This isn't an "everyone who struggles to finish projects or is a perfectionist has it" kind of post, but if this has been a long-term pattern for you, one that's caused real suffering, lost jobs or contracts, or kept you from finishing important work - please consider getting checked for ADHD. It took me 42 years to get diagnosed, and starting on stimulants genuinely changed my life and pretty much solved those issues for me.
I'd call it a net negative. A lot of regulations are straight up good - clean drinking water, food safety, no sketchy chemicals in clothes, electric appliances that don't catch on fire, the GDPR, consumer protections etc etc are all unequivocally good things.
Things like this bring the very useful tool of regulations into disrepute.
The funny thing is, both sides can read your comment and assume you’re talking about the other side having the "wrong" opinion. It’s the kind of platitude that doesn’t really add anything, it just signals that you see yourself as being above "the wrong side", whichever side that happens to be.
This is the kind of story that perfectly captures why “open source” != “freedom.”
You can run 100% FOSS software and still be completely imprisoned if you give control to a middleman.
The company in this story didn’t just sell “support”, they sold permission. They took something open, wrapped it in contracts, lock-ins, and managed-service handcuffs, and then claimed ownership of it. That’s the new vendor lock-in model: control the interface, not the code.
The chilling part isn’t that they could read customer emails, it’s that they thought it was normal. Somewhere between “managed service” and “surveillance,” the moral line vanished, replaced by legalese.
This story should be printed and taped above every government IT procurement desk.
If you don’t own your servers, your keys, and your contracts, you don’t own your data, no matter how “open” the stack is.
I disagree that you can’t own something that isn’t physically controlled by you. Almost all of us have money which is not kept on our persons or property, in banks and investments. I think people would be outraged if someone told them it belonged to the bank.
What’s really important is the laws and regulations governing ownership. Ownership in a modern society is nearly entirely a legal construct. Ownership of data shouldn’t be any different.
> I think people would be outraged if someone told them it belonged to the bank.
You might find it interesting to read about 2013 Cyprus bank levy then. The government unilaterally raided people's savings accounts, taking between 6.75% and 10% as a one-off tax with essentially no warning. When you put money in the bank you are implicitly accepting the (small but real) risk that the government will come along and say "I'm having some of that" and there's nothing you can do about it.
More anecdotally, I once had to help a family friend sue a bank for several tens of thousands of pounds in the UK because they refused to pay him back his balance when he closed the account and refused to explain the reason. It took a little over 6 months to get the money back. While researching the case, I discovered countless other cases in which businesses had gone bankrupt because of delays in recovering their money from the bank. Under UK legislation, banks can and do do this if they have "suspicions" of money laundering (which can be triggered for any reason whatsoever - the suspicion doesn't have to be reasonable). Not only do they not have to explain to the customer what those suspicious are, they are legally required not to. They can hold onto your money for up to 31 days and this can be extended to up to 6 months by a court order after a hearing which you will be excluded from and likely not even know took place until after the fact.
Legally you do not own your money in the bank. Instead you own a "chose in action" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chose) which is the right to sue the bank for the money. Although it sounds similar to outright ownership, it's not the same thing.
The government could also tax you an extra $5000 out of nowhere by pushing a law through. That levy happened to go for bank accounts but the general concept isn't tied to whether your money is stored personally.
Freezes are a big problem but they don't get to keep it. The delay is the problem, not a transfer of ownership.
Nonetheless, there's a fundamental legal difference between ownership (e.g. of the notes and coins in your pocket) and a chose in action (the right to sue the bank for the money which you don't own).
If you own something and someone withholds it from you, in the general case that's theft. Because theft is a criminal offence, people generally won't risk doing it. With a chose in action, you have to sue in a civil court for damages. In the meantime, the bank might go bust, you might lose your case, you may give up without even going to court because the amount they've kept isn't worth the time and legal costs of recovery.
You've probably heard the phrase "possession is 9/10ths of the law". If the government introduces a no-warning one-time $5000 levy, they still have to recover the money from you. The effort of doing so is on them and they have the burden of proof. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Maybe you'll decide to leave the country before the legal process concludes. These are some of the advantages of ownership.
When the money is in the bank, the bank and the government can simply agree (without a court's involvement) that you owe the $5000 and there is nothing you can do other than try to sue the bank (and likely lose) because you never owned the money in the first place. The burden of proof shifts to you and it's unlikely you'll ever see that money again.
> I disagree that you can’t own something that isn’t physically controlled by you.
We're not talking about "something" in general, but about digital infrastructure.
> Almost all of us have money which is not kept on our persons or property, in banks and investments. I think people would be outraged if someone told them it belonged to the bank.
A better analogy is if you have a cryptocurrency wallet managed by Coinbase. You don't own. And they can in fact suspend your account (and probably take your crypto) if they don't like you.
