I'm not sure I agree that any single fixed term makes sense. Rather, I think it'd be better if the exponential cost to society (in terms of works that don't happen, and works that don't happen based on those works that didn't happen and so on compounding) was just part of the yearly renewal price. Do maybe everyone gets 7 years flat to start with, then it costs $100*1.3^(year). So after another 25 years it'd be around $70.5k renewal. At 50 years it'd be $50 million. At 75 years it'd be $35 billion. Fixed amount and exponential can of course be shifted around here but the idea would be to encourage creators to use works hard and if they couldn't make it work not sit on them but release them. Once in awhile something would be such a big hit it'd be worth keeping a long time, and that's ok, but society gets its due too. And most works would be allowed to lapse as they stopped being worth it.
Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.
I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.
I still believe IP shouldn’t be protected by courts unless property taxes are paid on it. The IP holder should declare its taxable value, and that value should be its declared value in an infringement lawsuit. Oh, you said that movie was worth $1 for tax purposes? Now you can’t sue for more than $1 if someone copies it. You want to sue for $1B in damages? Ok, but plan on paying taxes on $1B.
I think that's a horrible idea. There's zero benefit to society in letting corporations like Disney that can afford to pay keep works out of the public domain longer than others.
Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
In all honesty, I really think you should think this idea through. Compared to the status quo, where we get zero tax revenue from intellectual property, this system would guarantee an expiration based on commercial viability. It couldn't sustain forever because the scale would always accelerate at a rate faster than any economy could sustain it. But it would have this additional benefit in that the more some intellectual property becomes commercially sustainable, the more revenue society can collect.
How does that even begin to approach horrible when it's magnitudes more equitable than the status quo?
> Wouldn't it result in additional tax revenue while preventing Disney's movies from proliferating throughout society unimpeded?
I mean they already pay taxes (allegedly). When artists create good works that become popular the state also gets sales taxes from the consumer side as money changes hands in exchange for the work. If we just wanted money we'd be better served by getting rid of the loopholes and tax games the wealthy can take advantage of to avoid paying their share.
I'm pretty adverse to the idea of codifying a system where people with vast sums of money can pay for extra rights under the law. If anything we should offer more support to small artists and not turn them into an underclass, but at a minimum we should enforce an even playing field. It's a bit twisted to call a "rights for those who can pay" system "equitable"
Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them. If the tax is high enough to stop the bad behavior we might as well have just banned it in the first place because if it isn't high enough to stop it, then the tax just becomes another cost of doing business and that's ignoring the fact that more tax money doesn't nessesarily benefit society to the extent that it should. Far too many tax dollars end up in the pockets of private corporations seeking profits (although that's a different problem)
The fact is that our economy and our culture will both benefit by works entering the public domain as that allows new creators to build on and explore those ideas which means more people being hired to work on those new projects, more products for consumers to purchase from retailers, and more taxes going to the government from a wider variety of sources which is itself a very good thing since mega-corps with monopolies on our culture and the tax revenue those cultural works generate can give those corporations a greater influence over government.
i understand your logic , but there's a problem with that assertion.
the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value . That thinking is flawed. If anything, the copyright owner contributed to the equity accrued to the copyright. They should be able to pay the high price to keep adding value to it. This does not discriminate. IN fact, i would say the opposite, what you are proposing, feels like stealing.
If i dump millions into developing a copyrighted work, why could any random artist with nothing to lose be able to exploit the work by paying a small/no fee? This seems incredibly unfair. Do you agree?
> the thought is that the copyright value accrued out of some accident and thus, the owner does not deserve its value .
The owner deserves to make as much money from their product as they can, but they should only be able to exclusively profit from that work in any form for 10 years. That's entirely fair.
Copyright isn't the natural order of things. It's an extraordinary restriction on our freedoms. If I hear a song, there's no kind of natural law making it wrong for me to sing it while out in public the next day. There's nothing morally wrong with that either. It's a massive imposition for the government to tell a free person that they can't share certain stories with others.
For almost all of human history copyright did not exist. The stories that were told, and which became foundational to all stories being told today, were not protected by copyright. People who heard those stories just retold the ones they liked again and again making whatever changes they felt like making and the most popular versions of those stories spread and gained a foothold on the culture. That is the natural order.
The reason copyright law was created was not so that people can profit for as long as possible by restricting everyone else's ability to retell stories or sing the songs they've heard. It was created to promote the creation of new creative works. That aim can be easily accomplished in a single decade.
