That video is also a great example of just how abusable the bailiff system is.
All the "agents" care about is getting the money for their client. For this, they're willing and apparently able to abort at least one flight, and possibly others, costing people on those flights possibly thousands each with rebookings etc, all for £3k.
I've only has the displeasure of interacting with a bailiff once, when I was a naive student. The guy knocked on the door asking after a previous tenant. We went through for any mail addressed to the guy he was after, and while doing so seemed to revel in explaining how he had the power to barge in by force and arrest me if we wanted. In the moment I was slightly incredulous but nodded along. Was only after the fact I researched to find you're within your rights to turn them away unless they're accompanied by actual police.
Seems like the perfect job for power-tripping sods.
I find it difficult to side with Delta when they're trying to shirk their legal obligations to their customers.
There's a comment in the video that this is david vs goliath, and they give david some leverage. I think that's the perfect use for high-court bailiffs. The other way around, maybe not so much.
(Ironically - obeying court judgements is not without control of the airline, so if this caused delays, those customers could claim compensation also.)
In general I agree, the bailiff system should be abolished for personal debts.
Except these are High Court bailiffs collecting a commercial debt. They just enforce the powers of the court. Useful in this situation where the executives are in a different country. The High Court can do a lot worse than stopping check in if you don’t comply with its orders.
Sure, no problem with their use against companies.
I don't care about the cost to Delta in that video, but I do think this particlar strongarm tactic was way over the line, due to the significant financial impact it could've incurred to innocent bystanders
>I don't care about the cost to Delta in that video
I do. if it was something like 3m euros I'd understand the greed, even if I don't condone it.
3000? They just seem petty. As the article said, this was something a manager could pay out of pocket (and I hope they got reimbursed). It should have been a rounding error already built into their budget that they paid immediately. Delta clearly didn't care of the "innocent bystanders" either, or they were willing to bluff with them as ransom. I've had delays for stupider reasons, but this would at least be a hilarious story to share as a passenger.
It's not like some working class that may not have that much in liquid to pay off.
You clearly had the former masquerading as latter. In Blighty, a debt collector tricking a naive student into believing they have court authority (!) is their Standard Operating Procedure.
Far from being douchey, I think you've hit the nail on the head.
No one is perfect, we're all incompetent to some extent. You've written shitty code, I've definitely written shitty code. There's little time or consideration given to going back and improving things. Unless you're lucky enough to have financial support while working on a FOSS project where writing quality software is actually prioritized.
I get the appeal software developers have to start from scratch and write their own kernel, or OS, etc. And then you realize that working with modern hardware is just as messy.
We all stack our own house of cards upon another. Unless we tear it all down and start again with a sane stable structure, events like this will keep happening.
Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management...
and is open source.
And yes, we've tried Matrix. IRC doesn't speak to people anymore either. Slack is worse.
Wanting everything for free is certainly a problem though.
I’m not sure how anything can compete with free and convenient, even things that work really well that take time to set up are hugely inferior because hosting is a cost if nothing else.
If something is free you have a responsibility to be even more diligent to understand what happens when it goes away, is no longer free, or how they plan to extract value from you. Discord is not a charity or government subsidized project.
XMPP does far more than IRC. And, as I said, there are public servers with nice clients everywhere, such as Monocles Chat for Android, Dino for GNU/Linux/BSD, or PSI+ for Windows. With video chat and everything.
Nothing deeper, skeptical is a fair term but impractical.
Consider instead what the person stands to gain.
In my case I invest in my network because it makes me independent and that is my objective and I am happy to pay for that.
For other people its because they might want to foster open source (freenode for example) and thus your for-profit business or gamer clan isn't the right fit.
Due diligence is the correct term. Not skepticism.
> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.
Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).
Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)
When it comes to exchanging information (especially if you want things to be searchable later), I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/
I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to be a part of your community, you go where they are, not vice versa. Plus, it doesn't seem that many out there are building gamer-centric platforms since the idea of making an enterprise version in parallel to the free one and earning money off of that is... unlikely?
