Absolutely!

I mentioned it last week.

Boarder?

Defenestration in … three … two …

Is it just me, or is that IKEA shelving?

You mean like the Nepalese government did?

How much waste they take up with them?

If it’s more than 8kg, I’m guessing that the only missing requirement for the refund is to increase the number to make it that every climber brings down more than they take up.

In other words, put every climber on the scales before they go up and unless they weigh more when they come back, they don’t get their money back.

Bonus reward for each extra kg.

So … now we have plausible gibberish … also known as Autocorrect on Steroids … that includes corporate sponsorship… seems like we’re moving closer to the true meaning of advertising with every iteration.

Next we’ll be asked to pay for this feature … oh wait.

I can’t wait until the Assumed Intelligence bubble finally bursts and takes with it some of the largest companies in the world … perhaps this is how we finally address climate change.

Am Dinky-Di Aussie, no wucking furries mate!

AFAIK Google owns the vast majority of advertising online and is the one making all the money.

Because they’re all copying each other’s homework?

… you had one job …

As it happens, the ABC is already available on DAB+, so in some ways it’s a step backwards 😇

For a time it was Solitaire, but these days it’s 2048.

And precisely how will you achieve the minimum standard of sustaining human life … trivial things like food and lodging?

That’s very interesting.

A little while ago we tested a bunch of radios for their spurious emissions. Until this post I was unaware that these radios were not tested by the FCC and that it appears that this is also true for other amateur transceivers.

For your information, here’s our report: https://github.com/vk6flab/rhp

It’s dinner time and why haven’t you fed me yet?

I’m clearly starving, why haven’t you fed me yet?

I’m not kidding around, why haven’t you fed me yet?

Have a look at the modlog.

Fair question.

What it boils down to is: Become part of the OSS community.

In my experience, there’s no other way, since the alternative is to be automatically part of the Microsoft (or Apple) community.

In other words, you need to make the investment into the implementation. As I’ve said elsewhere, license costs are insignificant.

The community is where you get help, where you find others with the same issues. You can pay the likes of Canonical and Redhat, but I’ve never been impressed by either.

Ultimately any solution requires support, just like any other tool. You just need to make it explicit, rather than assumed.

One thing that Microsoft does to ensure that you have support infrastructure is to continually break backwards compatibility in subtle ways that require you to open your wallet and pay for support.

OSS will likely run for years without adult supervision, but that doesn’t mean it can continue to work without requiring support from time to time. If you don’t prepare for this, you’re going to be very unhappy.

I’m talking about the reality of an organisation digging itself out of the hole created by projects such as described by OP.

I get the call from such organisations to help fix their issues and sometimes I can even help, more often than not it’s a time consuming effort (ie. expensive) to get to a point where the systems are in place to avoid the next catastrophe.

The reason that Microsoft keeps getting mind share and revenue is because there’s so much of that expertise around.

There’s loads of OSS professionals, myself included, but we’re a drop in the ocean by comparison.

In many cases an OSS deployment is the equivalent of “my nephew helped set this up” and it’s not helping the overall picture in the wider community.

If you’re going to deploy OSS, then you must consider the support implications before you start, anything else is unprofessional. License fees are insignificant by comparison.

Here’s three:

• A server with nobody supporting it for 13 years. It had a MySQL database with 743 columns. There was no documentation, served three organisations and hadn’t been backed up for at least 7 years.
• A server running a CMS for a dozen organisations that was running on failing hardware. No idea who built or didn’t support it.
• A server built by an employee 15 years ago, then supported by a “web company” who didn’t update it for 12 years, then “supported” by a Windows shop which was happy to charge the customer but hadn’t actually updated the server.

You’ll notice that I’m being deliberately vague.

All these share the exact scenario that the OP outlines. The organisations involved didn’t know that they were in deep trouble until well after the project instigator departed. No documentation, no updates, no training, handover, nothing beyond a set of credentials.