Get Scramble and let me know if you can beat it. At a young age, that game destroyed any interest I had in video games. I played Scramble for hours, always dying at the same point over and over.
The point of this story is that open source can't protect you against a bully with a legal department at his command, and neither can it protect you against bad contract clauses. Frivolous legal threats may be frivolous, but you have to prove that in court and a lot of companies would rather take the easier way out to avoid having to do that.
The "FOSS" company never directly threatened the author, but the implication of it alone was enough to scare off both agencies. Given a lot of the tech is mixed up here on purpose, there's a few FOSS companies & vendors I can think of with legal departments that I'd describe as "pretty aggressive" and "expensive for a managed solution" that aren't solely about Exchange related services but would definitely behave like this, given their PR over the years at times has had slipped masks.
This basically sums up modern corporate status quo. T
> "pretty aggressive"
The legal system has been weaponized against the average person. This is the veil it hides behind. A legal department can be downright boring yet vicious at the same time. Like how they slow roll any employee legal dispute to the maximum legal time limit in expectation that they can financially out wait the employee. Which they almost always can.
Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird is a creative writing exercise which didn't actually happen and isn't verifiably true to any degree. There were never any Finches, Ewells, Robinsons or Radleys, yet readers often find it quite powerful because they're perfectly aware the story's events have played out between real people many, many times. They don't need to be told the real names of people who have been in lynch mobs to know real people have been lynched.
Email servers aren't quite as heavy a subject, but we know these things happen.
Know your contracts. Read the fine print. Be careful who you do business with. Not all companies selling services for open source software embrace the ethos that we assume they do.
After reading the story, I can understand why somebody would not name and shame. The author could be inviting lawsuits from a company that clearly has no qualms playing dirty.
Something I read in the story is that the legal system fails to do its job: to make society fair. There are contracts and lawyers in the story, but they do not work toward ensuring fairness or justice, they work to help the company with more laywers and less scruples.
The legal system, in Italy, has been fundamentally bankrupt for a long time. It's one of the reasons a lot of foreign companies don't invest over there - if anything goes wrong, the legal system is unlikely to be of any help.
I know of no legal system that doesn't fail in some way. Some are much worse than others, but all have flaws. Often correcting the flaws is worse than living with them.
Don't take the above as we should just accept the flaws. We should not. However what to do about them is a hard problem and we should not do something that makes things worse.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but also I can't discern a single bit of useful information in your comment. It is all tautologies, and would apply to any human endeavour. Yes, nothing is perfect, it's possible to make things worse and we should avoid that. Sooo...?
It's a hodgepodge. These paragraphs near the end might be the point. I don't blame you for not getting this far.
"Here, streaming platforms have achieved a strange paradox. Never has a group of studios gained so much control over the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of movies by making movies no one cares about or remembers. Having not only failed to discover a new generation of auteurs, the streamers have also ensured that their filmmakers are little more than precarious content creators, ineligible to share the profits of any hit. It’s a shift that has induced a profound sense of confusion.
“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”
"Netflix has created a pyramid scheme of attention, with no end in sight. And yet if the streamer admitted how little impact its movies make, it would undermine its long-running pitch to audiences, Hollywood talent, and their business representatives that the company is a grand star-making enterprise that produces great cinema with commercial appeal.