Locking up vast amounts of our culture behind copyright for ~100 years or more is what sounds like theft to me. Not only are copyright terms of that length excessive, but they are so prohibitively excessive that they actually hinder the creation of new creative works as well as the ability for people to profit from those newly created works.
For example, consider the problems encountered trying to make and sell Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_The_Blues). The artist behind that project went to extreme efforts to put her work out into the universe. It's easy to see how many others in her situation would have been forced to give up or could become disheartened enough to abandon the project after realizing that there could be no monetary profit in it.
When a work enters the public domain that doesn't even mean that the original author or previous owner of a copyright can't continue to make profit on that work. It just means that other people can build off of that work and/or can publish/sell/distribute that work to others. That's perfectly fair too. I've personally paid for works that were in the public domain on multiple occasions.
You are conflating copyright with free expression.
That's not correct and the law is clear on this respect. No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song. However, the moment you start selling tickets to the presentation, that's something entirely different.
You are literally leveraging the fact that someone put that song on the map. You didn't create it. You didn't promote it. You didn't do anything, in fact, except try to profit from it.
Libertarians still believe in property rights. Property can be tangible or intangible.
The point can easily be made with a simple peek into history. No one that recorded anything intangible, like a song, was selling it to others for commercial use because they didn't understand that intangible they had just created had value, but the moment they did, morally, they felt it was wrong and sought the courts for redress. There are examples in history:
In fact, the oldest documented examples of creators pushing back against unauthorized copying predate any formal copyright laws by centuries anda few stretch back to over a millennium! [1] [2]
Why is this important ? Because the oppression you mention of freedom, in order to happen, must be codified by government. If you have this issue going so far back in time, when government hadn't codified anything, its a clear indication that the issue trascends code and goes to the heart of what is moral and inmoral.
This debate of whether you own an idea, trascended the codification of the idea in government "repressing your freedoms" . The fact of the matter is, we believe strongly in freedom, as long as it doesn't transgress the freedoms of others. This is key. In this case, the freedom to reap the rewards of your hard work should not be infringed by the work of another. You are not more important than someone else. This is a basic tenet of liberty
> You are conflating copyright with free expression.
No, copyright is a direct infringement on free expression. We've just tolerated it because the trade off was worth it. Not worth it because people would get rich and that was import to us. Worth it because having a chance to make money on a creative work encourages the creation of more creative works and having more creative works was important to us.
I'm sure that there were many times in history when someone came up with a good story and got mad that somebody else told a version of that story that others liked better. Not only is the ability to share stories more important than that one guy's feelings, but the result is better stories for everybody. Once people starting selling their creative works and it became easier to copy them we agreed that it was important that people had an opportunity to make money off their efforts so we'd have more works and that's where we started limiting people's freedom. When those limits are reasonable, it's a good deal. A balance where briefly people wouldn't be able to copy someone's work so they had a chance to make money and then later everybody could do whatever they wanted with it.
Recently the media industry has bribed their way into making the restrictions increasingly unreasonable, but we still want people to be able to have a chance to make money on their work so we just need to readjust to something more like what copyright started out as and less like what it's become.
> No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song.
Performance rights were what kept restaurants from singing happy birthday to their customers or paying Warner/Chappell for the privilege until a lawsuit clarified that they didn't have the rights to the song in the first place. By that point they'd already collected 50,000,000 in license fees though because performance rights are real and enforceable.
Realistically, nobody is going to sue you for singing a copyrighted song in public around others, but they could and there's a decent chance you'd lose that legal battle. Similarly, many small businesses will have a radio on or a CD playing that their customers can hear. They can be sued for that as well. Enforcement in that setting is rare enough though that small players take their chances, but big companies with fat wallets are prime targets for lawsuits so they tend to have a licensed solution to avoid massive fines.
With an increasing cost for age, they would eventually be paying an absurd amount for content of decreasing value. Either they end up funding the government massively, or they decide to drop commercially irrelevant copyright.
> Disney are able to pay that amount because their IP is still generating massive income.
That's entirely irrelevant though. The point of copyright isn't to protect income. The point is to encourage the creation of new works. Disney doesn't need 100+ years of exclusive profits on something to encourage them to create new works. Nobody does.
I'd even argue that the more popular a work is the more important it is that it enter the public domain sooner rather than later. The less cultural relevancy something has when it enters the public domain the less likely it will inspire new works to be created.
Another thing that doesn't get brought up enough: Copyright is not really needed to encourage creation.
Suppose Copyright as a concept was overturned and no longer existed. Would Disney just say "Well, it was a great run, but we're going to close up shop and no longer create works." Would an independent artist who needs to paint something decide not to just because it couldn't be copyright?
