The NewPipe team deserve a Nobel Prize. It might look like an unimportant video player, but it’s one of the last bastion of resistance against he Google monopoly and monoculture, the total invasion of advertisement in every corner of our lives, the privacy violation that always come with Google, and the general enshittification of the internet.
Thank goodness for NewPipe…
Of course I do. That job is the best gig I’ve ever had and it’s one of the best things I have going on in my life. That’s why I’m particularly cautious in this thread and I don’t say anything that could put my employer of my employment in jeopardy in any way, even though it’s highly unlikely.
You’re welcome 🙂
I posted what I could legally post on my Github, and I made sure it’s easily discoverable. If you need it, you’ll find it very quickly.
I have no reason to keep it for myself or my employer, since it’s GPL. Also, I kind of like the idea of distributing what the unhelpful company I got it from only gives upon request: when they do that, they comply with the GPL, but in the most unhelpful way possible. With what I posted, nobody has to request that stuff ever again, and I cleaned up and updated their code too.
deleted by creator
They already know. I’ve posted all the good I think of their device, as well as the author of the open-source debugging app that runs on it (it’s actually a generic device), on their official Reddit sub. But it’s just a general comment, not tied to this account of my little GPL adventure.
Well possibly, but here’s the thing: if I don’t say anything, I don’t have to worry about having to explain myself later.
This is just a software project, I really really like my job and I have other hills to die on frankly. So I just don’t need the aggravation.
The particular open-source license doesn’t matter: they’re doing all they can to not release their source code and that’s what I need to fix their stuff.
I can’t sadly. It would make it obvious which company I’m talking about, and if ever read this thread, they could retaliate against us.
My employer is openly willing to let the engineers work on whatever they want, however long it takes to make things good or better, not just good enough. The bean counters don’t run this place: we take the time to do things right.
It’s a policy that has worked for us for the past 40 years, and it’s the main reason why our customers come back to us and we’ve been consistently very successful over the decades.
Anyhow, originally one of my colleagues asked me if it would be possible to compile and debug our code in VSCode instead of the company’s IDE. I said I’d try to see if it’s possible, and then I went down the rabbit hole - with my boss’ blessing 🙂
I can’t really say because it would make it obvious which debugging tool I’m talking about and that would out me. And then the company could put 2 and 2 together and find out who my employer is and… you know, our orders might become slow or mishandled, that sort of things. My company’s entire business depends on that one supplier, so it wouldn’t be good.
Fixed. Thanks for the proofreading 🙂
You assume I’m paid 20k per month when I’m paid a lot more than that 🙂
Anyway, not to worry, we’ll recoup that money next year when we won’t have to renew our license for the 10-so development machines.
This one is kind of the same thing: it’s a bone-stock FTDI 4232H probe with a bit of logic tacked on to disable the chip without a custom init command and a custom USB PID/VID. All I need their driver for is to enable the chip. After that, I can just use the open-source FTDI driver. But the driver makes everything super-slow, so the point is kind of moot anyway.
Probably another attempt to go around the GPL actually, because they use the FTDI driver to talk to the chip (because the open-source libusb is very slow in Windows) and that too can’t be linked to the GPL debugging tool. So the probe masquerades as a custom device.
there are some good guys out there
I know that. But it’s just a general rule at this point: I just don’t give money. It’s rarely satisfying to give money (and yes, the person doing the donation needs to feel good doing it too) and I just don’t want to find out who deserves to get mine and who doesn’t. I understand your sentiment too, but that’s my personal rule. One has to draw the line somewhere: I’m not Mother Theresa and I reckon I contribute more than the average person to my local community. But I’m also free to donate what I want to donate, and money isn’t part of what I want to donate.
I’m a programmer. I have created, maintained and contributed to many open source projects over 40 years. That’s my donation.
I never give money: I give my time - like for example I’m a volunteer at our local association for the blind - and I give non-commercial things like my blood, used clothing, used toys or food. And to repay the other developers whose work I enjoy everyday, I donate code that I strive to make as good as possible.
The reason I never give money is because the money - part or all - invariably ends up in someone’s pocket other than the intended recipient. When it’s legal, it’s called “overhead”. Still, legal or not, and justified or not, I’m not interested in paying for that.
It’s not kindness 🙂 I only made a GPL claim. All I want is the stuff that the GPL entitles me to have. The rest is off-topic and - as you say - toxic. Nobody needs the off-topic stuff in the Github repo I’ll post the GPL code to: it’s about the code, not the people or whatever drama happened at their workplace.
My “everyday carry” isn’t a USB stick, but it can act as one - and much much more: I always have my trusty Flipper Zero with me, and the image I carry in the mass storage emulator is the Linux Mint installer, with extra space in the image to store small files.
To be honest, the Flipper Zero’s mass storage emulator turns it into the slowest USB stick you never saw. But in a pinch, it’s there and it’s usable. I use my Flipper for a variety of other things all the time - including, with my laptop, as a presentation remote and secondary mouse - and I almost never need a USB flash drive. So slow though it is, it’s enough for when I do need one.