The most important thing that I've learned from Stallman is that "craft a story - don't worry how convoluted it might appear - where corporations take actions in order to benefit themselves at the cost of everyone else" is a good heuristic to predict the future in a capitalistic society.
To be clear, this isn't criticism of capitalism. Capitalism has good things and bad things, and I have faith that we can keep the good things and mitigate the bad things. Instead the point of my comment is to highlight how some times our intuition starts moving in the right direction but we stop it because "come on that's too far fetched, they'd never do that".
Most text editors (not all, some are still lightning fast) choke on GB-sized files and I have yet to find a graphical file manager that can handle >1000 elements in a directory (terminal-based unix tools are fine). Maybe the authors of those softwares assume infinite RAM, infinite CPU cycles and puny workload or maybe they think the time of devs has more value than the time of their users.
I don't think the author has the slight idea what does the word 'feudalism' mean. If anything the current Internet where users build themselves on big corporations' domains and get their data sucked for profit is much more akin of feudalism than the internet of old.
Nobody seems to know what feudalism is these days with all of the idiots being taken at face value. Feudalism is about a system of allegiances and obligations that supported personal power. The Wagner Group attempted coup is far more feudalist than any of the first world problems in tech.
There is this [0] thread from a few years ago. According to the linked article, "unless an IOMMU is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily." No idea how true this statement is.
the contributor is giving the company/project something. and not making a promise that they don't keep.
if i understand it correctly, consideration is only relevant for a contract that has not yet been executed.
once the contribution is made, there is no enforcement necessary, because the contract is already completed. the project must now be able to assume that it can use the contribution under the terms that were agreed upon.
if that was not the case, no project could ever accept any contributions from anyone.
all the CLA is doing is requiring the contribution to be made under specific conditions.
if the project only accepts contributions under the GPL then there is an implicit CLA that all contributions be released under the GPL. once the contribution is released the license for it can't be changed either.
Pharo's CLA doesn't seem that bad [0]. You retain copyright, and agree to license your contribution using the MIT License. OTOH, you also agree that your contribution is "only a small component". IANAL and I wonder what is the implication of such a clause.
So, Utah and Virginia want their residents to surrender their private informations to shaddy websites and Louisiana is disposed to itself provides these informations.
