Except this model is practically "zero price". Yes, you can sell GPL software, but on the customer side, buying such software cannot be justified economically, if all you got to do is to find somebody/some place that will provide this software to you free of charge and legally so. The only customers that would pay are ones that do it for moral purposes, at which point your business selling GPL software isn't a business anymore, but something that receives charitable donations.
All of the open source companies/people that come to mind are not selling libre software, they are all selling some kind of service - support contracts, managed hosting, etc - or they embraced some kind of freemium/"open core" model (so they are really selling non-free software), or they are funded by charitable donations and sometimes public grants, often by having some large non-free companies being sponsors (Linus Torvalds is paid this way for example, through sponsorship money from the who-is-who of the non-free corporate world distributed through the Linux Foundation).
I manage the "support" (mostly DMCA) tickets for some small website we run as a hobby project without monetization whatsoever (aka "for fun"). People are free to use it, e.g for chat and to share content (i.e. DMCA magnet). It's maybe like 5-20 such tickets per day, most of which are DMCA and can be handled really quick, so it isn't that much of a time drag.
Not actually getting paid/having an employer there can be quite liberating...
Since nobody who ever writes me is a customer, and I am not getting paid anyway, I am more or less free in what level of politeness I apply. I usually try to model my response after the initial requests I receive - taking into account other factors like people who might be genuinely upset; or confuse me with the person who actually uploaded a piece of content.
We have users from all over the world, and it's rather interesting to see particular patterns/attitudes with certain types of locales.
For example, Americans - by and large - are too lazy to read the few lines of text on our contact page detailing what information we need to address what kind of problem, and often are rather rude from the get-go, and really like to threaten with their lawyers (plural!) in the initial email when it comes to copyright or related issues. This then leads to me asking for the missing details, followed by a lot of them demanding to talk to my supervisor, to which I then point out that they are not our customers and that being rude or even outright insulting the only person who could potentially help them (for free) isn't maybe the best idea they ever had... And if the supervisor demand came up, I point out that I do not have a supervisor, I demand to talk to their supervisor instead.
It would be unfair to only unload on Americans, tho. We got a lot of Portuguese users, and tickets from the Portuguese are even more rude on average and of course nobody bothers to read the instructions, tho nobody ever demands to talk to my supervisor. The French are polite but like to make outrageous demands, but seem to read the instructions. Germans are "professional"-polite but tend to write LOOONG emails, and when it comes to copyrights usually cite a lot of completely unrelated laws, but again read the instructions. Middle/South Americans are usually polite but constantly think the Subject line is where all their text is supposed to go, and do not read the instructions. I'd say the most pleasant people are the East European (mostly Polish and Russian) people who write me... I don't remember anybody outright rude from East Europe ever, tho the language barrier - our website is English only incl the instructions - is often rather obvious (but I will not fault anybody for that, of course).
Point being: the level of RTFM in my limited experience differs quite a bit depending on locale.
The problem wasn't about the conduct of the Biden's, it was Trump (allegedly) telling the Ukrainian President the Ukraine would only receive already allocated military aid if the Ukraine started investigating the Bidens, supposedly to get Joe Biden into at least political if not legal trouble that Trump could then capitalize on in a re-election bid. Whether or not the Biden's did anything wrong (and so far the have been cleared at least legally, tho I have to admit there is a stink of nepotism in my opinion) wasn't the issue, the problem was if Trump, the sitting president, abused the power of his office for personal gain by threatening to withhold public aid money allocated by congress.
I've looked, out of curiosity, at the prices you pay for refurbished ones around here (Germany), and most offers for the refurbished 2015 now exceed what I paid for a new one back in 2015 (same configuration, of course).
Agreed, but you should also keep in mind that this means extra work. Often the difference is negligible. But if you e.g. strace a syscall-wise very busy process and pipe that into grep, all the logging strace does that is then piped over to grep just to be discarded by grep eventually, may actually affect performance a lot; while strace -e avoids this extra work.
>As I already wrote, I think that being able to locate pupils at all times is a legitimate concern for schools, and parents.
Depends on the age, really. It goes from all the time for really young children, to "locate in a reasonable amount of time, if needed". How long that is depends on the comfort zone of the parents of course, but has to account for allowing children to develop, learn by themselves and grow, or else it's wrongful imprisonment to be honest.
By the way, the "being able to locate all the time" wasn't even the goal of the school. It was to take attendance.
Everybody was informed and OK.... Except for the students they tracked, nobody asked them.
Sure, they are still minors, and it's up to the parents to decide what goes and what not. But by law the parents in Sweden (and a lot of other places around the world) have an obligation to act in the best interest of their children to their best ability.
I'd argue exposing their children to mass surveillance in school and face recognition was not in the best interest of the child. I'd go further and argue that the parents violated the GDPR themselves, by mishandling or allowing a third party to mishandle with parental consent the data of their kids. This was at least grossly negligent. If I was making the decisions about fines, I'd have fine the parents a minor fine, too, just enough to make them (and other parents reading about it) think about such things next time somebody comes around with an indecent proposal to collect their kids data.
Also, we place, in my opinion rightfully so, certain restrictions on individual choice and decisions. For instance, you cannot kill your neighbor for your pleasure even if they gave you informed consent. These restrictions are of course not set in stone, as e.g. the assisted suicide discussions show, or gay marriage.
There are certain areas that seem benign at first, like e.g. health care providers getting you to wear "health" monitoring devices for a reduction in premiums... until the reductions become so severe that you cannot really opt out anymore, if any health care provider will even take you after you opt out. Or "voluntary" drug tests to get a job, or when already employed. Everybody knows these dejure voluntary tests are defacto mandatory.
I'd argue that mass surveillance and even biometric processing in schools falls in this category too; looks somewhat benign in the beginning, until it isn't.
Getting worked into the ground so some self-entitled person can "win" in "business" on the back of my labor and broken body and psyche, now that's a loss in my book.
All of the open source companies/people that come to mind are not selling libre software, they are all selling some kind of service - support contracts, managed hosting, etc - or they embraced some kind of freemium/"open core" model (so they are really selling non-free software), or they are funded by charitable donations and sometimes public grants, often by having some large non-free companies being sponsors (Linus Torvalds is paid this way for example, through sponsorship money from the who-is-who of the non-free corporate world distributed through the Linux Foundation).