As long as you’re comfortable and the client pays … Win!

So the net of obligation, ownership and mutually assured destruction continues to tighten?

At some point this is going to explode … right?

Wow.

That’s some list.

Do you know all those songs, or is there a (substantial) gap between expectations and reality?

The article is light on detail. No actual list of who’s in the song.

Here’s the full list of 119 references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_references_in_We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire

You clearly didn’t watch the MythBusters episode dedicated to this topic considering all its various lighting technologies.

The takeaway: Turn off the lights when you leave the room, unless you’re going to be back within a fraction of a second.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fRWEE1wiUfU

What you described as personal habits seem appropriate for participation in polite society while being examples to teach in a world beset by climate change.

AFAIK Google owns the vast majority of advertising online and is the one making all the money.

1/1/1

I joined Reddit because it was an open and moderated collection of communities … then after the blackout due to the API changes, moderators were sent packing and any sense of community that had been created was destroyed.

I joined both Mastodon and Lemmy and I’m glad I did.

The communities in both are nascent, but slowly growing, and that seems like a place I’d like to be.

After Twitter became Xitter, I also joined Bluesky but that feels much more like people ranting and venting, less about making communities.

Given the impermanence of any storage medium today, I’m thinking a puff of smoke would convey the sentiment with the right level of user expectation.

💨

… and anyone else who should not have access to your data.

And now you know why you should encrypt your data on any cloud provider.

Scrambled Eggs:

https://youtu.be/keGd9CXUHco

I wonder … will it be another case of “Too Big To Fail” … or will it be … “Let The Market Decide”?

I’m guessing the answer depends on how many medals the CEO of Oracle can bestow upon the Orange.

Me … cynical … no … just been here for a while.

I’ve heard it as:

When’s your Dentist appointment?

2:30.

Fair question.

What it boils down to is: Become part of the OSS community.

In my experience, there’s no other way, since the alternative is to be automatically part of the Microsoft (or Apple) community.

In other words, you need to make the investment into the implementation. As I’ve said elsewhere, license costs are insignificant.

The community is where you get help, where you find others with the same issues. You can pay the likes of Canonical and Redhat, but I’ve never been impressed by either.

Ultimately any solution requires support, just like any other tool. You just need to make it explicit, rather than assumed.

One thing that Microsoft does to ensure that you have support infrastructure is to continually break backwards compatibility in subtle ways that require you to open your wallet and pay for support.

OSS will likely run for years without adult supervision, but that doesn’t mean it can continue to work without requiring support from time to time. If you don’t prepare for this, you’re going to be very unhappy.

I’m talking about the reality of an organisation digging itself out of the hole created by projects such as described by OP.

I get the call from such organisations to help fix their issues and sometimes I can even help, more often than not it’s a time consuming effort (ie. expensive) to get to a point where the systems are in place to avoid the next catastrophe.

The reason that Microsoft keeps getting mind share and revenue is because there’s so much of that expertise around.

There’s loads of OSS professionals, myself included, but we’re a drop in the ocean by comparison.

In many cases an OSS deployment is the equivalent of “my nephew helped set this up” and it’s not helping the overall picture in the wider community.

If you’re going to deploy OSS, then you must consider the support implications before you start, anything else is unprofessional. License fees are insignificant by comparison.

Here’s three:

• A server with nobody supporting it for 13 years. It had a MySQL database with 743 columns. There was no documentation, served three organisations and hadn’t been backed up for at least 7 years.
• A server running a CMS for a dozen organisations that was running on failing hardware. No idea who built or didn’t support it.
• A server built by an employee 15 years ago, then supported by a “web company” who didn’t update it for 12 years, then “supported” by a Windows shop which was happy to charge the customer but hadn’t actually updated the server.

You’ll notice that I’m being deliberately vague.

All these share the exact scenario that the OP outlines. The organisations involved didn’t know that they were in deep trouble until well after the project instigator departed. No documentation, no updates, no training, handover, nothing beyond a set of credentials.

I’ll add it to the list:

• AI is Assumed Intelligence.
• AI is autocorrect on steroids.
• AI is a Dunning-Kruger accelerator.
• AI is a classic case of Gell-Mann amnesia.

Right until your PostgreSQL server goes down and you can’t call your IT department and have to start hunting for a contractor, find a budget, get it signed off by management and HR, then on-board the new staff member, that is, after you advertised the position, did job interviews, after first filtering through the 700 … or two, applications, each plausibly generated by a ChatGPT session. Give it something like six months in a big organisation, less in a nimble one.

Does an “entrenched” anything sound “nimble” to you?