When do you need voice and video with a big community btw? I can see if you have a group of like 8 core devs having their own communication channel, but that is something else then hosting the whole community.
Also, your boring, regular forum is searchable. Discord is a black hole, so if the value of information is more than just personal, Discord-like things should be a no-no, even if one doesn't value privacy issues.
I don't claim to offer a perfect solution, but the first step is admitting the problem. I'll be seeking out alternatives myself.
> with good ownership management
This part is questionable. As the advertising news highlights, a private company operates primarily in the interest of its owners. For a venture-captial backed company, you expect to see the cycle of benevolence in order to grab market share, a model that induces lock-in (social lock-in, in this case), followed by exploitation (advertising and the other predatory FOMO stuff they have with the subscriptions).
The writing was on the wall from the get go, but people fell for it anyway. And now I'm hit by it too because I have to use it to hang with my friends.
Opening everything and making it free during strikes sounds like a great way to do it, but I don't think the power that be would allow it.
I've never seen a barrier hopper stopped, but I'm sure the bobbies would be sent in if thry announced everyone would be doing it.
There's also the problem of disconnected services - the purple line is Rail, so while they use the same stations, they can be on strike when the Underground isn't. So you could go through open barriers at a rail station but you'd find the barriers shut trying to leave from an Underground station.
I'm aware of just how under invested the rest of UK infrastructure is outside of London, but that doesn't make complaints about its services invalid.
With the billions spent on the purple pine you'd reasonable expect a decent quality of service that doesn't involve so many cancellations, delays, and days of complete deadlock.
Bet if you look at to comparable European countries this reliability would be a joke to them.
The train being every 5 minutes is only for central London, if you live further out you're only served by at most 1 in 3 trains. Missing one sucks much more, during rush hour you can bet you'll be crammed like sardines if you're not early.
I've only been commuting twice a week for about a year, and there have been several occurrences where I get to the station and all upcoming trains are delayed or cancelled due to some line failure. The alternative route takes about twice as long if I want it to cost the same. You bet your arse TFL won't give you a refund if your regular route is untenable.
London gets more investment, definitely. But even so the outcomes still lag behind what you'd expect from the capital of such a wealthy country.
As soon as I see a CLA I'm turned off even using a piece of FOSS software.
I get it's usually just the lawyers protecting the company just in case a contributor tries something dodgy in the future. Out of principle however, I resent the broad assignment of copyright and granting them the right to relicense.
Of course I expect most of these projects would never exercise that right, but the mere fact that they _could_ take my Free work and make it non-Free is very disturbing.
So I'm simply not going to use it. I'm not going to get invested, then find a problem that I could theoretically submit a patch for. Rather than think of all the users who would benefit from my change, I'll just see it as free work for a megacorp.
Just like cookie banners, CLAs are one of those idiot lawyer things where some jackass at a big corp invented the idea to justify their paycheck, and now everyone cargo cults it because they think they need it. 99% of projects do not need a CLA and 99% of websites do not need a cookie banner.
I think I would actually flip that for CLAs -- 99% of projects do need a CLA it's just annoying because assignment isn't the assumed default when contributing to other projects. The number of projects where there is more than one owner (be that a person, foundation, or llc) is insignificant. Almost all outside contributions are from people who have no expectations at all over their code and are just scratching their own itch. Plus unless you're a huge project the legal issues are just ignored when it comes to re-licensing.
So maybe you're right but "99% of projects have a CLA in the form of not giving a fuck" is far more accurate.
This isn't a good analogy. Copyright is a real thing, and getting explicit consent from your contributors to use their copyrighted material is an important defensive measure.
I have a CAA on my GPL project so that I have the right to start releasing it as MIT, that is, more Free. Also so I can dual-license it to a corporation and make a modicum of money from the software that is 98% my work. I absolutely never intend to make future versions non-free (and I don't even have the right to make already released versions non-free). Do you find this disturbing?
> I have a CAA on my GPL project so that I have the right to start releasing it as MIT, that is, more Free.
That really depends on the CAA. It might allow way more. The text might be (legally) not applicable or have flaws, etc.
