Dwarf Fortress is essentially reverse engineered with a third-party tool called dfhack. It hooks into the program and all of the mods and graphical tools use it as a middleman.
The minute that happens the more accessible community version with polished graphics and interface will become the dominant one. Only dilettantes will play the original.
The problem is he has zero motive to do so. His income is adequate for his needs and he apparently has no interest in fame or other reward. To him there's nothing to gain and everything to lose from open-sourcing it.
In this thread a bunch of weirdos from San Francisco decide that your children don't really need computers. Only the elite priesthood that consists of them is eligible.
Well it's probably for the best that hacker news is not in charge of teaching our children. They'd be learning go or rust or JavaScript instead of how to read books.
The idea is that you're no longer constrained by planning around the use of a shared computer lab space. Instead, any activities that benefit from computer use can be used immediately.
You don't have a "pencil and paper" lab that is used the entire school day and scheduled around, and now computers have reached the commodity price point where they don't need to either.
He's not talking about creating a commercial venture that would necessitate thousands of devices. He's talking about an in-house project on the scale of dozens. Would contacting them directly get me that quantity at that price?
It seems unkind to conflate the current business model of the company and the employees. Many people serve lifelong careers in the postal service honorably.
We just switched from Github to Gitlab for our private repos. The choice (based upon cost alone) was between them and Bitbucket, and the professional way that this was handled and the transparent communication was really nice to see.
I think you're taking this too personally. The burden of proof is on you, the person suggesting a new idea to support it somehow. You're asking other people to do the work involved which is not fair to them.