I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
(code.mendhak.com)515 points by ekiauhce 10 hours ago
515 points by ekiauhce 10 hours ago
How wonderful! Since the game of the day seems to be the technicalities of the minutiae, could you explain the decision to send the GPLv3 vs GPLv2? Is this a request that happens often?
The sender didn't specify the version in his request, so I find it natural that they've sent him the latest version.
The author mentioned this exact problem. Quoting:
> There was a problem that I noticed right away, though: this text was from the GPL v3, not the GPL v2. In my original request I had never mentioned the GPL version I was asking about.
>The original license notice makes no mention of GPL version either. Should the fact that the license notice contained an address have been enough metadata or a clue, that I was actually requesting the GPL v2 license? Or should I have mentioned that I was seeking the GPLv2 license?
This is seemingly a problem with the GPL text itself, in that it doesn't mention which license version to request when you mail the FSF.
Well to be fair, that's not the full license notice, that's only the last paragraph. There should a couple more above that one and the first paragraph says the version of GPL in use. That said I think the license notice is also just a suggested one, it's not required that you use that _exact_ text.
If the sender requests GPLv2, he should receive GPL version 2.
If the sender requests GPL, I find it natural for him to receive version 3, because it's the latest version. At the time of receiving the license, he gains knowledge about the existence of version 3 (the header on the print says the GPL he received is version 3).
If the sender has a notice about GPLv2, it means that there's a high chance that there's also GPLv1. This should be a sufficient hint that requesting only "GPL" is not sufficient, because the sender should be aware of the risk of receiving GPLv1 if he won't mention the "v2".
At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly.
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".
The Free Software Foundation closed their office at 51 Franklin St in August 2024 [1]. Their new mailing address is on 31 Milk Street [2].
If this test was reproduced today, we may see different results ;)
[1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
That's recent enough that mail forwarding should work, if they set it up:
> Standard mail forwarding lasts 12 months. You can pay to extend mail forwarding for 6, 12, or 18 more months (18 months is the maximum).
Edit for source: https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm
> > Standard mail forwarding lasts 12 months. You can pay to extend mail forwarding for 6, 12, or 18 more months (18 months is the maximum).
That's kind of awkward when you consider people will find that address for source code where that license file just wont be updated for decades to come, if at all.
I wrote a little more about the various offices as someone who used to work there.
An updated version would say to make sure every email address you use/show in the application/terms/policies are usable and someone receives it.
When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
reminds me of this old joke. Two testers walk into a bar, the first says "i'll have a beer please" and they get their beer as expected. The second says "I just want water" and they get the water just like the asked. Then a user walks into the bar and asks "where's the bathroom?". The bar explodes.
Why should the test process be sending physical letters (edit: in 2025)? Nothing in the GPLv2 requires a physical letter.
The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.
Some companies still do this mainly to make the GPL request process more annoying so fewer people do it. If you have to mail a letter with a check to cover shipping/handling and wait for the company to send you a CD-R with the code on it, fewer people will look at the code compared to if the company just put it on Github or something.
If the goal is to be annoying, sure make sure folks can jump through hoops. I just don't think in 2025 a company legitimately intending to satisfy the GPL requirements needs anything to do with physical mail, since they'll provide it online.
I stopped putting in requests for source code offers because I've had a 0% success rate.
Most of the time the GPL request is a waste of time with no purpose other than annoy a company. You can download linux source code from many places, why do you want to get it from us?
There is a slight possibility we have a driver that you could get access to, but without the hardware it won't do you any good. Once in a while we have hacked the source to fix a bug, but if it isn't upstream it is because the fix would be accepted (often it causes other bugs that don't matter to use), and in any case if it isn't upstream, the kernel moves so fast you wouldn't be able to use it anyway.
Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).
Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility
Which changes as times change.
In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access.
Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult.
But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.
In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into.
Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable!
Accessibility and convenience >> convenience
> the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.