I’m not sure that analogy contradicts ownership. Physical assists can be seized or stolen also (if Deloitte’s AI doesn’t like you) but it doesn’t negate the concept of ownership of those
Maybe possession would be a more accurate legal term? You can own something that isn’t in your possession (eg might have been loaned, stolen, etc) or possess something that you don’t own (eg the other side of the transaction)
> If you don’t own your servers, your keys, and your contracts, you don’t own your data, no matter how “open” the stack is.
Quite true, but the choice is nearly never between an agency letting someone else own the data and owning it themselves. The idea of switching in one fell swoop from a labyrinth of duplicative, proprietary SaaS/hosted systems to self-managed open source is a fantasy for all agencies. Even if we take that as the goal (not necessarily something I agree with), nobody can get there in a single migration/political season/anything short of years.
Rather, the near-term choice is between who and how many parties own the data. Do you work with a stack of midsize cloud resellers, each of which has questionable quality and a lot of experience maximizing government revenue via advantageous connections and contracts? Or do you work with one of the hyperscaler clouds--higher quality, less specifically designed to exploit gov (I said less, GovCloud, now get your hands out of my wallet!), slightly more friendly to "build what you want how you want" approaches?
Neither of those approaches lets you take ownership of your servers/data/contracts fully. But the latter moves you closer to that ideal; the former does not.
Exactly this happened to European hardware startups. So many certifications and directives, weee, rohs, reach, red, supply chain, sustainability, etc. Logical step as an investor is to avoid ventures, that are burning tons of money just to comply with regulations. The company I work for right now has healthy cashflow and people for regulatory topics, but it would be impossible to re-create this electronics business today.
Even if you get EU grant, you can't run a startup that way. You have to basically have full plan set in stone, and you will be checked if it was fulfilled to avoid waste of EU money.
The problem is that you cannot pivot easily, you cannot change a lot of things in it - and even things like your potential hire bailing last minute can be devastating, paperwork wise.
Sadly this + unsustainable love for social welfare will lead Europe to lose long term life quality and possible wealth. They don't like innovators there now, that is for sure.
I’ll probably get downvoted (edit: already seeing that) just for pointing this out, but the best available estimates suggest that Wikipedia’s volunteer editor community leans heavily left wing politically. In the U.S., editors identify as Democrats at about three times the rate of Republicans. Make of that what you will.
> editors identify as Democrats at about three times the rate of Republicans
This seems to presume that the desireable middle ground would be the average of two US parties. But Wikipedia is global. (Not to imply it would be fine for the US, but that's another argument)
More interesting to me is the study that shows that Wikipedia editors start off being very radical (who else is going to invest the effort required), but moderate significantly over time.
Can't find the link I wanted, it was on HN this year, IIRC.
Exactly what you’d expect given any moderated system. Certainly you can learn what will not be accepted and moderate one’s approach without sctually shifting ideologically.
Counter-evidence: the rest of the internet. Reddit and pretty much all other large Internet sites are highly moderated and radicalize people, they don't moderate them.
Yeah, but Wikipedia doesn't work the same as Reddit. Wikipedia insists on verifiable sources, and wants to be a universal and reliable source of information for everybody. Reddit has no such aspirations (though it can still be remarkably useful at times).
No, it does not, hence the name. It is a reaction to the way Wikipedia has been taken over, not an honest effort to create a true encyclopedia.
A better solution would be to create a Wikiproxy which adds the missing viewpoints to Wikipedia articles without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This will be impossible for some articles which are too heavily slanted but even there such articles can be included as an addendum to real NPOV articles. Such a proxy should do away with the 'Perennial Sources' scam which is used by Wikipedia to keep out dissenting voices, relying on editors to weed out nonsense.
Now that I think of it there might be a way to get something off the ground fairly quickly by creating a 'meta-encyclopedia engine' which pulls in articles from several user-definable sources, e.g. Wikipedia, Britannica, Everything2 and whatever other sources [1] and allows editors to comment on subjects by referring to content from upstream articles as well as by adding their own content.
I think it just seems that way because at this period in time, truth, science, and facts are seen as left-wing. Although universities have always been interested in exploring new ideas, which probably tends towards progressiveness.
One thing to consider is that Republican affiliation is a minority opinion, so it makes sense that they would be outnumbered in a random sampling, though I would expect 2:1 rather than 3:1.
According to Pew’s most recent National Public Opinion Reference Survey (Feb–Jun 2025), 46% of Americans identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, and 45% identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/fact-sheet/party-affili...
In a truly random U.S. sample you would expect Republican identifiers to be nearly as numerous as Democratic identifiers.
Those in the United States who choose to contribute to a collaborative encyclopedia likely don't mirror the population as a whole; it's reasonable to assume they're more formally educated and more technically oriented, traits that tend, on average, to correlate with liberal or left-leaning political views.
Conservatives are making up their own reality as they lie and hate their way through life. What I make of that editor ratio is that Wikipedia will remain truthful and less corrupt when presenting factual information - and not yet another propaganda mouthpiece.
My make of it is the Left wing social values and perceptions of reality are broadly more tolerated than those of the far right that is complaining.
