Be careful hosing it down or scrubbing it. Those radiator fins are delicate and shouldn’t be bent or broken.

I won’t say don’t do it because I dunno, its probably fine. But watch a how to video or read up on it first. Just don’t put a firehose on it.

These schools have huge endowments that can fund their entire operation. Cancelling a popular class because it can’t get funding is just a smokescreen for school politics. Someone wants to take things in a different direction.

The esp32 supports efuses that can be used to require a signed binary to boot. So they could lock their hardware to only work with their binary. Source code wouldn’t matter.

Of course if the source is open you can buy and put together your own hardware and then put their code on it.

I’m not advocating what they’re doing. Rent seeking is rent seeking even if they need to recoup development costs. I’d rather pay for open hardware and software with no monthly fee.

Is the list if 40k apps public? Can someone write an app that checks to see if any of them are installed on a phone?

What if the shotgun makes a noise you don’t recognize? Hit it with the toaster?

The free software as a passion project idea became untenable long ago. It works for UNIX style utilities where the project stays small and changes can be managed by one person but breaks down on large projects.

As a user, try to get a feature added or bugfix merged. Its a weeks or sometimes months/years long back and forth trying to get the bikeshedding correct.

As a maintainer, spend time reading and responding to bug reports which are all unrelated to the project. Deal with a few pull requests that don’t quite fit the project, but might with more polish. Take a month off and wait for the inevitable “is this being maintained?” Issues reports.

I contribute back changes because I want those features but don’t want to maintain a longterm fork of the project. When they’re rejected or ignored its demoralizing. I can tell myself “This is the way of open source” but sometimes I just search for another project that better fits my needs rather than trying to work on the one I submitted changes to.

That is the happy path. The sad path of this is how many people look at the aforementioned problems and never bother to submit a pull request because it’s too much trouble? Git removed most of the technical friction of contributing, but there is still huge social friction.

Long story short: the man pages maintainer deserves something for all the “work” part of maintaining. He can continue to not be paid for the passion part.