This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.
I’m pretty sure I spend less than 5 minutes a week dealing with physical spam mail. I have a recycling bin right next to where the mail arrives and most days are 15 seconds of “these go into that bin unopened” and sometimes I have to open an envelope and glance at it to see if it’s something relevant to me.
Even with the best spam filtering on email, I’m well over 5 minutes a week of distraction from it.
You're paying that cent, but in the form of endless ads hijacking your consciousness.
> Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design
I think it's important to note that this isn't actually true. For a lot of homeless people or people who move often postal mail isn't as good. Online communication is actually more universal. Most (all?) public libraries have computers now.
Not sure if this works in other countries, but here in the Netherlands, homeless folks can get a postal address at municipal offices. People who move can set up (albeit paid) mail forwarding for up to a year.
Other than that, there’s good old ‘poste restante’, in which you can supposedly address mail to any post office and they’ll hold it for the recipient (even internationally), although I’ve never tried this.
(I appreciate that not everyone may actually know about these options, though.)
A common mistake in accessibility is to assume accessibility is mostly for users who are blind. I've rarely seen the opposite approach, calling something accessible that is very much not accessible to a person who is blind. A url is much more accessible for many people with disabilities than the postal mail.
Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.
It's like the classic argument about IRC vs Discord. IRC is more convoluted to use, the clients are subpar, you need to set up a BNC to receive messages when offline, but Discord requires you to give up your phone number.
Some people find IRC less accessible, but I find having a phone number that I'm willing to give to a third party is a much more difficult requirement.
Don't forget the next part: whenever you point out that Discord requires you to give them your phone number, hundreds of Agent Smiths appear in the replies to say that actually you don't. Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?
(The Agent Smith effect is something conspiracy theorists made up to explain why every time they show off their conspiracy theory in public, every single person around them suddenly gains the same opinion of them. I'm using it humourously)
> is universally accessible by design
I disagree. It requires taking time out of business hours, and they don't pay you your salary while you line up multiple times for 30 minutes each. I've sometimes had to line up for 2 hours total (4 times) just to mail one thing. Once to ask "how do i mail this", once to ask for a pen (couldn't cut the line because a Karen wouldn't let me), once because I filled the wrong form, etc. Typical USPS experience
I find it hard to believe that waiting two hours is normal for customers of the USPS. You can order stamps online, they have (collection) postboxes and even offer a pick-up service for parcels. At $0.73 to send a letter anywhere in the USA, that sounds like a pretty impressive offering to me.
I mean it is the fallback method. The solution for the "I never heard of this internet thing, or something else is preventing me from finding the licence online" problem.
Almost everyone will just use their search engine to find this page: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html
What can you do to serve the licence to those who can't or won't do that (for whatever reason)? I think it is hard to find something more universally accessible to serve that edge case.
You describe your story of how sending a letter went to you, and I admit it sounds like a bit of a pain. But you managed to do it. And by the sound of it you were totally novice at it. (didn't even bring your own pen!) Someone can do the same thing you did anywhere from Nairobi, McMurdo, Pyongyang, or Vigánpetend.
It is not "universally accessible" in the "easy and comfortable" sense. It is "universally accessible" in the "almost anywhere where humans live you can access this service" sense.
If you're talking about packages via USPS, you can use print + pay & drop boxes for anything that fits.
https://www.usps.com/ship/online-shipping.htm
If you're talking about letters, the innumerable blue drop boxes.
Physical mail isn't difficult, even now, for anyone with a modicum of competence. I can understand if someone hasn't used physical mail before, but it's very easy to look up how to send a letter + buy envelopes and stamps. If someone cannot do that without difficulty, they really need to work on their basic life skills.
Buying a stamp in the home country is doable for most people. But even then, imagine you are 20, how many mails do you think will you have sent?
For a different country, I'd have no idea. Especially if it's so far away like the USA and I can't locally get a special reply post stamp. What I would have done is to put in 5€ in the envelope and call it a day. The person would probably be happy seeing other money.
