Luis Villa

Programmer turned lawyer and community guy.

Current: Sonarsource, Creative Commons, OpenET, California HDF, 415/94110, dad.

Previously: Tidelift, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Open Source Initiative, GNOME, LegOS, Duke, 305/MIA, more.

Home + about me: https://lu.is
OpenML newsletter: https://openml.fyi
Work: https://sonarsource.com

Public Key

npub1zr7al5mjf2kq7vpddk4wkegqnnpk79y3jvp6vtkqr6fkvrhlke7qaezzng

NIP-05 Address

luis_in_brief_at_social.coop@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqspplwl6dey4tq0xqkkm2htv5qfesm0zjgexqax9mqpaymxpmlmvlqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsum7ask

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1zr7al5mjf2kq7vpddk4wkegqnnpk79y3jvp6vtkqr6fkvrhlke7qaezzng

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-06-08 23:10:47 UTC

- reply

usually I try to warn people off :blobcat_weary: Sounds like you're having fun though!

2026-06-02 22:08:57 UTC

In case you needed a reminder that "progressive" has been rendered completely meaningless, here's an article claiming that a centimillionaire and Nancy Pelosi's favorite candidate are progressive, while the pro-legalization, instas-his-leather-at-Folsom, pro-transit/anti-car, pro-housing candidate is not progressive https://jacobin.com/2026/06/sf-congress-election-chan-chakrabarti

2026-04-19 05:45:03 UTC

New post: Career articles on Wikipedia: some scary numbers
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-career-cliff/
#wikipedia #wikimedia #llm

2026-04-06 15:24:23 UTC

If you’re a space nerd and wondering how the toilet can get so wrong, highly recommend “Spacesuit”. TLDR: the points at which space engineering and human bodies meet are Hard, on many levels, including “engineers often don’t think they’re hard”.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262015202/spacesuit/

2026-03-05 04:21:11 UTC

- reply

it’s originally from CT!

2026-03-02 18:04:54 UTC

New post: Of Monsters, Men, and Lawyers
https://lu.is/2026/03/on-monsters-and-men/
#law #llms #ai

2026-02-24 06:08:35 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/116123866175660510
It’s a small detail in this thread, but it’s utterly bonkers that we’ve elevated cars over *freedom of assembly*, a right literally in the Constitution. One of the ultimate symbols of car-brained America.
#note189d…5g3m

2026-02-14 15:57:07 UTC

- reply

my gut reaction was “but this is interesting because the enforcement model is different for PBCs!”, which led me to do a really deep dive on PBCs and…boy they’re an even bigger scam than I realized :(

2026-02-12 19:13:12 UTC

RE: https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/116059238863475827
I'm basically pro-LLM at this point, but absolutely this - the more precision we can have about this, the better. And genuinely still think it should be illegal for bot chats to use first-person human pronouns.
#note1qa9…e2tm

2026-01-26 20:49:03 UTC

- reply

oh, interesting. Part of why I used Openverse is because it nominally includes Commons, but doing Commons separately (especially if there is a matching category of some sort) is a good idea?

2026-01-26 02:12:45 UTC

- reply

yay! high praise.
(I keep wondering what a UX revamp of the Wikidata Game might look like...)

2026-01-25 23:55:01 UTC

- reply

thank you for playing with it and helping build the project!

2026-01-25 22:06:27 UTC

- reply

no, the feedback is why I shared! I'll fix that.
For "hide", are you seeing this? (it's small, subtle, so it might be there but you might have missed it?)
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/115/958/008/077/396/598/original/02b63c4214f06e4f.png

2026-01-25 21:05:59 UTC

- reply

nope might be on my end, I’ll poke more in a bit

2026-01-25 20:42:10 UTC

- reply

try now?

2026-01-25 20:19:19 UTC

- reply

say more about "ignore this source" like... ignore all of flickr? or ignore a specific flickr user? or...?

2026-01-25 19:37:53 UTC

- reply

now a "load more results" button.
(As you can probably guess, I'm vibe-coding the backend but there is no LLM involved in the content process.)

2026-01-25 19:02:12 UTC

- reply

in my experiment in 2017-2018, my hit rate on getting things to stick was shockingly high. Lawyer got the most pushback. :blobcatpensive:

2026-01-25 19:00:33 UTC

- reply

oh, I see what you did there - nice use of the "in horror" subcategory.