"The creation of new works" doesn't need to be encouraged. It's the default. Cavemen still carved on cave walls without copyright.
You're absolutely right that artists can't stop themselves from creating, but I think that a reasonable amount of protection still does encourage more works.
Many works require a good deal of investment and time and if people had little to no chance of making money or breaking even on that investment a lot of works wouldn't get made.
Another nice aspect of copyright law is that it establishes where a work originated. Authorship gets lost in a lot of the things we treat as if they don't have copyrights. For example memes, or the way every MP3 of a parody song on P2P platforms ended up listing Weird Al as the artist regardless of his involvement. It also happens in cases where copyright really doesn't exist like with recipes and as a result we don't really know who first came up with many of the foods we love. A very limited copyright term would more firmly establish who we should thank for the things we enjoy.
IMO, copyright is something that should be shorter the bigger the media producer is.
The reason we need a copyright in the first place is to stop someone like disney just vacuuming up popular works and republishing them because they have the money to do it.
Disney, however, doesn't need almost any copyright to still encourage them to make new products. They'll do that regardless.
For an individual author, copyright should basically be for their lifetime. If they sell it, the copyright should only last 5 years after that.
A company like disney should get copyrights for like 1 year.
But also the type of media matters. IMO, news outlets and journalists should get copyrights for 1 day max. Old news is almost worthless and it's in the public interest that news be generally accessible and recordable.
Disney didn't invent (e.g.) Beauty and the Beast. They took an idea and a story in the public domain and retold it. Then they claim ownership of that and sue anyone who uses the same character(s) for the next 75+ years.
This is not "encouraging creation". This is strip-mining our shared culture.
So yeah, agree 100% that this kind of corporate theft needs to be stopped. I can't see that happening in the face of all the money though.
With respect - copyright's protection of income is the point
That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
We would not be having this conversation at all if people weren't able to make money of these works - there'd be no point to copyright at all if there wasn't money to be made (by the artists) and the reproduction of their works wasn't restricting their ability to generate that income (for themselves, or their agents).
I want to emphasise that I am not arguing in favour of the system, only how and why it works this way.
> That's, by design, the tool used to encourage people to invest their time into producing works.
The tool used was control over distribution. If income was the point copyright law could just hand tax payer money over to anyone who created something. That'd guarantee income instead of the system we have which allows artists to invest in the creation of a work and still never make a dime on it. Ultimately though, I do see your point and I agree that making it possible to earn enough money to justify the creation, publishing, and distribution of a creative work was a large part of the intention along with the establishment of the public domain.
I probably should have phrased that as "The point of copyright isn't to protect income until the work is no longer highly profitable"
How does getting tons of money from Disney into a government's tax coffers not benefit society? That's money that the government wouldn't need to directly collect from citizens other ways.
Money going to the government in the form of taxes doesn't necessarily result in a benefit to society at all, let alone one that justifies keeping people from being able to access and expand on their own culture while also killing off all the economic and culture benefits new works would bring.
If Disney had to pay the federal government a few billion each to keep absolute control over their oldest works, every year, no tax games, that would be pretty great for society. But it's also probably true that the tax games would indeed ensue. Something something low trust, we can't have nice things.
>I think I like the idea, but I can't help wondering if it would have unforeseen consequences.
As I said in a sibling comment, quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion as opposed to "final bill that has been revised in committee and is going to the floor for a full vote". The details of implementation are certainly critical, and not trivial either! I'm fully in support of thinking through various use cases. But part of why I'm interested in alternate approaches is that they might give us finer grained tools.
>Could this approach undermine the protections afforded by open-source licenses? (IANAL.)
I have actually considered that as well but didn't add it into a quickie comment. If we take the second path of approaches I listed there, then thinking about it all open source software would fall under a special even more permissive class of the tier 3, in that it already has "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" licensing for all right? Except that it's also free. The motivation here is the "advancement of the useful arts & sciences" and the public good, so having it be explicit that "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."
All that said, I'll also ask fwiw if it'd even be that big a deal given the pace of development? I do think it'd be both ideal and justified if OSS had a longer period for free, that's still a square deal to the public IMO. But like, even if an OSS work went out protection (and keep in mind that a motivated community that could raise even a few thousand dollars would be able to just pay for an extra decade no problem, the cost doesn't really ramp up for awhile [which might itself be considered a flaw?]) after 10 years, how much is it worth it that 2016 era OSS (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window) now could have proprietary works be worth it against 10 year old proprietary software all getting pushed into the public domain far faster? That's worth some contemplation. Maybe requiring that source/assets be provided to the Library of Congress or something and is released at the same time the work loses copyright would be a good balance, having all that available for down the road would be a huge win vs what we've seen up until now.
> quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion
Agreed, and my comment was aimed at exactly that. :)
An example of my concern: What would happen to GPL-licensed software if the copyright expired quickly? Would that allow someone to include it in a proprietary product and (after the short copyright term ended) deny users the freedoms that the GPL is supposed to guarantee? I think those freedoms remain important for much longer than 10 years.
> (and no changes since remember, it's a constantly rolling window)
Do you mean that the copyright term countdown would reset whenever the author makes changes to their work? (I'm not sure if this is the case today.) If so, couldn't someone simply use an earlier version in their proprietary product in order to escape GPL obligations early?
> "if you're releasing under an open source license and thus giving up your standard first, second, and part of your third period of IP rights and monopoly, you're excluded from needing to pay a license fee because you've already enable the public to make derivative works for free for decades when they wouldn't otherwise anyway."
Yes, I think this makes sense. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
> quickie comments on HN should be taken more as mental stimulation and kickoff points for further discussion
Indeed.
Setting aside variable details like time frames and cost structures which can be debated separately, what I found interesting about your suggestion is it's a mechanism to create an escalating incentive for copyright holders to relinquish copyrights even sooner than the standard copyright period. Currently, no matter what the term length, it costs nothing to sit on a copyright until it expires - so everyone does - even if they never do anything with the copyright. And the copyright exists even if the company goes bankrupt or the copyright holder dies. Thus we end up with zombie copyrights which keep lurking in the dark for works which are almost certainly abandon-ware or orphan-ware simply because our current system defaults to one-and-done granting of "life of the inventor + 70 years" for everything.
Obviously, we should dramatically shorten the standard copyright length but no matter what we shorten it to (10, 15, 20 yrs etc) we should consider requiring some recurring renewal before expiration as a separate idea. Even if it's just paying a small processing fee and sending in simple DIY form, it sets the do-nothing-default to "auto-expire" for things the inventor doesn't care about (and may even have forgotten about). That's a net benefit to society we should evaluate separately from debates about term lengths.
I see your suggestion about automatically escalating the cost of recurring renewal as another separate layer worth considering on its own merits. My guess would be just requiring any recurring renewal would cause around half of all copyrights to auto-expire before reaching their full term - even if the renewal stayed $10. The idea of having recurring renewal costs escalate, regardless of when the escalation kicks in, or how much it escalates, is a mechanism which could achieve even more net positive societal benefits by increasing the incentive to relinquish copyrights sooner.
An adversarial approach would also be interesting: People could open positions of "I would buy a right to use this copyright for $XYZ if it was released today"
So the copyright holder would have the option to EITHER cashout at any point (and consider the work/invested effort paid) OR counter-bid the sum of everyone to keep it.
Not sure about the implications, but it would encourage the most (economically) productive route
I'm a big proponent of compulsory licensing, which could certainly be limited to renewals so that creative control is still granted for some amount of time.
No, the problem with this is that a lot of IPs aren't profitable in their initial years, and this pretty strictly encourages property-holding as a business. That's exactly the wrong kind of revenue generation that copyright is supposed to be encouraging. It's empty rent-seeking.
Further, I think that the premise is flawed. Rather than being more protected by being profitable, a work should be less protected the more it has profited the owners. If you can make $50 million profit as an individual from your creative work that took 5 years to produce, then you're done. Dozens of lifetimes of wealth for 5 years of work? No, that's more than enough. You don't deserve more money for that. You have been suitably encouraged. The trouble with that idea is that "creative accounting" is too easy, so that won't really work, either.
I think it should match patent law. 20 years, and that's it. After that, if you want to keep making profit, you need to make something new. Because that's what it's supposed to do: let you make a living if you're able, and encourage you to keep working to create more.
How about something like IP as a tax? IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
I want to be super clear that I'm not proposing some finalized plan or numbers here, it'd need some real work spent hashing it all out. Mainly though I hope people will consider more the huge space of untapped approaches to balancing various benefits and costs towards a better societal outcome. And that maybe that helps a little in getting us out of some of the present seemingly intractable boxes we so often seem stuck in?
Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:
>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.
As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.
But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.
When old art gets a revival like that it's usually because the work is being reused (e.g. song used in an ad, Tv show, movie), something that costs time and money to license when done legally. How many artists lost their chances because navigating copyright is tedious and expensive?
