It's too bad that it seems like interoperability will only be for direct messages, and group chat support "will come in the future". There are a couple of groups I haven't managed to move to Signal. I guess I'll continue to bridge WhatsApp and Matrix so that I can avoid having WhatsApp installed on my main phone
Thank you! This is the piece of information I was missing. I kept wondering as I read the article whether that was a LGPL license breach. Thanks for clarifying
As the owner of the intellectual property you're the one licensing to others. License is a kind of contract. You're not under any license yourself, it's yours.
If you accepted PRs without a contributor agreement transferring the ownership, you might be infringing on their IP (licensed to you and others).
A consequence of that is that local companies, that have local economy level income, can't compete on salary with those foreign companies. So they can't get the top-tier workforce they used to have access to. Ever increasing the economic disparity between countries.
They allow brain drain to happen, without the barriers of having to move countries.
I'm pretty sure someone making 2-4x their local salary for a remote company and paying taxes is healthier for the economy than working your ass off (or not) for a local startup that wants to end up getting acquired OR doing the same remote work with 2-3 layers of management extracting the difference in pay. At least in Poland I can't think of any single company I'd want to work for.
There is also the factor of the country receiving hard foreign currency, which I understand is generally quite desireable. This is less relevant for EU vs US compensation, but for more developing ("3rd world") nations could be significant.
If they don't have to move countries, it's not really brain drain at all. It's exactly the opposite in fact.
If they did have to move, then they would, and you'd have brain drain. But because they can remain in their communities (while earning the globally-competitive income that they would otherwise have to move for), they now pay taxes to their local government, buy from local businesses, mentor local youth, and so on. When they've earned enough money from their job, they may quit and start a startup in their own community, or become an angel investor supporting startups in their area, rather than yet another bay-area based fund. These are all good things!
You might be right, if we assume that everyone who takes these high paying remote jobs also makes sure to never ever spend the money they earn locally, either.
However, if I was earning an order of magnitude more money than I currently am, I might want to pay a little extra to go to the really good barber, or to eat at the really nice restaurant at the riverbank. Or, hell, I might just employ a cleaning service every week, to save myself a few hours' time vacuuming my apartment. These necessarily local services will also see their revenues rise. To me that seems to be a more important effect on the local economy at large.
But how would you feel about working as a barber, chef or cleaner, when you could earn two orders of magnitude more making Internet thingamajings for people on the other side of the world?
New York never has a critical shortage of barbers, chefs or cleaners even though for many decades it’s been possible to earn 100x as a Wall Street bond trader or quant.
A healthy growth economy can tolerate income differences. But the balance is certainly precarious, as the example of New York or London shows. It’s constantly on the edge of driving out the remaining barbers and chefs because they can’t afford rents.
But the money stay in the country and increase the chance that the employee eventually starts their own business, possibly using the cheaper workforce as an advantage.
I think it should be illegal to label access to digital content as "buy" or "purchase" if you can't download the digital file DRM-free. If the way they presented the option to pay implied ownership, you should be able to own that digital file.
I think hybrid can work too, but it requires proactive transparency. In my workplace, a tech scale-up, we switched to hybrid after the pandemic and IMO it's working like a charm.
Everybody puts in their calendar each day whether they are going to work remotely or in the office. They also put their working hours or availability, they put when they are going to be off etc. Everybody I interact with shows up to meetings, some later than others, but that's no different than when we were onsite. Work is getting done faster than when we were fully onsite, although slower than during the pandemic.
The office is fully prepared for this working arrangement, with many "booths" for having calls, plenty of meeting rooms, all with great videoconferencing equipment, a meeting room booking system integrated with the calendar that "just works". Everybody is available on Slack while working, although IMO Slack is a bit overused and abused.
Now everyone works where they are more comfortable. Many have moved to smaller cities, others to the countryside. There are people that always go to the office, others that never go. There are teams that agree on certain days to go to the office, but AFAIK is not mandated by their managers, they just like to work and hang out together.
All in all, a great working experience, while staying productive. In fact, the workforce has increased about 20% since just before the pandemic, but the company has more than doubled in revenue, and volume of business and it doesn't feel chaotic at all. So I'd say that's the proof that hybrid is working for us.
clarification: NFC payments in Google Pay. For example my bank app has mobile payments implemented and they work on GrapheneOS.
AFAIK the only reason why Google Pay NFC payments don't work is because Google Pay keeps a list of hardware and OS that's allowed to use that feature, and GrapheneOS is not in that list. It's not an OS limitation.
There was an open issue to spoof this data so that Google Pay NFC payments, among other Google features behind this check, would work. But it looks like it got discarded 2 days ago: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/1986
I think Graphene spoofs the most basic level of Google's security thing but they never wanted to spoof anything higher because it would just turn into a cat and mouse game that they would eventually lose.
They recommend that app developers adopt the much stronger and vendor-neutral Android hardware attestation API instead.