His difficulty was finding postage stamps for the self-addressed return envelope, and clearly the author is not American. Do you think it would be quite so easy to "buy envelopes and stamps" if you had to send a stamped return envelope to Nepal or Manila? Is that a "basic life skill" or would you have to do a little research to figure out what you'd need?
Agreed. I am a millennial, so most likely older than the author.
Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.
I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff.
I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).
> but ordering stamps... on eBay
OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps.
As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me.
I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
> I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country
I would try to buy them online from their post office. For the USA, there is https://www.usps.com/business/postage-options.htm:
“Print Labels Online with Click-N-Ship
With your free USPS.com account, you can pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online”
Germany has (https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/deutsche-pos...):
“You simply need to open the app, select the appropriate postage service, tick “Code for labelling” (Code zum Beschriften), and pay with PayPal. You will then immediately receive a code, consisting of the letters #PORTO and an eight-digit string, which you must write in pen in the top right-hand corner of the envelope or postcard. Then, just pop it in the post box, and you’re done! The code is valid for 14 days and can only be used for Germany-bound mail.”
That 14-day limit may not be a good idea for this use case.
Offhand, I don't think I've ever mailed an International letter or package.
Is return postage something that, normally, my local post office would help me with? E.G. do they have some method of marking or adding post to a package that would be accepted globally (or at least within the destination country)?
Sure but, on the other hand, this was overly kind of him. In general, unless it is explicitely requested that you must provide a stamped envelope for the reply the assumption of snail mail is that each side pays for its own envelopes and stamps.
I'm also a millennial software engineer but I usually write stuff down to text files. I do use pen and paper to draw things if that helps my understanding of them. Like when there's geometry involved.
Sending letters isn't an alien concept to me either. I'm old enough to have done it regularly as a kid. I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.
When and where were you required to write the ZIP so strangely? I've never heard of such a bizarre requirement.
The author in the UK so it's pretty much a given that they're exaggerating for comedic effect, but... living in the UK myself, I have only sent maybe about 5 letters in my life, all to the government bureaucracy, and none more recently than a decade ago. And I'm a millennial, albeit on the younger side (so I tell myself).
I don't have any pens, paper or a printer in my house, so I'd probably go to my workplace if I needed to send a letter nowadays. I do occasionally send a parcel though, which involves printing off a shipping label, so the process isn't completely alien.
It's bizarre to hear about people not even having a single pen, like the author. What's the last time you ever used one? What is your daily life like?
I think the last the last time I used a writing implement was actually about two months ago, and it was a sharpie that I had to go to the corner shop to buy. I needed to take a verification picture of myself holding the date for an online pharmacy.
I do have an iPad with an Apple Pencil, but even that I use quite rarely - though I at least know where it is. If I'm annotating a PDF, that would be my tool of choice.
Aside from that, I'm not sure that my daily life is really that unrecognisable from anyone else's. Just that instead of writing stuff on paper, I either type it or tap it on my phone. For maths, I'm just quite quick at TeX input.
We don't have a printer at home (UK), sending parcels is the only time we'd need it but our small local post office prints labels (eg for Amazon returns, or parcel companies).
I did print a page at work recently, the second one since I started my job 5 years ago.
Most of the time I have to send parcels now, I use those drop off lockers where you just put it in the right cubbyhole and - I guess - they label it when they pick it up. Otherwise, most couriers will do label on pickup, or the return label is included with the delivery in the first place. Very occasionally there's no other option but to find some way of printing it myself.
I did have a small inkjet printer at one point, but the ink kept drying up, so in the end it was costing me £10 and a trip to Tesco every time I needed to print something. Thought about getting a laser, but it's quite a lot of space to waste on something I use so rarely. I might get one of those little thermal printers that are small enough to keep in a drawer.
> Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author.
It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!
> I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned.
