avidamoeba

Purely on the product side, if I decide to buy it, I wouldn't buy it for myself. I'd buy it for friends and family who are not that tech literate. Either to make my life easier to give them self-hosted services, or ideally for themselves to be able to do so. I want this product to be a non-shitty, open source "Synology," from a firm I can trist to support it for a very long time. Doesn't have to have that form factor. And I'm totally fine with an ongoing subscription. I'd like to be able to say - hey friend, buy this from ACME Co-op and sign up for their support plan. Follow the wizard and you'll have Immich, Nextcloud, etc. A support plan might include external cloud HTTP proxy with authentication and SSL that makes access trivial. Similar to how Home Assistant's subscription (Nabu Casa) works. It could also include a cloud backup. Perhaps at a different subscription rate.

I don't know enough to say what the structure should be but this should not be possible:

But it doesn't protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital

It implies that the founders have more voting power and ownership than the rest of the people in the org. In my mind, everyone should have an equal vote, which should prevent a sale on the whim of the founders or another minority group. If a sale is in the cards, a majority of the people in the org should have to approve for it to proceed. And this shouldn't be advisory but a legal barrier to pass.

If I were to start a firm today, I'd be looking into this because not only this is the kind of firm I'd like to work in, but I think so would quite a few people in software. And those aren't the dumb kids.

I can also say that as a customer, the few worker co-ops I've able to buy things from give me a much more trustworthy impression than the baseline. They just behave differently. Noticeably more ethically.

I probably would. However it has become increasingly obvious that the flaws with solutions so far have been in the organisation. Not so much the particular hardware or software. If I'm going to buy something I'd like some hope that it'll be there in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So please if you go serious with this, look into worker-owned organizations because I'm tired of dodging profit-maximizing traps and pretend-non-profit landmines. If the people building and supporting the thing aren't the ones deciding what to do with the revenue and profit, you're the only one doing it and you're going to make mistakes that will hurt them and us. And then you become a landmine to dodge.

It looks like something for a LinkedIn post.

Of course it does. Why wouldn't it? If I were an unscrupulous major shareholder of Intel looking for profit maximization above all else, I'd assume a bailout in the cards. Stop squeaking and give me another stock buyback. We gotta pump this bitch as far as it'll go before it hits the wall.

While that may be just some paperwork and a small expense, the next requirement is more insidious: “a phone number and email address for Google Play users to contact you”. I’m fine showing an email address, but I absolutely do not want my phone number to be available to anyone on the internet. (Even for phone calls. But remember that a phone number is used for much more than phone calls these days.) And that’s just me, a privileged hetero white cis dude who is unlikely to be the target of harassment or doxxing.

Yup. For small developers (FOSS or not) that don't make money which can insulate them from this kind of stuff, it's a no-no.

It's not impossible but I'd say it's unlikely. This is not a scalable way to do bad things while it costs a lot. That's why it's typically reserved for targeted bad things. I.e. someone wants to do bad things to you specifically. For example if you're an uncomfortable journalist. If there's a machine put up on the wide second hand market for anyone to buy, it's probably not one of those cases.

If I go to any of the teams I interact with who program their components in C++ and proposed Rust or anything else, I'd get a similar reaction. They're very good at C++ and they very rarely have memory and threading issues. 😂

Perhaps. Or perhaps not in the way they do today. Perhaps if you profit from placing ads among results people actually want, you should share revenue with those results. Cause you know, people came to you for those results and they're the reason you were able to show the ads to people.

If not, The Pirate Bay would like a word.

Commitment issues.

"It’s herding cats: introducing Rust effectively is one part coding work and ninety-nine parts political work..."

All software development in a team is. More like 20/80 or 40/60 if you're lucky.