2026-01-25 18:59:54 UTC

- reply

I was trying to find a good female clown! Such an obvious one!
The interesting one I want to track down is a male geisha - it's such a wide belief that there are no male geishas, but through this project I learned it was an exclusively male profession until fairly recently.

2026-01-25 18:49:57 UTC

- reply

can I ask what article you picked to poke at? Because my one frustration so far in my own build/experimentation is that the tool is good at identifying problematic articles but bad at finding better images.

2026-01-25 18:46:49 UTC

- reply

nope, you're just ahead of the curve! I'll fix it ASAP.

2026-01-25 18:35:52 UTC

Small #wikipedia experiment, feedback welcome from this safe-ish space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LuisVilla/ImageDiversityTool

2025-12-24 21:26:58 UTC

- reply

it's sort of weird how little we talk about our toes, now that I think about it

2025-12-24 20:41:01 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@onlmaps/115774733448340183
Growing up weakly bilingual (my Spanish is bad) I admit that as a very young child I thought Spanish was a stupid language because of this. I had no idea it was so common.
#note1y4r…0g8n

2025-12-17 16:31:56 UTC

- reply

is it publicly tourable? The amount of cultural goods stashed away, out of sight, by the big museums that claim to support sharing culture with the world drives me utterly mad.

2025-12-06 21:44:22 UTC

We absolutely need legal consequences for self-driving car companies, but it bothers me that so many people think human drivers face consequences for hitting people. The US legal system bends over backwards not to penalize drivers who kill, and doesn't even bother to pretend with drivers who merely maim and traumatize.
https://mastodon.social/@jmcrookston/115674707791502748

2025-11-18 01:19:36 UTC

- reply

It’s not that the current EFF is anti-antifa, but its beliefs are still at core *libertarian* in the deep sense of “the biggest threat to human flourishing is the state, and the best way to counterbalance that is to unfetter humans” (at EFF, read: “unfetter technologists”).
Which was not an unreasonable perspective in the late 1990s! And is still not completely *wrong*. But it feels a bit besides the point when our most unfettered technologists are open monarchists and eugenicists.

2025-11-17 17:45:58 UTC

Skimming https://authoritarian-stack.info/ and wondering what an explicitly and actively anti-authoritarian/anti-tyrant, not just (civil?) libertarian, EFF would look like.

2025-11-05 01:41:43 UTC

Finally reading @npub1v85…mqcs ‘s Inventing The Renaissance and may have just described it as “what if suck.com grew up just a tiny bit and wrote a deeply scholarly history of the renaissance”

2025-09-23 14:42:13 UTC

- reply

are you a joints half full or joints half empty person, Joe

2025-09-08 15:28:39 UTC

- reply

it is historically very good on that scale, with active moderation and strong culture.
Though I haven’t been active for (checks notes) a disturbingly long time and I’m sure it has some lurkers who may monitor it to see what should be attacked.

2025-09-04 03:26:18 UTC

- reply

I read a thoughtful, careful piece today that said:
“Building AI systems that serve democratic values… requires acknowledging uncomfortable truths about how power operates in technology companies”
Sooooo I guess we’re not going to be building AI systems that serve democratic values any time soon :blobcatsob:

2025-08-24 16:20:03 UTC

Are you on Masto for very eclectic weird? Yes you are, so here is @npub1hmq…tzeg doing very eclectic weird. You’re welcome.
From: @npub1hmq…tzeg
https://social.coop/@adamgreenfield/115084166276097771

2025-08-24 15:16:38 UTC

Very specific #music request: I have 20 minutes of morning PT (ugh) but I have the luxury of doing it in a lovely garden, often as the sun comes up.
What’s the best orchestral work to come into the morning with? Copland and Williams’s fanfares are go-tos but I want to branch out.

2025-08-22 14:49:30 UTC

Any S.F. privacy knowers know whether it is legal to hang a private surveillance camera on a public utility pole? And if not where one would report that to get it removed?

2025-08-12 03:06:43 UTC

- reply

we have the power to do this
(shudders)

2025-07-19 23:46:25 UTC

- reply

no! Not nice! I want to read the book! Now!