Some adults were born in 2007
Anyone, even someone born in 2007, should know how to use pen and paper. This is a basic component of being an educated person, not knowing how to do that is as shocking as being illiterate.
> I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned.
Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.
As someone born in 2003, I did this just last week when filing my tax returns.
Do you not send thank you cards for birthday and holiday gifts?
I just sent in my taxes by USPS mail a couple of weeks ago. Long after online payments were available, I would pay my monthly bills by writing checks and sending them in the mail, as that process actually took me less time than logging in to five or six different websites and navigating through their online payment flows.
There's a difference between writing a letter longhand, and simply knowing how to use a pen.
Once I had to send an international RMA that they wouldn't pay for the shipping. It went something like this:
0. Went to Fedex to check on the shipping cost for this tiny box. It was $120 so I passed
1. Went to USPS, found that they were closed, the only option was a 30 minute line to use the machine. Lined up for 30 minutes, found that it the goddamn UI on the machine did not support international shipments.
2. Went home to generate a USPS international shipping label. $25, much more acceptable. FedEx should be out of business.
3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label with 1 layer of white and 1 layer of black but it wasn't high resolution enough in the X/Y direction for the label to be readable so I gave up
4. Went to FedEx to use their 2D printers but realized I forgot my USB drive at home
5. Went home to get my USB drive
6. Back to FedEx, realized I forgot my mask (this was COVID times, so no go)
7. Went home to get my mask
8. Back to FedEx, printed the 2D shipping label
9. Back to USPS, found out they had no tape
10. Back to FedEx to buy a roll of tape because I don't know where the hell else to buy tape same day, and all my tape at home are electrical tape, teflon tape, or Gorilla tape
11. Back to USPS and the stupid package drop box had a mechanical issue preventing it from opening more than a few cm, not enough to fit my package
12. Went to another USPS to drop the package
> 3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label
This sentence really captures the absurdity of this story.
> But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason
I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.
Probably because in our countries (I'm also from S.America) the reliability of the post office is questionable at best, so it wasn't something I ever really used.
In most/all of Europe, letter volumes are reducing but they're still used. Even where email is common, letters are usually possible.
In your country,
- how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?
- how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?
- how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
The paper size and foreign stamps make sense, but I must say the inability to use a pen surprised me a little more.
I'm not an American and I did write letters in my country of origin as a kid, but one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address - you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. If you're used to writing on lined paper because that's the standard in your country (including envelopes!), it can be frustrating.
The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...
> one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address
I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years.
Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.
We have envelopes like that, too, but they're not all that common.
In the UK at school in the 90s we were taught how to write a letter including addressing and stamping the envelope. It's quite strange to see it done "wrong" like in the OP. You're supposed to have the first line of the address centred vertically, leaving the top half for stamps. At least they got the stamps on the correct (right) side, though. I've seen a lot worse.
Being unaware of paper sizes is baffling to me - where I live, letter and legal paper are common but I’m entirely aware of ISO216 paper sizes.
One time at my old job I was trying to load the printer, and I said something like "Oh shoot, these are oversized sheets; I need the 8.5x11."
My coworker looked at me like I was crazy. "The what?"
"The normal printer paper, the 8.5 by 11 inch paper"
"Why do you know the exact size of printer paper??"
I did not know how to respond to this question.
They're not just uncommon, they're not used at all. You will only see US legal in the UK if an American company/person sends it to you, how often do you think that happens? I've had it maybe once or twice, but you could easily never see it, especially people born ~this century growing up with less paper of any size anyway.
You missed at least one other country that uses “US” paper sizes.
It's exceedingly rare to encounter US paper sizes in the UK and I expect the rest of Europe too. I've only received these from two places: the FSF and Donald Knuth.
True, any page oriented software like LibreOffice, Inkscape, Gimp, will show you US Letter sizes and US Letter Envelope sizes and you may have messed up with printing on wrong size... but as other posters say, maybe this days nobody prints on real paper anymore...
