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A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.

The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the US and some other countries decided to do things differently... As a European, I don't think I've ever seen something not A4 or A3/A4 in a professional context in my life, ever. Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so), and do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing? Or just happens to be something FSF only seem to be doing?

https://www.google.com/maps/place/51+Franklin+St,+Boston,+MA...

Wow -- I mean, sure, I don't use a pen that often, but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month...

I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.

https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d...

And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'

I wonder if this was just rhetorical flourish? Are there really people who never ever use a pen?

I barely ever handwrite anything but there are still crosswords and the occasional form to fill in.

Wild that so many commenters don't see the satire dripping from the post. Is it just a UK thing to never take things at face value?

Circa 2010, I bought a vintage Concept2 Model B rowing machine, made in the 1980s, and wanted to fix it up. The paper order form I found for parts was similar to those tiny order forms at the bottom of an ad in an old comic book, where you'd handwrite your return address, and it told you the address to mail it to, with your payment.

Somehow, not only did this address still reach them, but they were set up to fulfill parts orders this way, they actually had the parts for this decades-old model, and sent me the parts (for a pittance), and they tossed in a free service manual.

I already loved the product (from using it at gyms), and now I loved the company.

I wonder what percentage of 25 year-old URLs still work.

In the old days when they released GPL v3, Linus Torvalds considered it "not the same license at all". He felt betrayed because the FSF "try to sneak in these new (tivoization) rules and try to force everybody to upgrade". People could fork the Kernel and relicense the fork in a way that prevented him from merging their improvements upstream. He referred to the FSF's move as "dishonest", "sneaky" and "immoral" and decided he would "never have anything to do with the FSF again".

https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

I heard that Boston was a small hub for tech companies back in the 90s (which is is much less true these days), which might explain this.

Lol this is a bit ridiculous but a fun blogpost!

I have to wonder if the whole exercise was a prime example of a brit "taking the piss" 8-)

> the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier

I literally laughed out loud at this 8-)

And the outrageous expectation of obtaining... stamps!

It was just too funny.

For unfamiliar muricans: The success, according to british cultural standards, in the humiliation of the intended victim is increased, when the victim replies while being completely unaware that they are actually being mocked.

YAY!

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address.

https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: " Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text."

Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).

Really??

I have a really, really dumb question.

Why don't we have more licenses and contracts like this? Do we just need to set up a foundation that drafts them and makes them freely available to use?

Like, for instance, "Hi, Mark - we'd like to offer you a job here at our daycare, but first we need you to look over this contract and sign it."

This contract says, roughly, that if there's an accusation of sexual abuse against children that it will go to a mediator who has final say, and if they say it was a credible accusation, that Mark immediately loses his job, and can never work anywhere that uses this same contract, ever again. Sorry, you lost your chance to work with kids. It sucks that it might have been a false accusation, but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems.

Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this.

Another one, "Hi, Greg. We understand we'd like your endorsement from our political party? Sounds good, here's a contract for you..."

It says, among other things, that if Greg switches political parties that he must resign from office. Sorry. He's welcome to run again, but he can't stay in office on our votes.

Like, shouldn't we have more contracts like this?