2025-07-19 17:57:05 UTC

🤔
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/881/188/596/032/478/original/7a2d085fb18de303.jpg

2025-07-18 05:18:55 UTC

- reply

(Some day I need to write down the quibbles. They’re related to my somewhat quixotic belief that UNESCO should make Wikipedia the first pan-human intangible cultural heritage, and to my utterly deeply quixotic belief that the entity and servers should almost certainly be under UN jurisdiction.)

2025-07-18 05:08:04 UTC

I have some quibbles with this. But the core intuition is roughly correct and the quibbles mostly make the claim stronger, or at least more interesting.
From: @npub1ysw…06g2
https://fosstodon.org/@djspiewak/114831647604435802

2025-07-15 00:29:34 UTC

@npub1eyy…x54t or other #sf #bike folk: what’s the least terrible way to get up Potrero (specifically to the Rec Center?) I tried 23rd today and that was… oooooof. Am willing to come up it from pretty much any side. If no suggestions, probably 17th to Rhode Island tomorrow.

2025-07-07 14:14:18 UTC

- reply

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/we-need-to-escape-the-gernsback-continuum

2025-07-06 19:24:12 UTC

I am about 1/3rd of the way through this book. I don’t love the style but the substance… coming away so far fully convinced that Sumner should be on the pantheon. (And, tangentially, that America needs a fleshed-out pantheon around Lincoln, in order to be able to fully tell the story of the Civil War and Reconstruction as a Second Revolution.)
https://toot.community/@SharonCrockett/114802519136162083

2025-07-02 18:46:28 UTC

I have heard it said that tech people do not commission enough art.
https://ericwbailey.website/published/you-must-listen-to-rfc-2119/

2025-06-19 19:13:09 UTC

- reply

yup, Tidelift got bought and I’m still with Sonar. We’re still paying developers! That work is a little quiet right now while we get situated (and ship the integrated customer-facing part of the product, here: https://www.sonarsource.com/blog/sonarqube-advanced-security-now-available/ )
I’m hopeful that as part of Sonar we’ll be able to add C/C++, which was always a blocker to supporting things like libxml in the past.

2025-05-18 00:15:37 UTC

Related: enwikifriends: is there a reason to prefer/not prefer use of interwiki links [[iarchive]] instead of just… a link to archive? Given that you have to cut a weird substring out of the URL, a URL is much faster; does anyone actually use the extra metadata provided by using iarchive: instead?
https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/114524386270158230

2025-05-08 17:05:03 UTC

This is wild. It takes a lot of traffic to move the needle at Wikipedia.
https://wikis.world/@wikipedia/114473196600149526

2025-04-19 16:06:39 UTC

❤️
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:o5bmj7zjgwqmmlq5h5vwolrz/post/3lmqzbqvktc2p
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/365/484/100/900/231/original/8fef3e2657eeadf2.jpeg

2025-04-14 01:26:18 UTC

- reply

clown high school rejects, let’s be honest

2025-04-14 01:23:33 UTC

- reply

went and got a law degree instead? 😆 So I’m doing OK.

2025-04-13 21:51:58 UTC

- reply

Yeah depression and anxiety (and bad timing with an advisor who left for a new uni, but let’s be honest mostly the depression and anxiety) cost me mine.

2025-04-13 21:13:09 UTC

America needs more holidays where we set fire to things (fireworks don’t count). Extra credit for burning symbolic bad things like (checks notes) customs boats.
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:su7q6jngaiyjueenbbabq43s/post/3lmpwwjvxdc2c
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/332/715/472/898/091/original/e8e8bda4ff878816.jpeg

2025-04-13 14:40:30 UTC

- reply

Works definitely worthwhile, can’t speak to the slag.
I also found the cathedral strangely moving, though I suspect that was very specific to my mood and circumstances at the time.

2025-04-13 01:13:59 UTC

This is the sort of paper I wanted to write as my thesis: data analysis of legal forms and how they impact the longevity of commons. Unlike mine, though, it’s about water, acequia, and the state of New Mexico’s law. Great stuff. cc @npub15rs…knyc
https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.5334/ijc.1112#1-introduction

2025-04-12 15:31:34 UTC

On the plane home from three straight weeks of travel. Good trips with a mix of family, old friends, and coworkers old and new. Highlight was probably seeing the coal works in Essen. Gave me a lot of feels about labor, industry, and unintended consequences.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/325/710/010/442/787/original/fd526bed6afab965.jpg

2025-03-22 17:36:42 UTC

- reply

and yeah, it’s a CRM but I have found it nice for reconnecting with people. My experience is that most old friends are genuinely happy for the outreach.