That's how you end up with "Hollywood accounting" where movies that gross over 100M dollars still show as a "loss" for tax purposes via creative accounting methods.
Yep, I've been proposing a similar system literally for decades now in online discussions like this. If you dig through Slashdot posts from 20 years ago, you might find something from me saying something similar.
It makes sense too: some things just aren't very profitable, and some are. If it's really worth it to the creator, they can pay for it. If they want to keep it locked up for 75 years, they better be prepared to pay very handsomely.
One problem I see with this system is: how does someone know if what they're trying to copy is protected by copyright or not? The government would have to maintain a public database to query. Another possible problem is the Berne convention, which harmonizes copyright across countries.
This could lead to a broader culture, because the most popular works would get long copyright protection terms, while the relatively unpopular ones would get short protection terms. People would be more likely to use those unpopular works and perhaps breathe new life into them.
Eg imagine if this is how the system worked right now. You could have streamers watch unpopular (modern) movies with their audience. Or a youtuber could read a book to their viewers (listeners). And it wouldn't have to be content that's 100+ years out of date.
You could also make it so that when the copyright protection first expires then a percentage of the income earned through the use of the work gets paid to the author for some number of years. Eg you're free to use the work, but you've got to pay some percentage of the revenue to the author for 10 years.
>Most Europeans don't live in single family homes for this to be a practical advantage.
Uh, where are you getting that from? From what I can tell at sources like [0] "most" Europeans overall (though with very significant country variance) do live in detached or semi-detached housing. Most also own it. Further, even for those in flats the higher voltage EU's grid runs at still means easier higher kilowatts at parking lot or garage chargers, so it's still an advantage anyway?
>If it's really as bad as all that, they'll patch existing older releases.
They have patched existing releases of iOS 18... but then they artificially restricted those patches only to a couple of phone models that don't support iOS 26. So if you're on a vaguely modern iDevice and are still on 18 because you don't want the new UI and other fuckups you are not allowed to install the patched 18. It'd be one thing if you had a phone that simply never supported iOS 18 at all, or if Apple wasn't patching iOS 18 at all for anyone, but that they've gone to the effort to fix it but then also used it as another lever for force upgrades is really sucky.
To be fair, it would cost them more to fully test the iOS 18 patches on all devices, than what it cost them to test a few devices. So I wouldn't quite call it artificially holding the patches back. But yeah, it is probably mostly motivated by avoiding bad PR of letting slightly-older devices get hacked, and then forcing everyone else to be on the new release. (FWIW I'm running iOS 18 on an iPhone SE 2020, so probably going to have to embrace all the change and bugs in iOS 26.)
>Is it “you are not allowed,” or Cupertino isn’t going to bother developing and testing?
It is very firmly "you are not allowed". In fact you're not even allowed to switch back to iOS 18 at all. Only actively signed iOS IPSWs can be installed (barring historical cases where someone had saved signing tickets). You can see the current status at sites like https://ipsw.me and if you're on any iOS 26 supported iDevice currently only 26.3.1 is signed. The last iOS 18 version was 18.6.2 from August of last year. If you go back to the iPhone XS/XR, you'll see they're still updating iOS 18, with 18.7.6 released two weeks ago (March 4), but they've chosen to force anyone who wants security updates to move to iOS 26 instead.
The rollback provisions, granted. But I’m arguing the other stuff requires QC attention Apple may not want to provide to a legacy line. That isn’t not allowing something that can be done. It’s not building something they don’t want to.
>But I’m arguing the other stuff requires QC attention Apple may not want to provide to a legacy line.
Oh come on. This is HN, we know how development works, how modular an OS, how the patch process works and what that entails for testing in an incredibly restricted and limited hardware base. We know they have no issue doing retroactive updates for quite awhile on the same code base for Macs, which have enormously more hardware variance then iDevices. These are extremely high profit margin premium products. You really don't need to carry water for the multi-trillion dollar megacorp with absolute wide eyed credulity.
And on other systems, even if it wasn't supported, it'd be perfectly possible for hardware owners to patch various components or implement workarounds. It's only on iOS that Apple is utilizing technical controls to stop that dead.
>That isn’t not allowing something that can be done.
Yes, it is. They are 100% using their technical controls built into the underlying hardware and then on up for not allow something that can be done. They could trivially allow hardware owners, even if only as a buy-time option, to have the ability to add their own certificates to the iOS root of trust, and in turn install and modify any software they wished on their own to the extent of their abilities. Apple wouldn't have to do anything except not exert maximal artificial control.
