These days he's helping to remediate polluted waterways

https://cottagelife.com/general/this-toronto-professor-took-...

Or GS/OS for the Apple IIgs, the weird "not exactly Mac OS" GUI.

Don't worry, you can still get on linkedin and write a bragging post about how many tokens your engineers are spending.

Based on the era when RHCP was the most popular, I would guess that PE people buying the RHCP catalog plan to license it to advertisers for just about everything as Gen-X people age into the 60+ demographic and retirement. You can expect to see RHCP music in adult diaper and "help I've fallen and I can't get up" commercials in the future.

If they've sold the name, they may not be able to perform new music as the RHCP either. New musical projects would possibly need an entirely unrelated name of a music group.

They just sold the rights to the recordings though, as the article states.

It's a bit like an individual person taking the option of receiving a lottery payment in one large lump sum (and nothing else, ever), vs. receiving ongoing monthly/annual payments for some period going into the future. The new owner pays them one big lump sum and then the new owner gets all rights to license the content for things like car commercials on TV, streaming, reissues of box sets, radio, etc. Also for derivative works of all forms and basically whatever the new owner wants to do with it.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

You have a point, but if you've ever seen how a gmail account behaves for the ordinary person once it reaches 80-90% storage capacity used (15GB free, some cumulative total of all emails and google drive content, google photos content), all of these free services exist to sell a perpetual monthly recurring subscription to users. And many people do pay. The default gmail web interface starts to have a big banner across the top warning about storage reaching maximum capacity with a link to the payment page.

Look at the workflow for a standard out of box android phone now that defaults to backing up all your photos to 'the cloud', which will almost immediately fill the 15GB free. Once your 15GB is full, then you're run through the payment/checkout workflow to enter your card and set up monthly recurring billing for some premium google service.

In general having a gmail account is the initial stage in the pipeline of getting someone to be a monthly-paid google customer for life. Whether it's just for more storage to hold all their google drive and photo content, or google workspace individual, etc.

Additionally, tying a gmail account to the primary-user android on-device account on any android 4.x+ device means revenue from google play store paid app sales. And then all those 'free' apps that the user installs where the app developer has implemented embedded small ad banners for google's ad network? More venue.

I don't know if that really solves your problem if the main trunk of development for gitlab is being run through several AI slop machines before they push it to what they call stable, then you download that (or use a debian, redhat package for gitlab which originated from it) and self host on your own machine the results of the AI slop fest.

There are other forges.

TBH the open source nature of gitlab means that any sufficiently large and clued-in hosting company (think: servercentral/deft/summit, whatever it's calling itself these days, or one of its competitors) could put up gitlab instances for people to use and meet more nines of uptime than github. It doesn't have to be the gitlab company itself running servers with the httpd and back-end database.

I understand the meaning, however, in that they're well positioned by having the company name and domain name, same general way that non-technical people will pay wordpress.com to host their blog/small website because it's very easy, rather than DIYing it or paying a 3rd party.

GitLab isn't open-source. It's "open-core". Third parties hosting GitLab instances don't have access to the same range of features that GitLab-the-company does.

Yes, copy and pasting from the gitlab site:

"Editions There are three editions of GitLab:

GitLab Community Edition (CE) is available freely under the MIT Expat license. GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) includes extra features that are more useful for organizations with more than 100 users. To use EE and get official support please become a subscriber. JiHu Edition (JH) tailored specifically for the Chinese market."

Personal opinion, but I think a great deal of the people who are presently overloading github with one person created vibe coded projects would be just fine with the "CE" feature set.

I just rolled out CE in our small org, it is a nice step up from Free GitHub, there are Wikis, and no uncertainty about the runners. Founders like it better because their IP is on their own servers now.

I find it a bit concerning that this piece focusses so much on customers and shareholders... I know I don't pay, but perhaps sometime I will, and I am learning GitLab and applying at large orgs as GitLab consultant. All because of CE... So I hope it will stay. It is a nice and very complete on-ramp to EE.

United States domestic "politics" and just about everything adjacent to a certain well known public figure..