They all default to ISO sizes for me.
If I format the page size, Libreoffice does offer "Letter" and "Legal". GIMP shows them as "US Letter" and "US Legal" but again they're not the default.
It wouldn't surprise me if most non-US users hadn't seen them at all, and certainly not that they don't realise the US uses a different size.
I wrote a letter to a friend last year. It was the first time in probably well over a decade I had used a pen for more than just scribbled notes or doodling. I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.
> I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.
Back in the old days when people still wrote by hand, they also made mistakes, but just scribbled them out and kept going. Starting over was only necessary with doing something special.
Yeah that's crazy. I use pens to doodle designs or write little recipes or Kanban cards or index cards for what's inside a box... The author maybe does all that by typewriter?
Or they do it all digital, or don't even do it at all. Label printers and note-apps are very popular with IT-people.
Sending physical mail is one thing. I no longer consider myself "digital native" after reading this:
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time
I grew up pre-smartphone (pre-Web, partially, even) and even through college probably half my total output for school was hand written (friggin' blue book exams, LOL)
Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year.
I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.
Even digital natives are using pens with their smartphones and tablets these days. It's just a choice now whether you use them. Though, not sure whether kids these days are still learning it in school.
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time.
Sometimes I cut out my address from a bill and tape that on as my return address. I know it’s formatted right.
I’d definitely do the same on a “self”-addressed stamped envelope that I need returned.
Disappointed that International Reply Coupons are no longer a thing too! I used one back in the 1980s to write to the authors of the Power C compiler[1] in the US about a bug (yes, a bug report by mail). I enclosed an IRC in case they wanted to reply. They were kind enough to write back, and didn't use the IRC (but sent it back). They did however include a floppy disk with the fixed compiler, which was nice of them.
[1] Still around: http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
I don't send letters by post but I often need to send packages by post. Perhaps it's returning some merchandise where the merchant didn't have free shipping. Perhaps it's shipping a security key to a close friend so I can have offsite backup of a key. When I moved, I got rid of my book collection by asking friends which books they wanted and I shipped it to them (media mail is cheap).
It's efficient to transmit information over the internet, but it's still essential to send physical items by post. When I visit USPS branches, I always see plenty of people mailing packages.
Sending mail being a challenging or difficult thing does come across as odd to me, being in Canada and born in the late 90s. Sure I haven't mailed a letter in a couple years, but when I do the main hassle is just finding where I put my stamps. I can however understand that finding return postage would be a hassle; I'm not sure why the UK and Canada (amongst others) don't do IRCs anymore.
It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
Sending international postage in my country (South Africa) is not a very reliable process, so couriers and email are used quite heavily here instead. Its not necessarily an age thing.
As far as I know there are still some things you have to post in the UK, like sending your cut up old driver's licence to the DVLA and maybe you still have to post your V5 when you sell a car. OP might not own a car or drive, though, so who knows?
I think the strangest part is that it had been years since they had used a pen.
Agreed. Grabbing a pen and a post-it is faster for me than opening a text document, and a pad of paper allows me to format and diagram things freely.
The post-its can be sorted, stacked, moved, stuck to pertinent notebook pages, altered, and ultimately recycled when they are no longer relevant. It's much freer than a document on a phone or computer, where it can still be a pain to move information from one domain to another.
Honestly, sending letters is increasingly alien: I rarely send one letter per year. This year I have sent two, only because I am trying to contact an incredibly old-fashioned directorate of the German government that doesn't seem to have an email address.
The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
I have a roll of Forever stamps, purchased years ago. I don't even remember why, specifically, I purchased them. In theory, I could post a letter on my deathbed (I'm Generation X, so it's not that far off) and be assured that the delivery fee is covered by the cost of one stamp. Unfortunately, most of the people I would wish to correspond with will also be deceased at that time. So …
I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes...
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...