> Do you find this disturbing?
It is a barrier to contribute. I would not even bother trying to contribute.
Your statements here are already a bit conflicting to me. You partly might want to monetize the software. You partly might want to release it as MIT. I don't see how you'd still have a means to monetize if you'd release it as MIT. Feels like you want to keep all options open.
That all said, hey, you developed it, so cool if you'd listen to people with different opinions but I'd likely not need your software anyway I guess. Further, loads of non-CAA pure GPL software never receive any contributions. It takes quite a bit of effort to be noticed and get contributions.
FYI: If I reread above parts might come across as harsh but none is meant that way.
Yeah, I've put 7 years and thousands of hours into it. I do want to keep my options open!
> loads of non-CAA pure GPL software never receive any contributions.
Yup, for several years before I had a CAA I received almost no contributions, except from people I had a direct personal relationship with. The CAA hasn't deterred people, in fact if you look at the timeline, I've gotten more contributors since I've put the CAA into place. (I'm sure it's not cause and effect, but still.)
> It is a barrier to contribute. I would not even bother trying to contribute.
I used to think that I would want any and all contributions to my project. But I've learned over time that, except for trivial changes, a PR from a new contributor is more effort than it's worth, by itself. I mean I can write code, and I do--lots of it. The real value in contributing is everything else: documentation, bugfixing, sincere attention on the problem. So I realized that I'm looking for repeat contributors, the ones who are going to invest in the project, and become active community members, maybe even maintainers. And the low-effort drive-by contributors who would be deterred by e.g. a CAA were never the contributors that were going to move the needle anyway.
In fact, and please correct me if I'm wrong, based on your general tone above, I'm guessing that you've never been an active contributor to any open source project, CLA/CAA or not. In which case, I consider the CAA to have been effective: you can feel self-righteous and I avoid the hassle.
Most CLAs are a bot on the MR where you click sign, type your name, and it's done. If you don't really care about your code ownership then it's barely a speed bump compared to the rest of getting a PR merged.
You seem to have a single line at the bottom of your CONTRIBUTING.md stating that contributors assign copyright to you. I doubt that this is worth anything legally. You have probably received and merged many contributions whose author didn't have the right to assign it to you, and having put no effort in checking that, you would probably be the one found in the wrong.
Also take a look at GitHub's ToS, which explicitly states that "inbound=outbound" is the default. I don't think you can expect people to hunt down your little notice when there is a site-wide default. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
You'll probably never do things the people who contributed won't agree with. But someday you'll pass away, and the people who end up with your estate might not care about the intricacies of software and sell it off for cheap to somebody who'd rather do anything to get a return in investment.
Even if the CLA somehow said you could only relicense to MIT, they could simply do that without releasing anything, and immediately take it and use it in proprietary things :)
I respect your intentions, and if the CLA is truly restricted to relicensing as MIT or dual-licensing, I'd be more willing to use it.
I would hightlight that the dual licensing in particula introduces the issue of sharing any profits with other maintainers, if there are several. Personally if I'm submitting minor patches I would not bring this up, but it deter people from wanting to be more actively involved.
Depends on the size and scope of your project, I guess.
Oh hey, I also worked on Company of Heroes, but a good decade later while porting it to iOS. It was definitely among the nicer codebases I worked on at that job. But we did some unholy things to port it and get it working with touchscreens, I'm glad none of the original team have to see that. Decently chuffed with what we managed to bolt on to the existing UI system though.
All the "agents" care about is getting the money for their client. For this, they're willing and apparently able to abort at least one flight, and possibly others, costing people on those flights possibly thousands each with rebookings etc, all for £3k.
I've only has the displeasure of interacting with a bailiff once, when I was a naive student. The guy knocked on the door asking after a previous tenant. We went through for any mail addressed to the guy he was after, and while doing so seemed to revel in explaining how he had the power to barge in by force and arrest me if we wanted. In the moment I was slightly incredulous but nodded along. Was only after the fact I researched to find you're within your rights to turn them away unless they're accompanied by actual police.
Seems like the perfect job for power-tripping sods.