I'm a bit confused - you subscribe to one developer, and then get the benefit of being subscribed to all?
What's the incentive for a developer to sign up to this then, if they don't get a share of your subscription when you use their service? Isn't this a bit like asking Disney+ to give all Netflix subscribers access with no compensation?
The difference this is supposed to make is that currently most people don't pay for free software. I don't for example. That is because I don't need to. This system is supposed to make more people pay, which should mean that all developers get more money. Giving access to someone who subscribes to someone else is part of what makes this work and if the developers can accept that, they should all benefit from it.
But I don't get any $ from it unless they sign up on MY site, right? Since there's no sharing mechanism.
So I don't see how joining in would benefit me - if anything I'd lose a bit of revenue from people who would have paid and now find they don't need to because they're signed up for some other product which I have no hand in and no revenue from?
> But I don't get any $ from it unless they sign up on MY site, right? Since there's no sharing mechanism.
Exactly.
> So I don't see how joining in would benefit me - if anything I'd lose a bit of revenue from people who would have paid and now find they don't need to because they're signed up for some other product which I have no hand in and no revenue from?
It would not benefit you if the average person paid for multiple free software projects. In that case, they would only have to pay for one instead of multiple.
I don't think that's the case though, so this solution should make more people pay for free software and that should benefit the developers on average.
While I agree that going with what the users want is the correct approach, but "a few digits less of accuracy" really undersells how much the data quality will suffer.
It will pretty much become useless (how many people are going to opt-in, realistically?) - and that's fine if it's what the community wants.
Storing the length of a string alongside the string is a viable option in C, it's up to you to do it yourself though (whereas Java and almost every other language does it for you). See https://github.com/phusion/nginx/blob/master/src/core/ngx_st..., used by NGINX.
Which breaks down every time a C API needs to be called, and that linked API still has plenty of functions with separate pointer and length parameters.
You can do it like in Free Pascal/Delphi: store the string both length-prefixed (for fast length access and bounds checking) and zero terminated (for passing to functions that expect zero terminated strings).
If the callee is meant to corrupt it then it is your fault for misusing it (unless the corruption is intentional and you plan to recalculate the length after calling it). If it wasn't meant to corrupt it then it is a bug and if it is in your code then it is your fault for not using the string functionality that you already have in place to avoid the bug in the first place. If it is not in your code, as long as you had to use it you'd have that bug regardless of what language or framework you used since it is out of your control and there isn't anything you can do about it.
What's the incentive for a developer to sign up to this then, if they don't get a share of your subscription when you use their service? Isn't this a bit like asking Disney+ to give all Netflix subscribers access with no compensation?