you can't call it cheese anymore.

All that the sodium citrate is doing in this situation is acting as a binder that helps the cheese solids hold on to the water. This action is what gives many dishes, sauces, and the like their smooth, creamy texture. But use the word for that -- "emulsifier" -- and suddenly people think you're trying to poison them, because that's a scary chemical word.

Why does this product exist? Because it offers a unique melty texture that people appreciate in certain contexts. It's a niche product with a niche function. Treat it like one.