They don't do that. They have the power. It's their responsibility in turn. It's pretty irritating anyone who has been around the block as much as you have would try to white wash that. FFS.
>Beamforming is an old technology though. It's not hard to do
Well, so is satellite launch right? Cost, efficiency, and scaling are hard to do. That's SpaceX's entire raison d'etre. Doing a general public usable all weather maintenance free well designed phased array terminal they can sell for $250 and pump out by the millions is as worthy an achievement as near anything else in the Starlink project. And I'd love if it was more available too even terrestrially, for PtP/PtMP links alignment even motionless is a certain amount of work at long distances. And long range high bandwidth stuff isn't cheap. It'd be pretty cool if you could have units for $250 that you just needed to aim vaguely in the right direction and then it all just worked.
Hardware gets a bit easier in some respects when you have unit scale and don't need to make COGS+margin back on the sale. If Ubiquiti sell a base station, half of the unit price is gross margin. If SpaceX sell a Starlink terminal, they don't even have to cover COGS for it to be a good business case, because they're selling the service not the device.
The Starlink terminal is a very cool piece of kit, but it's not nearly as interesting as what they're hucking into LEO, and how they're doing it.
The answer to a lot of the pollution problems is probably, and perhaps counter intuitively, "even more mass even cheaper, combined with regulations that are enabled by that". The key identified current concern is very specific to aluminum reentry, not just generic "whatever mass". Around 15000 tons of space dust hits the Earth each year no problem, but the chemical composition is quite different from what present typical satellites produce on reentry.
But in turn the composition of present satellites and the nature of their use/lifespan/safety systems has itself been driven heavily by economics. We don't make satellites out of steel or other safer materials not because they don't work, but because of the cost the extra weight imposes. We haven't put satellites in VLEO not because being lower is bad for communications or imaging (it's the opposite, lower is better) because it'd need more satellites, more fuel per sat, and higher cadence, all increasing cost beyond the historic ROI. But Starship or other future fully reusable methalox designs will give us vastly more mass budget and cadence for the same cost. Some of that could result in more trouble with existing designs made for a low cadence/high $/kg environment, because some externalities that were previously acceptable due to lack of scale stop being so at scale. But the same increased budget also means increased budget to ameliorate that. We can trade some of the gains for materials that burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, designs for lowering apparent magnitude to the ground, for better self-destruct and end of life systems, more fail-safety, more redundancy in general, etc etc. And if that requires more regularly replacement that too is made easier but order of magnitude or more lower cost.
Some of this may happen naturally just due to self-interest, but other parts like pollution may require thoughtful regulation. But such regulation will be a much easier lift when it's affordable, so it's worth it to try to maintain an appropriately thoughtful mindset on the benefits vs tradeoffs and how to keep the former while reducing the latter.
While the GUI and other polish certainly makes it more approachable then many I wouldn't really call it "consumer-grade", it's definitely into prosumer/SMB territory. And in that market there are thankfully a number of solid competitors fwiw, both directly the exact same head to head niche (Omada), more disjoint but sometimes higher value deals like Mikrotik, and open source solutions focused on embedded (like OpenWRT) or ones like OPNsense that will run on a vast array of PC hardware. Failover should be pretty straight forward on all of them, whatever is being used for routing just needs at least three network ports (2 or more for WAN, 1 or more for LAN).
Another slightly-above-consumer-grade device is the Firewalla. It works really well, the only time I even notice it's failed over is (a) when I get an alert on the phone and (b) search engine results start coming up in Spanish.
>It’s very disputable whether BEVs are industry’s future
It is not disputable (unless you're including Old Auto lobbyists I suppose). Without government imposed restrictions keeping the public from buying Chinese BEVs without an outrageous markup (or at all) the ICE industry would already be imploding. The government could and should require that all vehicles be under full control of their owners with no remote telematics required, or even allowed necessarily (and heavily restricted even then). That'd resolve concerns about Chinese kill switches or gathering intel data or whatever. But of course the Western industry hates that too because they want to fully enshittify cars next and turn them into locked-in subscription revenue and advertising data sources. So they can't even compete on trustworthiness. Total embarrassment and also long term ruin.
The present gas price mess and global instability Trump has kicked off is just going to draw an even bigger line under both the personal and the national security value of not being tied to any single source of energy for mechanized transportation. BEVs are simply fundamentally superior particularly in a risky world.
Not to mention, regenerative braking. It recovers something like 30% of energy that was previously just wasted, so in terms of having energy independence, it's worth mentioning.
