They're silly, folks. Intellectual property is a spook.

Under communism all software will be free to share, use, and modify without restriction.

This post inspired by the current Ruby mimemagic gem license drama.

In case you're not following:

  • mimemagic is a Ruby library (gem) used for detecting the MIME types of files, either by their extension or by their content
  • it's widely used and included in Rails
  • it was MIT licensed
  • it was using an xml file from freedesktop dot org, which is a GPL project
  • the GPL license means that every project that uses that software must also be GPL licensed - open-source, freely usable/modifiable/etc
  • someone from freedesktop pointed this out to the mimemagic maintainer
  • the maintainer republished the gem as GPL and yanked all the MIT licensed gems, breaking builds everywhere, and making rails currently uninstallable

I have a big headache because of ideology.

    • crime [she/her, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      A good life hack is that if you get your devs used to containers and then get rid of the containers, they sometimes express a sentiment that gets close to gratitude 🥲

        • crime [she/her, any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Haaaaa yeah that's a little too real

          My devs have stopped doing that since my team started the cultural practice of tagging the entire team responsible for the broken build if it's towards the end of the workday and they don't respond, and fortunately bullying works 😌 shame keeps them from logging off until their specs go green

          Probably helps that we've been good about keeping our CI server inline with prod so it doesn't break much, and to their credit the devs are good at fixing specs that intermittently fail

            • crime [she/her, any]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Oof that's rough. Guessing if it's a small team it might not be an option, but if you can get them to do a little mini-rotation where they have to spend time "fixing the build server" (i.e. debugging what they think is wrong with the build server and realizing it's their shitty tests) to get acclimated that might help? Otherwise idk what solves that beyond a culture of treating broken builds and bad specs like the #1 priority after prod fires :/

              Good luck and solidarity, comrade :rat-salute: