Yeah this is insane for me to read. I’ll say it’s about 8pm-2am for me that the world is all quiet and everything is just peaceful. I’ve had some of my best ideas and made many life decisions in these hours.
I disagree with your view on IP, at least for pharmaceuticals. For most drugs, the exclusivity period is only 5 years, after which generic companies reverse engineer the product with ease and create a low-cost alternative. Without this period allowing pharma companies to make their money, there’d be no reason to invest the billions upon billions of dollars into R&D to discover and develop the drug in the first place. Most drug candidates fail, and the wins are what prop up the whole industry.
I’m not defending price gouging and I think all governments should control pricing, preferably with a single payer system (looking at you USA), but we would be so much further behind without patent protection. Especially for orphan diseases.
Don’t really agree with you on IP for most creative purposes either. There should be a reasonable length of time you get exclusive rights to something you create. But this doesn’t excuse Disney’s stranglehold on the mouse.
I’ll second CrDroid. Gabriel Wolfe I think is the name of the maintainer. He does a great job of it with updates coming out roughly every two weeks. I always had a couple bugs (camera not focusing quite right sometimes, some crash messages on reboot), but never any major issues.
The Wallstreet Journal did a really good podcast interviewing Kenyans who worked for Sama on this particular engagement. Most of them said it affected their lives deeply, one said his wife almost left him as he just “wasn’t the person she’d married”. I think she ended up coming back after he quit at least, but yeesh. Another said he pulled away from his young daughter after reading prompts about child sexual abuse. Can you imagine that level of mental health hit?