I'll admit I've still stuck with the original FreeBSD based TrueNAS, and still am kinda bummed they swapped it. So it's interesting to see a direct example of someone for whom the new Linux based version is clearly superior. I'm long since far, far more at the "self-hosted" vs "homelab" end of the spectrum at this point, and in turn have ended up splitting my roles back out again more vs all-in-one boxes. My NAS is just a NAS, my virtualization is done via proxmox on separate hardware with storage backing to the NAS via iSCSI, and I've got a third box for OPNsense to handle the routing functions. When I first compared, the new TrueNAS was slower (presumably that is at parity or better now?) and missing certain things of the old one, but already was much easier to have Synology or Docker style or the like "apps" AIO. That didn't interest me because I didn't want my NAS to have any duty but being a NAS, but I can see how it'd be far more friendly to someone getting going, or many small business setups. A sort of better truly open and supported "open Synology" (as opposed the xpenology project).
Clearly it's worked for them here, and I'm happy to see it. Maybe the bug will truly bite them but there's so much incredibly capable hardware now available for a song and it's great to see anyone new experiment with bringing stuff back out of centralized providers in an appropriately judicious way.
Edit: I'll add as well, that this is one of those happy things that can build on itself. As you develop infrastructure, the marginal cost of doing new things drops. Like, if you already have a cheap managed switch setup and your own router setup whatever it is, now when you do something like the author describes you can give all your services IPs and DNS and so on, reverse proxy, put different things on their own VLANs and start doing network isolation that way, etc for "free". The bar of giving something new a shot drops. So I don't think there is any wrong way to get into it, it's all helpful. And if you don't have previous ops or old sysadmin experience or the like then various snags you solve along the way all build knowledge and skills to solve new problems that arise.
One of the most helpful realizations I had as I played around with self-hosting at home is that there is nothing magical about a NAS. You don't need special NAS software. You generally don't need wild filesystems, or containers or VMs or this-manager or that-webui. Most people just need Linux and NFS. Or Linux and SMB. And that's kind of it. The more layers running, the more that can fail.
Just like you don't really need the official Pi-hole software. It's a wrapper around dnsmasq, so you really just need dnsmasq.
A habit of boiling your application down to the most basic needs is going to let you run a lot more on your lab and do so a lot more reliably.
Kind of expanding on this, it feels like a huge chunk of specialized operating systems are just someone just putting their own skin over Debian. The vast majority of services and tools they wrap aren't any more complicated than the wrapper.
Hardware is kind of the same deal; you can buy weird specialty "NAS hardware" but it doesn't do well with anything offbeat, or you can buy some Supermicro or Dell kit that's used and get the freedom to pick the right hardware for the job, like an actual SAS controller.
>it feels like a huge chunk of specialized operating systems are just someone just putting their own skin over Debian. The vast majority of services and tools they wrap aren't any more complicated than the wrapper.
That's exactly what TrueNAS is these days: it's Debian + OpenZFS + a handy web-based UI + some extra NAS-oriented bits. You can roll your own if you want with just Debian and OpenZFS if you don't mind using the command line for everything, or you can try "Cockpit".
The nice thing about TrueNAS is that all the ZFS management stuff is nicely integrated into the UI, which might not be the case with other UIs, and the whole thing is set up out-of-the-box to do ZFS and only ZFS.
There are exceptions to this such as Proxmox which can actually be added to an existing Debian install. I must admit that when I first encountered it I didn't expect much more than a glorified toy. However it is so much more than that and they do a really good job with the software and the features. If anybody is on the fence about it I recommend giving it a go. If you do, I recommend using the ISO to install, pick ZFS as the filesystem (much much more flexible), and run pbs (proxmox backup server) somewhere (even on the same box as an lxc host with zfs backed dir).
Same with a router. Any Linux box with a couple of (decent) NICs is a powerful router. You just need to configure it.
But for my own sanity I prefer out of the box solutions for things like my router and NAS. Learning is great but sometimes you really just need something to work right now!
The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc makes this my favourite too.
Household life is generally in some form of ‘relax’ mode in evening and at weekends. Having no internet or movies or whatever is poorly tolerated.
I wish Apple was even slightly supportive of servers and Linux as the mini is such a wicked little box. I went to it to save power. Just checked - it averaged 4.7w over the past 30 days. It runs Ubuntu server in UTM which notably raises power usage but it has the advantage that Docker desktop isn’t there.
>The fiasco you can cause when you try fix, update, change etc makes this my favourite too.
