I would advocate an additional method of supporting open source: contributing. Doesn’t even have to be features. Bug fixes or docs are amazing. Heck even opening really good issues where it’s clear the dev spent time getting a good reproduction. Daniel is a full time maintainer who would benefit from additional income. Many small projects have maintainers that a few dollars might be helpful but help would be more helpful.
I went to some open source confs to promote a book I wrote (https://howtoopensource.dev) and free service (https://www.codetriage.com) and asked people working at booths for large companies if they can contribute to open source at their day job. Only one person had a positive example and in that case their team was literally blocked on the fix and there was no workaround. The rest seemed confused about why they should be spending work time to report issues or fix bugs. Some genuinely didn’t realize that was helpful and that “contributing to open source” doesn’t just mean releasing and maintaining your own code.
So yes, please fund the software you use, also time and attention is valuable too.
Last tip: If you want to make a habit of it, get it tracked like regular work. “Hey, is feature X done, can we move this card over?” …”Actually I still need to report an upstream issue before we are totally done, I’ll make another work item for it and get it checked off today”. If you feel like you would get pushback for that, then start smaller, by filing issues and talking about it after the fact. Most other engineers and quite a few managers see this as going above and beyond for your job.
>And how many of them are donating to or sponsoring the cURL project?
A lot of them are likely using it as part of a game engine that they pay for, those game engines should be supporting the curl project, assuming you believe they have an obligation to do so.
I have been a developer and nerd since 25 years, and I always expected that Apple also patches some previous versions. E.g. around a week ago they released both iOS 17.2.1 and iOS 16.7.4: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222
So why should I assume that latest iOS 16 isn't completely patched? I think it's a shame to say at least that Apple has no public policy of how which OS versions are supported and which are not, it's just guesswork. Whereas I definitely know how long Microsoft supports Windows versions, e.g. Windows 10 until October 14th, 2025: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows...
It's not completely patched. Stop assuming. I've always assumed that Apple or Google or Microsoft consider three factors for deprecated devices or software: 1. Severity of Issue, 2. Expected work required to fix issue, 3. Number of users involved
I think if something is a relatively easy fix and high severity that they will fix it. I don't think they view security updates as a tool to force people to buy new products. The low hanging fruit for large numbers of users gets fixed. The underlying software however, should not be trusted or viewed as secure.
Even though these applications are bundled with the operating system, they are probably separate code bases and if they believe the patch can be accomplished across the versions with minimal work like fixing the same line of code in the old version it probably goes out. If they have to do a major overhall of the old operating system and port the new browser version to the old software, it probably doesn't.
I can only recommend to give Firefox another go, if you don't use it by default. It really has improved the last years, it also had made much progress in privacy features, and doesn't want to kill ad-blocker like Google wants. Also, Firefox on Android finally started supporting extensions.
Another thing: Because no other browser engines are allowed to be installed on iOS, those numbers should be subtracted from the total.
I hear this everytime a thread on HN pops up. Everyone talks about the major improvements, how it performs well nowadays etc. after a few years of perf. issues. But it runs like shit on my Macbook Pro 2019 (Intel) 32GB RAM. Videos freeze, it takes ages to cold start. Every interaction feels slow to me compared to chrome.
NAT64+DNS64 is the best transition method as it eliminates the need for dual-stack.
Clients can be IPv6 only and ideally need a CLAT installed to handle the edge case of IPv4 literals in apps that don't use DNS. The ISP's internal network can be IPv6 only. Only this NAT64 translator needs to speak both IPv6 and IPv4, and only for non-IPv6 traffic.
On hacker news. You're going to find a big contingent of people who are getting things like VPS/colo/dedicated/cloud hosting, only get an IPv6 address on that (or finding that an IPv4 address costs extra) ... and are occasionally finding some customers can't reach their sites without every host having an IPv4 address or paying for something like cloudflare.
So there is a bit of a demand, especially here, for forward compatibility.
I've basically given up reporting bugs with Apple as they just seem to be ignored and either never fixed, or fixed some years later when the corresponding component is completely rewritten.
I basically resent filing bugs with companies that have enough money to do proper testing, I don't want to work for them for free, especially if there is no answer, or a 1st-level answer who hasn't even tried the filed repro case. However, I am happily reporting bugs with open source projects.
