Ah, that‘s the angle you’re coming from.

In this regard you are right. I could’ve chosen AGPL and use it in my commercial project nonetheless. I wasn’t aware of that at the time, and that was a mistake.

That said, I don’t expect all users to notify me. But if a company like Apple, with millions of users, exposes me to even a fraction of its users - then yes. I expect a mail beforehand. I did not sign up for this.

But I agree with your last part again ;)

To be honest, I wasn’t aware of this option when I wrote this library. Nowadays I would chose this path.

I did not want to make a business out of this library. I don’t want money for it.

All I would’ve wanted is that the people at Apple would’ve given me a heads up beforehand, so I would’ve been prepared for it and not caught on surprise. And a that they do a version upgrade when I release a new bugfix release.

This is not a license issue. I was well aware of the consequences when I chose the MIT license. This is not about money.

Yeah, well. What should I say. I wanted to use it in a commercial project, too :)

Yeah, I was surprised, too. I guess they implemented stuff using Ruby and didn’t bother to write an in-house implementation. 🤷‍♂️

Apple deployed a library I wrote to every mac on the world, and additionally bundles it with Xcode.

Apple users reported some bugs, that‘s how I found out.

I never heard a word from them. No patches, no bug reports, nothing, they didn’t even bother to refresh the bundled version.

I think in the meantime they removed it from macOS but still bundle it with Xcode.

I mean, I didn’t any money, but some appreciation would’ve been nice, and a version refresh…

If you are curious: it is this library: https://github.com/ckruse/CFPropertyList

Edit: appreciation as in: a mail with a notice that they did so.

I believe most of DACH learned writing web pages with SELFHTML. Those were the times :-)

❤️

It’s a pleasure!

It’s a german language forum. I guessed that it is not very interesting to most people reading here because of the language barrier. But I’m happy to share the link: https://forum.selfhtml.org/

yeah, I feel this. Currently it is mainly nostalgia and memorial why we keep it running.

Yes, the uprise of social media was a big hit in traffic.

But I disagree with the smartphone part, quite the opposite. Suddenly the forum was flooded with questions about HTML/CSS/JS issues with smartphones. I suspect that smartphones delayed the drop in postings.

I am running a forum (about web technologies), and have been doing so for about 24 years (damn. I’m old). I had some spam problems, but was able to get rid of it.

It probably helps that I wrote the software myself (24 years ago there weren’t many forum software projects).

But the traffic is declining. The peak was around 2003-2005, with >500 posts per day, and is slowly declining since then with a massive drop last year (about 19 posts per day). Young people only rarely use the forum anymore, despite massive modernization efforts, and the older people slowly disappear.

    1998 |   6686
    1999 |  40528
    2000 |  70379
    2001 |  41129
    2002 | 171294
    2003 | 203642
    2004 | 204685
    2005 | 173659
    2006 | 150000
    2007 | 135936
    2008 | 126283
    2009 |  94894
    2010 |  70333
    2011 |  48691
    2012 |  31197
    2013 |  30606
    2014 |  30227
    2015 |  29334
    2016 |  25472
    2017 |  27505
    2018 |  28551
    2019 |  22366
    2020 |  17250
    2021 |  12794
    2022 |  10135
    2023 |   7151

If the trend continues we will shut it down in a year or two.