You should be aware of the social impact this makes. iMessage is already partitioning Android and iPhone users socially. These products just make it worse and will exclude people from social groupa even more. There's also that lower income individuals who can't afford an iPhone and use Android devices for cost related reasons would lose out on event planning.
It's funny, because the Costco credit card used to be AmEx. IIRC Costco Canada only takes Mastercard, which is funny since the US Costco credit card is Visa, so you can't use the US Costco CC to pay in a Canadian Costco.
You actually can use the Costco US Visa at Canadian Costco, they’ve got a special exemption for it. (And vice-versa, you can use the Canadian Costco Mastercard at American Costco.)
My first thought was Bell Labs here. The lack of time pressure for research results sounds like a big reason why so much innovation happened—people could pursue projects that may not have immediately benefitted the company's bottom line, because Bell had money to throw. I think UNIX was an example of this, because MULTICS was a failure and Bell was wary of similar projects, but I might be wrong.
According to Kernighan in UNIX: A History and a Memoir, the Unix team was constrained with regards to hardware capital at the time of Unix's creation. The Multics team got to use a fancy GE-645 (36-bits!) while the Unix team had to beg for "cheaper" systems like the PDP-7 and eventually an 11. Thompson has a great quote about how ultimately he was thankful they didn't have as much money to play with as the Multics team did but at the time he was annoyed he had to beg for a PDP-11. Fun book!
Most of the Bell Labs fundamental breakthroughs had no path to commercialization at the time of their discovery. The transistor was discovered 12 years into Shockleys research on fundamental properties of semiconductors.
If commercialization had been considered before funding, the project would have never been approved.
Instead, Bell management took the view that they could find everything, and some of it might become a new market, maybe.
It's interesting this is such a large problem there. In NYC, the tap-to-pay OMNY system is literally excellent. I swear it processes cards in a second or less and you save a lot of time by not buying a MetroCard. Are the BART scanners for some sort of RFID/NFC cards that are local to the train system, or do they accept credit/debit card payment? I'm curious how OMNY is so fast (compared to even going to a store and paying with tap to pay) and why BART is slow.
And OMNY will either accept a tap to pay credit card, a phone with tap to pay (including Apple's express card option, where it works even if your phone is dead), or a prepaid value dedicated OMNY card.
It does not actually run the transaction through the entire way - if a transaction fails, the card info gets placed on a blacklist and that particular NFC device won't receive an instant authorisation next time. Generally speaking, people don't have an easy way to generate lots and lots of fake NFC devices, so this hasn't been a problem for widespread fraud (vs just jumping over the turnstile).
The Clipper cards used by BART are 90s technology that took so long to fully deploy that it was outdated by the time most people started using it. There was a brief window where if you were an early adopter it was better than what was available in many places (or not-so-brief compared to OMNY, which came along a decade later), but unsurprisingly the things designed later have mostly improved on it.
The killer feature that also causes most of the quirks is that it can be used to make payments fully offline without allowing double-spending of balance. This is of course mostly a killer feature for transit operators rather than users. OMNY solves the same problem by just accepting that it'll occasionally permit free rides.
I guess Clipper wasn't super reliable when it came out(?) (so long ago at this point it's hard to remember), but I don't really remember having much fondness for the old BART cards. (Not to mention the annoyance of having to pay for BART and Muni in different ways, or carrying around those silly paper Muni transfer slips.)
These days, I can't remember the last time I had an issue with my physical Clipper card. I do recall lots of issues when they first rolled out the ability to put a Clipper card on your phone, but I haven't run into a problem with that in at least a couple years.
I don't know if this is the case with BART, but I've seen in my own local public transit network an incredible inability or lack of will to use systems proven in other areas. Instead of going with quick, proven, and reliable, systems, they'll default to going for the cheap option, which is usually slow, re-inventing the wheel, and unreliable. I visit a city like NYC or London or Tokyo and see a transit system with decades of accrued understanding, technical experience, and optimization. Then I come home and ride something shiny but slow, janky, and bug ridden.
My one huge gripe with Tokyo's/Japan's transit system is that you can't load money onto an IC card using a credit card. I was just in Japan last month; my last trip before then had been in 2017, and I really assumed that they would have fixed this deficiency by now.