Is an editor "evil" for deleting or debating the addition of a politically charged article? Come on.
I weep for this country: if we had a voting system that allowed multiple parties (>2) to really compete, we could have an intellectually honest right wing.
Can you not just say 'right' without the need to add 'far' in front of it?
Do you consider the left wing to be intellectually honest in your country? If so, why? Could you explain in your own words why the right wing is not intellectually honest while the left wing supposedly is? It all sounds rather strange to me considering the way left-wing politics is so often driven by feelings instead of facts.
You berate me for being specific and then you overgeneralize without providing any personal detail.
The left in the US ranges from "preserving the ante-Trump status quo for the administrative state and rule of law and centrism" to "publicly funded healthcare and more action on climate change".
The right, which to your credit is most of the Republican party, is silent or else cheering the destruction of the United States government and are either tree sonally malicious in their desire to weaken our economy and national security, or path etically ignorant to the fact it's already happened.
The right operates on feelings of misplaced anger and economic and geological ignorance.
> Could you explain in your own words why the right wing is not intellectually honest while the left wing supposedly is?
This one is easy. The right wing is peddling lots of conspiracy theories and misinformation, and is more likely to embrace those that don't originate with them. This isn't just true in US politics (where the effect is blatantly obvious), but it's also something I see (to a lesser degree) in Dutch politics, for example.
I don't know why this is the case, and I don't think it's universally the case, but at this particular moment in history, it's very much the case.
> It all sounds rather strange to me considering the way left-wing politics is so often driven by feelings instead of facts.
I'm afraid the opposite is true. Again, look at US politics, but also for example the irrationality around the Brexit vote. That was entirely driven by feelings, not facts. Conservative politicians promised nonsensical and contradictory things, and obviously were unable to deliver.
Which is ironic given the origin of the name, Electronic *Arts* once positioned themselves as a haven for “software artists,” treating games as creative works on par with music and film. Now they feel more like a licensing machine, recycling IP until it’s dry and chasing live-service revenue. The contrast between what the name promised and what the company became is kind of bleak.
The irony really kicks in when you start to remember all the arguments for how capitalism leads to the best products. Seems we forgot to clarify "best for who?", but it's clear at least shareholders won something.
Indie games are a product of capitalism too. RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, etc. All products a functioning market just as much as the latest AAA shovelware is.
It's thanks to capitalism that you get to choose which one you want to play.
Eh, I think we'd probably have a lot more indie games if we did not live in a society with few safety nets where one really needs a good paying job to survive.
> You're saying that like it's some obvious truth, and only exists because of capitalism, yet you provide no proof it is actually like that.
You're statement about EA and capitalism implies that the current market is a result of capitalism. If the market is a capitalist market, as you a state, then all the products of that market can be equally attributed to capitalism, can they not?
Capitalism (the free market, more accurately) is what led to those games existing and your ability to choose to play them. You can easily imagine a world where software engineers were subject to licensing requirements (like lawyers, doctors, etc) and software that was run on your PC was subject to a state approval process.
The ability of a single person to use their time and money how they see fit to create products that other people can choose to use (or not use) based on their own personal choice is the ideal of capitalism.
> You're statement about EA and capitalism implies that the current market is a result of capitalism.
Why does it imply that? The only implication that is clear from what I initially said is that capitalism can turn good companies like EA into whatever it is today, not that every single product on the market is the result of capitalism.
I disagree. Filming Airsoft is no more intrusive than filming football matches or paintball. It’s a public-facing hobby where documenting the experience is part of the culture, and that’s a big reason the sport grows and attracts new players.
UK law already strikes the right balance: you’re free to record in public or semi-public spaces unless there’s a specific ban, while also having protections against harassment or misuse. That’s a sensible framework we should never dilute with “consent-by-default” rules, which would only stifle creativity and community sharing. If you join a hobby where cameras are standard, it’s fair to expect that presence, not to restrict others’ enjoyment because of hypothetical discomfort.
If you don’t like that, nothing stops you from setting up your own private games with different rules
The most cynical part is that Labour spent years accusing the Tories of wanting to do this, then introduced it themselves, dressed up as a way to cut migration. And now, if you oppose the ID, they smear you as being pro–illegal immigration.
This is some very impressive politicking and exactly why many people don't trust the mainstream political parties.
The immigration angle is a total fraud. If they wanted to do any of the things being implied they could have done so ages ago, they don't care. it's true that the ease of accessing the grey economy is a pull to the country but you can just... not let them in.
edit: an interesting example of this that I find quite fascinating is that the amount of automation in things like car washing is declining because the automatic ones are being undercut by quasi unregulated alternatives that don't clean up the chemicals properly and so on
Have any of those petitions ever changed anything? I might as well shout 'I don’t want a digital ID' down the toilet, it’d be just as effective. And that’s coming from someone who’s against digital IDs.
Well, 2 million plus have signed the petition and 90% of those people will go along with the scheme when it is introduced - because it will be convenient to do so.
Tell me how you plan to survive living off-grid whilst standing firm against it.
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