This thread is more interesting to me than the article itself. I am the complete opposite. I always have a pen in my pocket along with a really small (2"x3") notebook, and I absolutely use it all the time.
Personally, I find pen and a memo pad much handier than a phone. There is no unlocking, searching, or loading. And I can write much faster than tap a little screen keyboard. Even more importantly, on my memo pad there are no notifications to completely sidetrack my lizard brain.
But aside from the practical, it is also just such a nice change of pace to use analog technologies when I can. I use my computer and write software all day. It's good to get a break sometimes.
I recently was in an awkward situation when ordering my new passport. Most times I got to sign some papers I have some signature which is a few waves, not forming many letters. In the passport office the clerk told me they can't recognize any enough letters in there, so I had to do multiple attempts till they were happy ... now my passport got a signature I won't be able to replicate ever.
(I do some handwriting for notes taking, but that's some writing based on block letters, not script as in a signature)
>now my passport got a signature I won't be able to replicate ever
I'm not sure I could ever prove I am who I say I am using my signature. My wife signs my name most of the time when it's necessary for a check or a health form for the kids or whatever. Whenever I go to vote, I try to sneak a look at their copy of the form to see how I signed it when I registered. I think my credit union has one 'on file' for me, but I'm sure it's nothing like how I actually sign my name and is from ~25 years ago.
Genuinely curious, I don't write anything long by hand, but do you not jot down disposable information with frequency, or date food, or anything like that? I date food we put in the fridge/freezer. I jot down something like a phone number if I am redirected. I have to give my pet medication occasionally and I use a post-it to track so the household can know. Like I said, I'm not writing anything even as long as a card, but I use a pen multiple times a week, and essentially daily. I know a lot of people use their phones for this stuff (and I do too), and maybe I'm an old person now for not using my phone for all of that.
> I date food we put in the fridge/freezer
What date are you putting on the food? Every packaging here in Spain (and Europe I assume) has both the production date and "best before" dates printed on them from the factory, and stuff that doesn't have packaging you know if they're bad by looking/smelling/tasting.
I batch cook and freeze meals, and some of them look similar (sauce and chicken vs sauce and pork) and I want to eat the older stuff first. There are also some products that are recommended to be disposed of within X days of opening, which fall well before their best by date.
Unopened, a jar of pasta sauce is good basically indefinitely, but as soon as you actually open the jar the clock starts ticking. We don't make enough pasta at a time to use a full jar, (and in fact will usually use a small fraction of the jar) so I write the date that I opened the jar on the lid to plan its use a little better. "Hey, better find a use for this sauce, it's going to go bad eventually."
Food that's not prepackaged. e.g., I recently threw out a container of eggs that had been in my freezer for about two years because my hens were laying so much faster than we could consume, that we had dozens of extras.
I also label things like the date I install a new HVAC filter, or how much to cut off on a piece of lumber, etc.
When I open milk, I write the date on the cap to help keep track of how long it'll remain good.
I tried for a while to do the whole "notebook life" thing that was really trendy to blog about some years back, but found I never had the notebook I wanted on-hand (even if I was just using one notebook...) or forgot to grab a pen or can't find a pen et c. Then making it possible to find anything in them requires more effort afterward.
What do I have on me basically all the time? My phone.
I've done everything in Apple Notes for years now, and it's so much less hassle, and actually works for me. I just make sure to include words I might use to search for a note, when writing a new note. Search does the rest. I can and sometimes do organize things into directories, but usually it's kinda wasted effort. Search is enough.
Meanwhile, the few dozen pages scattered across four or five notebooks that I generated in that brief kick remain, passively, a pain in the ass. I've carted them through two moves, meaning to digitize them, because when I remember they exist and browse I'm like "oh yeah, that was a good idea!" but, out of sight out of mind and when I stumble across them I'm always in the middle of doing other, more important shit.