I forgot to get a Tokyo metro pass along with my train ticket from Narita to Tokyo, so I ended up wandering around Nippori station looking for an ATM that would take my Visa debit card so I could get some cash in order to top up my Pasmo card[0] and take a local train to Shinjuku. I'd also forgotten how most random ATMs don't take foreign debit cards; after it dawned on me, I left the station, found a 7-11, and used the ATM there.
This was not something I enjoyed having to do, while carrying my bags, after a 10-hour flight, plus 2 hours waiting in line at immigration, followed by another hour-long train ride to the city.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that many many more businesses in Japan take credit cards nowadays though.
[0] I was also pleasantly surprised to find that Pasmo cards are still good up to 10 years after the last time you use them. I feel like something similar in the US would expire after no more than a year or two.
It works so well that I was severely confused the first time I used them, coming from the Bay Area. I spent ages trying to figure out how to instantiate and load a transit card into Google Wallet before realizing I could just tap any card I had.
I feel as if alternative solutions are costly and can price out small businesses from messaging customers.
My local public library uses email to text to send messages about overdue books. While they don't develop their catalog system, I believe that using things like Twilio is costly, and I hope their upstream catalog provider isn't unduly burdened by this. I contract for a small company and we switched to email notifications exclusively since SMS was too expensive.
Maybe this says something about how SMS is the wrong platform to be using, but it looks like business WhatsApp messaging costs money too. I've never recieved spam over email to text.
Another thing to add: this is Linux-only and a large amount of Linux users will care about your product being free software or under an open source license for ethical reasons. Source available doesn't mean open source, and open source means your product's license protects distribution and modifications of the code to some extent. This extent is quite debated, but you should certainly read up on this and have a strong defence for why your product isn't open source either way. I can certainly see why you wouldn't want to, but make sure to think about it especially for Linux-only. Windows and Mac users are probably more amenable to proprietary software.
Not OP, but I think AGPL is generally an excellent choice for my hard work that I want to showcase.
If I care about free software but also want to "protect" my work to prevent people from forking it without releasing their contributions because of strong copyleft. Many of my open source personal projects are licensed under AGPL.
AGPL makes no sense to me for projects that aren't focused on server use. This project is a good example of something that could just have a GPL license attached to it.
I personally don't use AGPL software if I intend on trying to expand on something as a business idea. I'd be fully willing to give back bugfixes and donate back, but I'm not about to hand off anything I pour months and years into to my competitors for free.
> I'm not about to hand off anything I pour months and years into to my competitors for free.
Library authors can pour "months and years" into their projects, and yet you expect them (but not yourself) to give away their code under more permissive terms, while you keep yours closed? The (A)GPL is a great choice because it forces people like you to either (1) open up your code or (2) pay for a closed-source license.
I don't expect anyone to do anything, but if they do I intend on respecting the license. I also expect myself to give back however I can. I just don't see how you dismiss someone else's efforts. It's like valuing a home you bought and did work on, solely on how it looked before you bought it. Even if you tore down most walls and redid the flooring and interior drastically.
I’m not really sure why the author made the limitation to “IT Companies” unless what they really mean is the IT organization within the companies. The security.txt seems like it should be utilized by any company that does business on the internet, much like having an abuse email address.
I think it's also worth noting that the Nintendo Switch and I think many of their previous consoles have been jailbroken to high heaven. So there's an overhead of maybe not being able to use Nintendo networked services, but you are able to "own" the device more. People have gotten Ubuntu running on a Nintendo Switch IIRC.
This is not an optimal solution, but it is more of a solution than, for example, the (maybe I'm wrong) lack of jailbreaks for iOS that are usable (eg. tethered jailbreaks are more work to maintain).
Like I mentioned, tethered jailbreaks are not restrictive and from what I've gathered and require specific hardware and iOS versions (https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/1go8wy4/what_is_...). Sure, you can maybe jailbreak the latest iOS on specific devices, but it's a lot more restrictive in selection, and various devices have various levels of being able to be untethered.
Meanwhile, old Switches have a hardware vulnerability [1] and all newer ones can be jailbroken to their fullest with a modchip. Such pervasive coverage doesn't exist for iDevices to my knowledge.
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