2025-03-22 17:28:09 UTC

- reply

https://www.relatable.one/
It’s not perfect (and expensive) but it’s trying to get at what you want here.

2025-03-15 16:13:01 UTC

It’d be interesting to do an audit of all the deleted American government pages and see which of them can/should/don’t have #Wikipedia articles. Is anyone doing that yet?
https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/114167314994107129

2025-03-05 16:36:57 UTC

- reply

it’s unfortunate but this is the case. Elsewhere in this thread I’ve posted at least three situations where a security researcher did proper bug filing against OOo, and then no release was done until after the security researcher had done the correct thing (waited, waited, and only then with reluctance published the vulnerability). And given that Libreoffice is doing regular security releases from a similar codebase, there’s almost certainly more.

2025-03-05 00:00:44 UTC

- reply

Eg, the OpenOffice website could say “please don’t download this, we just do it for fun and as a result this often has security vulnerabilities. If you want an free office suite that is maintained to a high level of professionalism and security, please go to libreoffice.org”. But instead it not only encourages downloads, it misleads a banner stating “380M downloads”, giving the impression that it is an active (and presumably secure) project.

2025-03-04 22:41:35 UTC

- reply

No, ASF has the domain and the Google/SEO juice, so they have the primary responsibility.
And to be clear they’re not actually maintaining it, since it regularly has security vulnerabilities that go unpatched for months at a time.

2025-03-04 04:49:48 UTC

It’s really really embarrassing that @npub1lpa…q3qx still distributes OpenOffice, leaving people like this schoolteacher (name omitted to spare them spam) to think it’s a maintained or viable alternative.
My casual count suggests LibreOffice has done 40+ releases since OOo last did a release.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/114/102/356/379/786/612/original/245b21e1b54a4332.jpg

2025-02-02 13:23:13 UTC

- reply

Now powered partially by… Nostr?

2025-02-02 10:48:44 UTC

I would love some sort of curated feed of protest pics.
From: [@gedankenstuecke](https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke )
https://scholar.social/@gedankenstuecke/113931901035101572

2025-01-31 09:00:36 UTC

- reply

This panel is spicier than any I’ve been to in a long time. Not what I expect in stuffy Brussels. Kudos to @npub15j7…gj8c for putting it together.

2025-01-31 08:59:53 UTC

- reply

Peter from @npub16al…4u4w raises that “buy european” mandates can be in some tension with how open source is developed. (We’re certainly going to see that in the US, with “buy American” mandates being used to exclude globally-developed open.)

2025-01-31 08:58:25 UTC

- reply

Specifically hits on the idea that Trump controlling EU infrastructure should be horrifying to Europeans. “Trump is not a blip.”
She says eight worst words you can hear if you’re a founder: “I will introduce you to DG-CONNECT”.

2025-01-31 08:56:24 UTC

- reply

She’s blaming the focus on regulation, among other things. Also says Commission has no urgency. Gets lots of spontaneous, interruptive applause when she says there should be buy-European rules—“patriotism is not bad”.
Draghi mention #3, but not sure if it counts for a drink because she says it is just a copy and paste of the Lisbon 2000 report. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Strategy

2025-01-31 08:53:55 UTC

- reply

Tempted to step out briefly because (1) I need a coffee and (2) I might play the Draghi drinking game, where we’ve just had a second mention.
But glad I didn’t because Cristina Caffara from [@cepr_org](https://econtwitter.net/@cepr_org ) says out loud what German dude implied earlier: “we are a colony”. She’s explicitly trying to shock, but she’s not wrong.

2025-01-31 08:48:04 UTC

- reply

talks about the sorts of things that need to be done to make open competitive, particularly focused on the economic dynamics to support larger teams.
She’s not wrong! But boy I wish we had other ways to compete than playing purely on their terms. If “open” means “enterprise-style software and enterprise-scale businesses, but with a different licensing scheme” I think we’re not likely to win in the long-term.

2025-01-31 08:41:52 UTC

- reply

It’d be really interesting to read a history of industrial policy in the EU, that’s an area I know very little about, and it’d be interesting to understand what does/doesn’t map to open.
(EU followers: please recommend reading on this!)