Wow, I use a pen nearly every day. Sometimes I deliberately get a pen or pencil and paper rather than a phone. I was doing some home improvements in my attic, and I would often need to jot down a measurement so I could cut wood etc. I did this once or twice on my phone and realized it's much easier to do this with a pencil and small notepad.
In what is perhaps the most ironic blend of high and low tech, I wrote my own software to build grocery lists, which I then print and use a pen to cross items off as I shop. This is by far the most efficient vs trying to faff about with some mobile solution.
I prefer an app for grocery lists since it can be managed with a single hand while shopping - no need to stop in the middle of an aisle to pull out a pencil and cross something off, nor to print anything out before heading to the store, for that matter. Plus, I won't have to re-sync the list with what remain on the physical list at the end of the trip.
My software is highly idiosyncratic. I input recipes for the week, and it adds ingredients to the shopping list, but only some ingredients. Other staple ingredients are things we keep in standard inventory and these go on the shopping list periodically rather than on demand.
UNIX is a friendly environment for me to write my own software like this. Phones are hostile, they’re more like appliances. Pair up UNIX with old-school peripherals like printers and I’m in business.
But yeah I love my phone for its appliance-like uses.
Apple Reminders has native grocery lists now. The collaboration feature (a household can keep just one shared grocery list) and auto-categorizing by store section are serious time and frustration savers. No "oh shit, I left the list at home", no "I could go to the grocery store while I'm out, if we need anything... but the list's at home...", no manually organizing the list, no grocery-list-by-text. It's so nice, saves far more time than any faff it introduces (I'd agree that without the collaboration and auto-categorizing, grocery lists on phones would be more trouble than they're worth)
(I know other apps have also done it, but having it on a built-in is really handy and it works well)
I can't even remember the last time I've used a pen for anything other than writing a check.
Not even a whiteboard marker?
I'm in the US so I use permanent marker to write my lawyers phone number on my arm before protests
As a Brit, the concept of "My lawyer" is slightly unfamiliar. The average Brit doesn't "have a lawyer"; they would only find a lawyer if they had a specific need, eg being accused of a crime or wanting to write a contract etc.
And yet as far as I can tell, most middle class Americans seem to refer to "their lawyer". Do you pay a monthly fee? Are they a criminal defence lawyer, or something broader? How often do you talk to them? How do you find them?
>but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month..
I'm sure I do too, but I couldn't actually tell you what I used it for. Probably to cross items off a shopping list or sign my name on something. Actually we got a new car and I needed to sign the form at the DMV to get license plates, so I guess that was it.
My hand writing got rusty and awkward until I read that writing something by hand is shown to strengthen one's memory and recollection. It definitely seems to be the case for me and has made me much more organised.
Now I journal on a paper notebook, take daily notes on a whiteboard and I'm rediscovering index cards for long term storage, but I wish real life had a search function.
If I had an automated scanning + OCR + convert to Org system, I would never use a text editor for notes ever again.
Try using a tablet with hand written notes. There are programs (or even applications that replace the popup keyboard ) that will convert your writing into computer text.
I think that gives the improved retention plus easy filing of the result and if your writing is like mine the ability to actually read what you wrote a year before.
He's also obviously not used to write/type letters... The whole thing is quite awful.
Schools used to teach this a minimum but they no longer do. It was also standard to learn that for job hunting but, again, I don't think many people apply for jobs by post nowadays although it can still be useful to know how to write a formal cover letter.
That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product:
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'
The FSF offices have moved again if you weren't aware. The new address is
Free Software Foundation 31 Milk Street, # 960789 Boston, MA 02196 USA
In Gnulib we distribute and use the license with just a link to <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/> [1]. I would just use that.
Many GNU projects use a rule that will fail 'make distcheck' when it sees an address in the sources [2].
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=bf31... [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=086c...
I once was reading a software license, and deep inside it there was a promise: who has read till this place will get a certain prise. I emailed them, they kind of confirmed that I am eligible for the prise. But it was a far away city, so I never went to claim it.
