Yeah, I think this may be a good option when actively working on a project. Sadly at the moment, it's mostly a case of "I just need to make a couple of bug fixes in this old project, why is my editor shouting at me?"
It's only a personal side project and I have a good handle on the untyped modules in question, so in the end I suppressed most of the errors with `# type:ignore` and friends.
I'd reconsider that if I was doing more than the odd bug fix on the project. I still like Python, and started using type hints early, but there's enough added friction to make me question using them in the future.
Worst of both worlds is right. I came back to a Python project with a couple of critical but untyped dependencies recently after writing mostly Rust, and to clear up a large number of these (particularly “type is partially unknown”) I had the choice between lots of purely type-checking ceremony (`typing.cast`) or going without.
For those skimming, this is the controversy over J Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen. I highly recommend reading Dreger's article.
Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing board, and infamously posting photos online of Bailey's children suggesting that Bailey had raped them and asking whether his young daughter was "a cock-starved exhibitionist".
Much of this material is still on Conway's University of Michigan-hosted webpage.
(Starting with the caveat that I’m not hugely well-versed in the GDPR:)
I think that actively soliciting personal data from people (wherever they may be) and collecting or processing it entails a higher level of responsibility. The GDPR in that situation effectively says: if you want to collect or process data on EU citizens you have to follow some rules.
I don’t believe that simply publishing a document online, for anyone who may wish to see it, has that “active character.”
However, others have pointed out that offering the Gutenberg website in a German translation is a similar act. I do think this is arguable, and this point does appear in the court ruling:
> “Apart from that, the first defendant’s website is also intended to target German users. This is supported by the fact that the website is partially in German, that the site offers German-language works, and that the first defendant explicitly strives to make the works available globally” [from the English translation]
However, going back to my point earlier, my concern is with the idea of making the website “publicly accessible in Germany.” I think there is a disconnect here between the understanding of traditional publishing (where it takes effort to publish abroad) and internet publishing (where it takes effort to prevent access from abroad).
I worry about the chilling effect of such a ruling. Should I, out of an abundance of caution, only make my blog available to readers in the UK (where I am, and where my blog is hosted)? I think it is easy to see what the effects of such a ruling could be, and (take to their logical conclusion) would have a severely detrimental effect on information exchange via the internet.
> I just wanted to point out that the reaction of the court isn’t as entirely pointless as it may seem on first thought.
And I think you’re right to do so!
Honestly, regarding the whole case, I think the court has erred in accepting the publisher’s argument that Project Gutenberg is a valid target for a lawsuit in Germany.
If the publisher wants the books removed it should sue in the US, if it wants to prevent access from Germany it should seek another local remedy.
> for playing devils advocate I can see the courts point: International websites have to respect local laws
I think this is an untenable position as it would mean that any website, published from any country, hosted on servers in any country, would have to abide by the laws of the world’s 193 countries.
Project Gutenberg’s argument is that they are only a US concern — everyone involved officially is in the US, and the site is hosted in the US.
This is distinct from, say, a company explicitly providing a service to customers in a particular country (cf GDPR).
And, to counter your point with an extreme example, it would mean that no-one is ever able to criticise the Thai monarch on any website in the world lest they be jailed under Thailand’s lèse majesté laws.
It’s one thing to say that an in-country website respect that country’s laws, it’s another entirely to say that any website hosted anywhere in the world must respect that country’s laws.