For what it's worth, TigerData is the company that develops TimescaleDB, a very popular and performant time series database provided as a Postgres extension. I'm surprised that the fact that TigerData is behind it is not mentioned anywhere in the blog post. (Though, TimescaleDB is mentioned 14 times on the page).
Yes, but that would then require more infrastructure. For example, Australia does not have a national ID card - or a national proof of age card (each state, however, does implement a Proof of Age card, eg https://www.nsw.gov.au/driving-boating-and-transport/driver-...).
So, what is your zero knowledge based on? Who is the signer?
Under the Identity Verification Services Act 2023 we have IDMatch (https://www.idmatch.gov.au/). This whole setup can simply be extended to have third parties act as an intermediary between the government and the party attempting to get proof of age. Similar to AusPost's DigitaliD (https://www.digitalid.com/personal). But let's not have that company owned by the Government :)
It's pretty cooked that we are asking the social media companies to go ahead and prove to the eSaftey commissioner that they have measures in place to stop kids from getting access to social websites, yet they have to use unreliable measures like selfies to do it. The companies can't win here. This won't be the last you hear of this. https://youtu.be/YTwBStZIawY?t=306
Can't you just put a middle man on there then? Get a non-profit organisation like Mozilla to ask the govt. on behalf of the user.
The organisation asks the govt, and gives back a signed token.
The the only thing the government knows is that an age verification was requested. Once verification has been done once for one site, it can be used for future verifications.
The middle man in this scenario can mask the URL that is requesting age verification, but what's to stop the government compelling traffic logs from the middle man?
Nothing more than what prevents them from getting logs from your ISP about the sites you visit after verification. In ideal countries they need a court order for that, in less ideal ones they just scoop up the logs preemptively.
> All risk of loss for the Products shall pass to You upon delivery of the Products to the location specified in Your Order (even if no signature is required for delivery). For the avoidance of doubt, the delivery of downloaded Products occurs when the Products are downloaded.
What you are saying is that you ordered FileZilla (agreeing to the T&C as part of payment). The T&C said once you downloaded the product, you were required to keep the software yourself.
> In a one-off purchase you will have a right to receive services or other rights for the maximum period of time indicated in the package you have purchased or ‒ missing that indication ‒ for up to five years.
It also says:
> Unless registered, your copy will not receive updates and will not exploit the services of the Software.
So, I would assume that if you purchased the Lifetime license, and you registered the software within the 4 required weeks, then they are infact breaking their contract with you.
Sure, but that is an older Terms and Conditions. It was a perpetual license, not a lifetime license that is sold today. It's like saying you shouldn't purchase Windows 11 because Windows XP no longer gets updates. Well duh! It stopped being supported more than 10 years ago, and Windows 11 is a different license to that of Windows XP.
The lifetime license purchased today is not a perpetual license. FileZilla says that it will update it for life.
So, respectfully, no, it's not good to warn people about the clause, because people purchasing the product today do not run into this issue.
The Wikimedia Endowment [0] has been created for this. From it's Financials [1] it mentions that
> ... [its mission is...] to act as a permanent fund that can support in perpetuity the operations and activities of current and future Wikimedia projects, which are projects that are approved by and advance the purposes of the Foundation or its successor if the Foundation ceases to exist
The Wikimedia Endowment (which is sorta-kinda separate) is to drive solutions to that exact problem.
By having a separate fund that the Wikimedia Foundation can access to help Wikipedia to have the technical expertise and knowledge workers required to continue the work of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Should the Wikimedia Foundation cease to exist, the funds in the endowment can be redirected to a successor.
EDIT: this is similar in style to the UK's Guardian Foundation, who provides funding to The Guardian newspaper. https://theguardianfoundation.org/
The point is that without Wikipedians adding and improving articles, Wikipedia will die, even if the site could be kept up indefinitely. So it has to remain a relatively wide social phenomenon, an obscure Wikipedia that no students know about and care to use will knowledge rot, even if it doesn't but rot.
Why does the printer design being NC licensed mean that you won't be able to purchase one?