> After a few weeks of waiting, I eventually received the ‘African Daisy global forever vert pair’ stamp which was round! I should have noticed that the seller sent me the item using stamps at a much lower denomination that those I had ordered. Oh well.
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?
I’m surprised this stamp seller didn’t cover half the envelope in 5 cent stamps.
That’s what I usually get on the envelopes from stamp sellers: decades old stamps from the “bad investment” portions from stamp collectors.
I don't understand the satire, can you explain?
We can't see the full set of "lower denomination" stamps on the letter, but I'm not 100% sure it's actually lower denomination. The sender of the stamps seems to be using the "2 domestic forevers + some amount of cents = 1 global forever" formula. I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.
Indeed, the formula is correct. Wikipedia maintains a list of historic Forever pricing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...
From the blog, the letter from California was dated April 2022, at which point the rates were domestic = $0.58 and global = $1.30. So the California sender correctly attached two domestics valued at $1.16 total plus an additional $0.14 to make $1.30.
I think quoting that part alone, didn't make it clear I was referring to the whole article.
>...... "Oh Well."
May have been more apt.
Is eBay really anyones first thought when looking for a (non-collector) stamp to (actually) mail?
Perhaps he should have picked up a few £1 coins on eBay, use them to purchase some stamps from the post office?...
> I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.
It would be hard to know that ahead of time though. The global forever stamp is good for letters up to 1oz which can be as little as 4 US letter pages. It took the FSF 5 double-sided pages. Granted, it looks like lightweight paper & the post office doesn't seem to be very picky about this. But I think sending two forever stamps was being on the safe side.
This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author.
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.
What places don't have postcards? Whenever I go to places in the UK, tourist tat shops will often have hundreds of them in every flavour of souvenir
It seems to be a cultural thing. As an European I am used to find postcards in every town, but when I went to Singapore I had a hard time procuring them. None of the souvenir shops had them, and when I asked the employees they often looked at me as if I were some kind of strange animal. I finally found a small, dusty selection in the darkest corner of a huge department store.
I always like to buy a postcard.
Occasionally actually post them before I leave a place (ideally soon after I arrive).
Generally they arrive substantially after I get back.
Yep, same path. Arrive, get cards ASAP, usually as I walk out of the airport, give it to the hotel concierge the next morning. They will often stamp and drop it in the mail for me.
It is so much fun to watch my spawns showing me the cards they got with strange stamps and neat pictures of far away lands. I address them individually, so there are plenty to write, still fun.
my flash cards all store at least 32 GB of data but are so tiny I keep losing them.
Yes! Check out Postcrossing, where you can sign up to send and receive postcards to random people. :)
I know how to send mail but it's like doing taxes, I'm afraid I'll get something wrong and not find out until I'm in trouble for it
I'm probably younger than you by quite a bit.. no descendents, no time to travel, not allowed in many countries or US states anyway
is the owner of the address a perpetual owner of the GPL? Example: - Step 1: Create evil Corporation - Step 2: Buy that address - Step 3: Create a new GPL, still GPL but technically a new version. This can make sure the sole owner of the claimed IP (remove the FSF of course). - Step 4: Sell your updated license to anyone that'd want to go around previous GPL.
I'm interested in hearing from someone at FSF (and I used to know someone, but I don't think he's there any more), who can tell us how often this has happened. I can't imagine it's a frequent occurrence.
I love how small of a world this site is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43784538
As I implied in my top level comment, it should happen more often than it likely does. If you work on a commercial project with any GPL code ask your test group who has done that and when - if you don't see a lot of hands go up then your test group isn't doing their job. (if you are only automated tests, then I assume you have an automated test to send this letter and verify the response)
Yeah I sort of hoped it would cover that bit not just the author's foibles at writing a letter.
This is funny because I was the operations assistant (office secretary) at the time we received this letter, and I remember it because of the distinct postage.