I think some of the difference between "self-hosted" vs "homelab" is in the answer to the question of "What happens if this breaks end of the day Friday?" An answer of "oh merde of le fan, immediate evening/weekend plans are now hosed" is on the self-hosted end of the spectrum, whereas "eh, I'll poke at it on Sunday when it's supposed to be raining or sometime next week, maybe" is on the other end. Does that make sense? There are a few pretty different ways to approach making your setup reliable/redundant but I think throwing more metal at the problem features in all of them one way or another. Plus if someone moves up the stack it can simply be a lot more efficient and performant, the sort of hardware suited for one role isn't necessarily as well suited for another and trying to cram too much into one box may result in someone worse AND more expensive then breaking out a few roles.
But probably a lot of people who ended up doing more hosting started pretty simple, dipping their toes in the water, seeing how it worked out and building confidence. And having everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other data. Issues with circular dependencies and the like or what happens if things go down when it's not convenient for you to be around in person don't really matter that much. I think anything that lowers the barrier to entry is good.
Of course, someone can have some of each too! Or be somewhere along the spectrum, not at one end or another.
> And having everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other data.
Docker-compose isn’t a backup, but from a fresh ubuntu server install, it’ll have me back in 20 mins. Backing up the entire VM isn’t too hard either.
I was in a really sweet spot and then ESXi became intolerable. Though in fairness their website was alway pure hell.
> And having everything virtualized on a single box is a pretty easy and highly flexible way get going and experiment. Also if it's on a ZFS backing makes "reset/rollback world" quite straight forward with minimal understanding given you can just use the same snapshot mechanism for that as you do for all other data.
Docker-compose isn’t a backup, but from a fresh ubuntu server install, it’ll have me back in 20 mins. Backing up the entire VM isn’t too hard either.
I was n a really sweet spot and then ESXi became intolerable. Though in fairness their website was alway pure hell.
I'm similar to you[0]. I still run FreeBSD TrueNAS, and it's just a NAS. Although I do run the occasional VM on it as the box is fairly overprovisioned. I run all my other stuff on an xcp-ng box. I'm a little more homelab-y as I do run stuff on a fairly pointless kubernetes cluster, but it's for learning purposes.
I really prefer storage just being storage. For security it makes a lot of sense. Stuff on my network can only access storage via NFS. That means if I were to get malware on my network and it corrupted data (like ransomware), it won't be able to touch the ZFS snapshots I make every hour. I know TrueNAS is well designed and they are using Docker etc, but it still makes me nervous.
I guess when I finally have to replace my NAS I'll have to go Linux, but it'll still be just a NAS for me.
Fair point! When I first started on this I went down a deep rabbit hole exploring all the ways I could set this up. Ultimately, I decided to start simple with hardware that I had laying around.
I definitely will want to have a dedicated NAS machine and a separate server for compute in the future. Think I'll look more into this once RAM prices come back to normal.
I'll second this, also adding that while it remains more of a project to setup Frigate has made significant advances over the last few years and has improved a lot. So if you previously looked at it and were put off, might be worth looking at again.
Also fwiw, if someone is willing to spin up a Windows VM or are running that stack anyway than Blue Iris is probably the default contender for local security software, well polished. I know a few people who still keep a single remaining W10 with GPU passthrough install just for that, not even for games anymore where Linux has gotten good enough in the last few years.
All of this though benefits a lot from already having some sort of homelab and/or self-hosted stack. If you do then the marginal investment may be pretty minimal and value quite high as you use it for a lot of other stuff. If starting from scratch it's a lot more of a haul which of course is precisely why a lot of people use other solutions.
I dabbled earlier but started using 1Password in earnest in 2010 or so with 1PW3. There are plenty of things that could be argued about when it comes to the switch from a native Mac application to Electron, degradations in the GUI etc, some of us may be more sensitive then others. But one major objective thing you're apparently missing was the shift to a forced subscription, including deactivating previous supported sharing methods, and with the typical-for-VC-driven-feudalism-model eye wateringly, outrageously expensive and inferior multi-user support. Pure, proud rent seeking. And then naturally as well the artificial segregation of simple features like custom templates began too.
I hope someday that's made illegal. In the meantime there's Vaultwarden.
Another alternative/additional approach would be to split up the nature of copyright, vs an all or nothing total monopoly. Let there be 7-10 years of total copyright, then another 7-14 years where no exclusivity of where it's sold or DRM is allowed, then 7/14/21 years where royalties can still be had but licensing is mandatory at FRAND rates, then finally some period of "creditright" where the creator has no control or licensing, but if they wish can still require any derivative works to give them a spot in the credits.
I think there is a lot of unexplored territory for IP, and wish the conversations were less binary.
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