To me, it seems like this license makes the most sense for everyone. The designer(s) of the printer get to sell a printer that no doubt took more than a few days worth of work to go from idea to "hey look, it prints something", and everyone else gets to see how the design works, to either improve, or create a new design based on learnings from this project. Hopefully that brand new design is licensed more liberally!
But I sure as hell would love an open printer that has a less than ideal license, especially when the alternative is basically getting a new printer from one of four companies (Canon, Epson, HP... did I miss anyone?)
The world needs more open source hardware. I'm currently trying to tackle an open source washing machine and heat pump dryer in my spare time. Will it ever turn into a built project? Probably not, but I sure as hell want to make sure that every peice that I've worked on so far is released to the world if it means that the next few people can finish or fix the design.
The fact that we see __washing machines__ as something that's not worth supporting after 6 years is honestly disgusting to me. It's not a flat screen TV, I don't see the design of a washing machine improving radically in my generation.
But if it does, it should be able to be retrofitted, rather than replacing an entire machine.
> Why does the printer design being NC licensed mean that you won't be able to purchase one?
> To me, it seems like this license makes the most sense for everyone. The designer(s) of the printer get to sell a printer that no doubt took more than a few days worth of work to go from idea to "hey look, it prints something", and everyone else gets to see how the design works, to either improve, or create a new design based on learnings from this project. Hopefully that brand new design is licensed more liberally!
Let's consider a hypothetical. It might not happen, but I'd bet that it does. The project launches. They get funded. They successfully ship the hardware. Once. And then... oh, it doesn't matter. They retire. They disappear. They get hit by a bus. They want to do another run but funding falls through. They try to do another run but there are manufacturing problems and after a couple years everyone gives up. Heck, maybe they get bought by $EVIL_MAINSTREAM_PRINTER_MANUFACTURER to kill this competition. It really doesn't matter how, what matters is that if anything happens to this one group of 3 people, nobody's allowed to sell this thing ever again, which means the only way to get new parts, let alone a whole replacement machine, is to personally have enough DIY skill to make it yourself. And that's too high a bar.
They're coming at it from the software side, but the FSF articulates it pretty well:
> Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. Paid, professional support for free software fills an important need.
> Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success.
> But I sure as hell would love an open printer that has a less than ideal license, especially when the alternative is basically getting a new printer from one of four companies (Canon, Epson, HP... did I miss anyone?)
Yes, Source Available is better than nothing, but it's strictly worse than Open Source.
> They retire. They disappear. They get hit by a bus.
Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.
Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.
You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use, the tinkerers have the plans so they can modify the hardware.
Then the commercial suppliers of replacement parts can pay a small percentage of their sales to the group that made the original designs, so they can continue to build new designs and improve existing ones.
Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.
> Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.
I don't think it's specific to hardware, but yes, I personally think this is a poor choice of license. There are actual Open Source licenses designed for hardware, but this isn't it.
> Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.
Dual-licensing would be nice, but still isn't Open Source and is still awkward; if the original folks are gone, there's nobody to grant those commercial licenses. If you really must, I think the best option is a BSL-style arrangement where you release it under a restrictive license up front but it automatically becomes truly Open Source, including allowing commercialization, after a year or two.
> You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use,
Point of order : GPL is absolutely not a NC license. You are free to make money off of GPL software, you just have to give code to anyone who gets binaries (possibly only if they ask, again this is general terms not legal advice).
> Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.
I'm kind of okay with that. Carbon copying and selling the design is giving something to the community: availability. I'm 100% on board with share-alike licenses, of course; anyone else selling it also being forced to share the source would be great. But a lot of my point is that as someone who wants open source printers to take over, I absolutely want these things to be ubiquitous, including by them being sold for pennies on the dollar by fly-by-night manufacturers and cloned and remixed and modified by companies that stand to make a fortune by doing so.
1. That only helps if you don't care about breaking the law.
2. That's great right up until they reappear 5 years later and start suing people. Or their estate does. Or if they got bought up specifically to crush competition.
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