Until just now I had never heard of this team and their contribution to FreeCAD. Reading the article I think it outlines what they did and it sounds excellent.

As far as their success or failure of achieving their aims, I don't have any information to make a judgement either way.

I will say that making a business out of open source software is not something for the faint of heart and not something that has a track record of success, let alone a documented one. Mostly it seems to follow the pattern: "How do you make a small fortune from open source?" "Start with a large fortune."

I say this as a quarter century user, developer and advocate of open source solutions.

It absolutely is.

It's possibly also how they'll get broken up by the DoJ.

You can have several for different purposes and audiences.

It's a lovely pattern to look out for, your efforts to show just how ugly it is, are welcome.

For anyone considering implementing this: No.

Mind you, those might not all be human..

You mean the information superhighway?

Shame that all those business models require US centric payment processors to actually get paid.

I'm not in the US and my choices for actually getting money into my bank account are PayPal or Stripe, neither of which have policies that permit the distribution of electronic data or alternatively donations without being a registered charity.

Neither has dispute resolution procedures that go beyond "you broke the rules and we're keeping your money", and "sorry, that was a fraudulent card and we're taking the money back, plus a fee, and the fraudster keeps the goods", and finally "our word is final and we're now closing your account without disclosing why".

So, yeah, good luck with that.

Source: I've spent months looking for alternatives and as far as I can tell, they just don't exist.

Uhm. AFAIK, you only have to share code under the GPL if you distribute binaries outside your organisation.

If it stays in-house, there's no distribution, thus no requirement to share the source.

I'm happy to be wrong, feel free to point out what I missed.

This reminds me of a story where a speaker at a conference was talking about software development methodologies.

They asked the audience, who in the room would get on board a plane built in the way that their company approached software development?

Everyone stuck their hand up.

Then they asked who would stay for the takeoff.

One person stuck their hand up.

Asked why, they answered: "Based on how we write software, I doubt that it would taxi from the ramp, let alone take off."

Let's just hope that Boeing had better systems and processes for building this spacecraft than they did their 737 MAX 9 ...

I've never lived in a building with an elevator. I've lived in multistorey apartments, townhouses and live in one now.

Stairs are part of life.

I've never had an issue with groceries and stairs.

Heavy furniture and stairs on the other hand are a reminder that you need friends in your life, if only to have them help you move :)

I have all notifications turned off.

If I need to concentrate, I put on noise cancelling headphones and play electronic music.

To get "started", I pick the smallest, quickest, easiest task and complete it.

At the end of the day I purposely stop mid task.

That incomplete task is the one I start the next day.

So .. are you in the same ship?