quaddo
First if all, you’re not wrong. Depending on the financial risk in play, the anxiety and trust get tossed into a tizzy.
When I say financial risk, if I’m buying a car, we all already know that that’s a whole racket. Buying a house, even bigger $$$$ involved. Buying a staple commodity, like a loaf of bread? Meh, it’s no biggie.
One big factor in play is our emotional side.
I’ll make a suggestion here. Feel free to ignore.
There’s a book by Dr Robert Cialdini on persuasion. From what I recall, he got into learning how humans react to certain things, because he felt that he himself was duped into doing/buying things that he later realized he wished he hadn’t done/bought. He wanted to better understand the process so that he could be more aware and less vulnerable to the grift. He ended up going into psychology and… well, specializing in the subject.
One sec, there’s a website that gives a nice intro to this:
Just a reminder of a couple of things here. And to say that I’d forgotten myself.
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Red Hat was acquired by IBM.
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IBM has had increasingly questionable business practices over the years (ref: The Decline And Fall Of IBM.
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The old saying “Nobody got fired for buying IBM” is an old saying that meant something at some point; whether it still does is another matter. Read the link above to get the full picture. (As someone that used to do support work for HP, a lot of the sales-centric, don’t-spend-money-on-the-tech-folks mindset resonated with me.)
People (myself included) aren’t happy with Red Hat’s proclamation. As an individual, I can’t do much other than to watch how this plays out and give my team and management the heads-up, and monitor.
Jeff Geerling weighed in on this yesterday and had a quick additional thought just a few mins ago.
From TFA:
Some commentators are pointing out that it’s possible to sign up for a free Red Hat Developer account, and obtain the source code legitimately that way. This is perfectly true, but the problem is that the license agreement that you have to sign to get that account prevents you from redistributing the software.
So although the downstream distros could still get hold of the software source code, they can’t actually use it. In principle, if they make substantial modifications, they can share those, but the whole raison d’être of RHEL-compatible distros is to avoid major changes and so retain “bug-for-bug compatibility.”
Of course, they could take a “publish and be damned” attitude and do it anyway. At best, the likely result is immediate cancellation of their subscription and account. That could work but will result in a cat-and-mouse game: downstream distributors continually opening new free developer accounts, and the Hat potentially retaliating by blueprinting downloads and stomping on violators’ accounts. It would not be a sustainable model.
At worst, though, they could face potentially getting sued into oblivion.
ETA the full context.
Just wiped all my comments a couple hours ago with the help of PowerDeleteSuite. Didn’t quite take the first time, and was surprised that it was a clean sweep the second time. From what I’ve read, I shouldn’t have expected that degree of success.
Even so, I’ll check back periodically to see whether they’ve been ‘restored’.
I’ll not contribute to that site any longer. I might still pop on over once in a while, eg, if a web search leads me there. But I’ll be sure to have my adblockers/anti-trackers engaged.
You might find this interesting, then: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw
Related TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU
Last year, CBS correspondent David Pogue commented on the sub’s “jerry-rigged” design before
A shame that this keeps getting brought up. Yeah, some of the stuff was super-basic. But the absolutely key component, ie, the pressure vessel itself, was anything but jerry-rigged.
That said, I’m really curious how the pressure vessel failed. My random guess is that the viewport glass (which may not have been glass at all) cracked and then ruptured. I know that one of the vessels that has been down to the Mariana Trench experienced glass cracking; that was definitely a sweaty palms moment for the crew.
Also, given that the hatch had to be bolted shut from the outside, I’ve been wondering whether they need to be set to specific torque values each time. Meaning, what would happen if they were unevenly torqued down? My bet is you’d get uneven warping where the hatch mates to the vessel cylinder. Even if the warping is microscopic at sea level, the stress differential would get magnified at depth.
It’s also got to be pretty rattling to folks like David Pogue who have already been passengers. I’ve heard David himself say he’s still trying to process it all. But there’s got to be an ample heaping dose of “holy shit, that could have been me if the dice had fallen differently”. It’s already started to bother me that he keeps getting pulled into interviews; the first one was fine, but to keep pressing him with “what are your thoughts/feelings”… I’d rather buy him a beer and talk about literally anything else, so he can have a breather.