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You could get 4 Lenovo X280 if you just need an overpowered notepad.

Yeah, or a Macbook Neo! No need to disparage other people's use cases.

Free but not Open Source? Did I miss that?

> Free but not Open Source? Did I miss that?

The miniscript language itself is MIT License:

https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript

The Minimicro code doesn't seem to have any license in the repository or code:

https://github.com/JoeStrout/minimicro-sysdisk


So Open Source but not Free (Libre).

For miniscript: the Free Software Foundation considers the MIT license (which they call the ‘Expat License’ to distinguish it from the ‘X11 License’) to be ‘free’ (and GPL compatible), but not ‘copyleft’.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat

For minimicro-sysdisk: I am suspicious that the author just forgot to include a license. Their other repos are mostly MIT or ‘The Unlicensed (also ‘free’ but not ‘copyleft’), and some have licenses added after creation. Suspicion is not something to be legally relied on of course…


That's usually called "source available", since most people, including some governmental orgs around the world, already follow OSI's definition for "open source".

Am I the only one that hates that programmers now have to also be lawyers?

What do you mean now? The peak of debating the merits of varied FOSS licenses must have been 20 years ago.

Mini Micro seems to be built on Unity. The MiniScript portion of it is open source https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript but the version packaged for use by Unity costs some money. I can't tell if the people behind MiniScript are the same people behind the Mini Micro.

Looks like you found the ad/sponsor block in the article.


I see it more like a question than a rule.

"The service is free. Am I the product?"

That is a valid thing to ask. Even with FOSS sometimes.

Some FOSS projects are backed by companies, then yes, plausible to ask.

Otherwise, I would answer with a clear no.

(Projects can still collect telemetry and other data and sell that, though the sell part should be very rare, imo...)

Edit: Was that a bad faith argument or a honest question?

Sometimes I can't tell, maybe because of old or ESL...


No. This is not the way.

> give parents the ABILITY to advertise the users age to browsers, apps and everything in between.

Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent are set to a country-specific age rating restrictions (PG, 12+, 18+, whatever). That's it.

None of the things you mentioned have any point to concern themself with the age or age-bracket of the user in front of the device. This can and will be abused. This is very obvious. Think about it.


Why should the applications get to decide if they are appropriate for a particular age? Shouldn't that be up to the parent? I shouldn't need to tell my kid: "Well, to use this compiler software, you need to set your age to 18 temporarily, because some product manager 3,000 miles away decided to rate it 18+. But, set it back to age 13 afterwards because you shouldn't be on adult sites." It's stupid.


I get what you mean, but I might have miscommunicated a bit.

Clarification: "are set to" means by the parent. "Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent" like media content providing apps like discord, netflix, etc. that ARE able and/or bound to rate their content.

Package Manager and Software Installation in general are usually locked behind root/admin passwords anyway. Especially on kids' devices their user should be non-admin, no?

So, when any piece of software is installed, it is by choice of the parent.

That's not unreasonable then?


That is what I meant by age(-rating), you are correct. However, drop country specifics - too complicated. Age brackets are enough: child, preteen, teen, adult. At around 16-17 these should be dropped anyway since at that point people are smart enough to get around these measures anyway and usually have non-parent controlled devices.


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