2025-01-31 08:40:45 UTC

- reply

Same German (from @npub16al…4u4w ) talks about proprietary American software in terms very analogous to colonialism: sending money to America to build better software to extract more money.
Talks about how the German government should be pushing back on this, but often doesn’t or even sides with Microsoft.

2025-01-31 08:38:13 UTC

- reply

Adriana Groh of @npub1yng…nhrk (fka Sovereign Tech Fund) mentions that we’ve tended to focus on open maintenance, but we should also be thinking about growth.
I’ve certainly been guilty of that one!
German speaker agrees that this should be a non-partisan interest, in part because new governments may “have new parties” which is one way to say “neo-nazis”.

2025-01-31 08:31:00 UTC

- reply

(Today’s event is much more for explaining open to policy-makers at the EU level; yesterday was a bit more internal to the open community. So tones will be different but some notes carry through both days.)

2025-01-31 08:29:14 UTC

- reply

I joked yesterday that mentioning the Draghi report was trolling, but it’s just been brought up in passing by a panelist who is generally going much, much harder than Draghi’s report did. And gets rousing applause at the end of their rant.
Morning starting very much on a note of open as a tool for European self-investment and self-control, which is great but in muuuuuch tension with yesterday’s regulatory bent.

2025-01-31 08:20:29 UTC

- reply

It was pointed out to me that Article 21 creates a channel for this to happen. https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/113917163537396938

2025-01-31 08:17:39 UTC

- reply

Similarly, it sounds like a lot of the frustration was heard (not just yesterday, but preceding yesterday) so there will be serious efforts to make this standardization process more accessible to open communities:
https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/113917218850774860

2025-01-31 08:16:46 UTC

- reply

But before that some comments and additions to yesterday’s 🧵. What was said from the front of the room often got clarified later.
I find it somewhat maddening that the approach seems to often be “legislate first, learn later” but at least learning is happening!
eg: it sounds like there will be a lot more serious effort to include open source folks in the funding I mentioned here. There’s still a lot of opportunity cost to get involved, but may be some support:
https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/113917137680678877

2025-01-31 08:04:56 UTC

- reply

(And then I slept 11 hours.)
Back up for today’s EU Open Source Policy Summit.

2025-01-30 17:52:44 UTC

- reply

Wrap up of the afternoon: I’m less freaked out than I was, for a variety of reasons that will take some getting into so won’t happen tonight.
But boy also legislative consultation processes are just deeply unsuited to working with open source, even if entirely well-intentioned. Lots of literal Seeing Like A State problems here.

2025-01-30 14:19:40 UTC

- reply

(Break for lunch and further FAQ discussion.)

2025-01-30 12:18:36 UTC

- reply

CENELEC person here says she has successfully downloaded (draft?) standards as a citizen, so that’s good, but crowd energy seems… very skeptical.

2025-01-30 12:08:16 UTC

- reply

Apparently the standards bodies defining these standards need to report on how they include open source communities… but the report can be “welp, we did not include them”.
(and of course I realized yesterday that being part of a Swiss company does not help me here at all; for these purposes the Swiss aren’t European.)

2025-01-30 12:06:53 UTC

- reply

I am getting close to embarrassing myself here, because the level of well-intended delusion on the panel is just… I just can’t. Simultaneously saying “please give feedback to fix problems” while also essentially admitting that only European companies enrolled in certain standards programs (not even European citizens, just companies) can give feedback.

2025-01-30 11:52:49 UTC

- reply

EU dude says, in essence, that manufacturers have the same responsibility towards open source code that they would have towards code they wrote themselves. And that this creates incentives for manufacturers to figure out how to make that work.
This is music to my ears as an employee of Sonar/Tidelift, but booooyyyy. If they actually enforce that strictly it’ll simply be the end of software development in the EU.

2025-01-30 11:46:14 UTC

- reply

The EU has programs to fund participation in standards development, which is both smart and… do we think people will just quit their day jobs to take this funding and participate? I am wondering how that works in other spaces.
(I should note that I’m a little aghast at all this, but everyone I’ve talked to from the EU is working very genuinely to make this work. Of course we’re seeing a bit of a self-selected group who will show up at FOSS events, but still, it’s heartening.)

2025-01-30 11:38:27 UTC

- reply

After a small, active breakout group conversation, I have entered many, many potential FAQs (all Qs, drafting answers in the afternoon).
My favorite so far: “is C fucked?” https://github.com/orcwg/cra-hub/issues/86

2025-01-30 11:23:26 UTC

- reply

TIL “presumption of conformity” and that it is… almost the opposite of what I would expect with my US ears. I would expect that it means “if you are doing industry best practices you’re presumed to conform to the standard” and instead it means “if you check the boxes in a standard, you’re presumed to conform to the law”.
The amount of work being created here is immense. It’s not *wrong* (our software sucks! it should be better!) but the optimism about the costs of transition seems delusional.

2025-01-30 10:17:37 UTC

- reply

[Tangent: I’ve sort of been on two manels so far and that’s very bad. I literally was up from 2-3am last night thinking about finishing and publishing my speaker pre-event questions, which I have failed to ask about FOSDEM/SOOCON.
Besides panel diversity, I also want to ask about access for remote folks, health/air quality, etc.]

2025-01-30 10:07:31 UTC

- reply

Fundamentally, it just strikes me that two things are both true, and lots of people involved in this process only acknowledge the first of them:
(1) open source practices are, in general, truly industry best practices
(2) documentation of open source activities, in a standards-acceptable manner, are terrible, and will be a vast amount of (almost entirely uncompensated!) work to bring up to an acceptable level

2025-01-30 10:01:51 UTC

- reply

There’s very much a case being made that open source maintainers should have near-zero concerns because “they are codified best practices”; “we aren’t going to invent any new things”.
I want to be optimistic (yay, we’re already there!) but boy the decades-long, near-totally-failed push for SBOM adoption—which is being cited as a success!—does not fill me with optimism.

2025-01-30 09:56:48 UTC

- reply

The group asks “what happens if these standards don’t get finished in time” and the answer is… welp, do industry best practices and cross your fingers. I… am not sure if that’s a best-case or worst-case scenario. May be best case for open source maintainers, worst case for manufacturers?

2025-01-30 09:50:32 UTC

- reply

The timeline of the availability of these standards is going to be … something hard to puzzle out, I will try to get those clarified as an FAQ today.
https://github.com/orcwg/cra-hub/issues/60
https://github.com/orcwg/cra-hub/issues/61

2025-01-30 09:45:54 UTC

- reply

About 1/2 of those 41 (previously 44) are going to be specific to particular verticals, so likely won’t impact open source too much, but the rest are going to be work.
It’s going to be interesting to see how ecosystems (like pypi) implement tooling to help maintainers who want to comply opt-in. eg, most of the package ecosystems still don’t really support SPDX or SBOMs very well—will they have incentives (or EU-provided resources?) to move quicker on CRA-related metadata/fields?

2025-01-30 09:42:51 UTC

- reply

Everyone in software I know has been choking on the idea of 40+ european standards to conform to, but Tobie just pointed out that hardware has 800+.
I realize this is cheap trolling but still I feel an immediate need to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draghi_report

2025-01-30 09:39:14 UTC

- reply

Another observation: there’s been a lot of talk about “what box will the CRA shove me into” but there were some interesting conversations last night about what boxes people might voluntarily jump into.
eg a package ecosystem provider could potential *opt-in* to being a manufacturer in order to help drive financial relationships with enterprises.

2025-01-30 09:29:50 UTC

- reply

That is relevant because today’s task is improving this FAQ, which can only offer clarification but can’t offer certainty: https://github.com/orcwg/cra-hub/blob/main/faq.md
From a European Commission perspective, this uncertainty is fine: courts and bureaucracies will slowly accrete reasonable interpretive answers and the right outcome will eventually be reached. Which is not unreasonable, generally!
But for spare-time maintainers… oof.

2025-01-30 09:29:31 UTC

- reply

Topic that came up several times yesterday and will again today: programmers wanting certainty that legal systems can’t give.
I was reminded of, but can’t currently find, an @npub12da…kz89 quote about programmers often being brilliant at reading and picking apart “black-letter” law (the written down text of statutes) and very, very bad at understanding the fuller complexity of court cases, interpretation, etc.

2025-01-30 09:26:36 UTC

- reply

Update: slept like a log, thrashed for an hour, slept like a log again.
This will be a thread; mute me for a day or three if CRA/open policy is not your thing.
Now listening to @npub19wg…8s2x give a variation on this talk:
https://speaking.unlockopen.com/2KeBeb/the-cra-is-here-now-what