That moment when you tell the head of IT that he 'bought' licenses for a deprecated version of an open source engine for 300K 🤣

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

MIT License is one hell of a drug

This is something I think about a lot. Value of Licenses in open source! As long as it is open source people don't seem to care much about the license attached to it.
There is this portfolio a girl desiged and created herself and made it open source. And she clearly states that she spent hours of time designing it so if you use this then do make sure give credit in the footer saying she designed it. Then I see a lot of people using her repo as their own with zero credit to her. That's just awful.

Most useless feature: an extension that did the exact same thing as an opensource extension so that the company could hide the code and not include licenses (???)

ps.: they obviously used open source frameworks and libraries

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

Don't forget, docker desktop will require paid licenses after 31/1/22

Docker Desktop remains free for small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in annual revenue), personal use, education, and non-commercial open source projects.

Just a friendly reminder to fuck docker and migrate to a better solution.

Does anyone of you know a good website where I can learn about open-source licenses?
I've written a small terminal-based passwords-manager in Go want to open-source it and some of the libraries I've written for it.

Just found out that my project bought intellij idea's licenses just for two of the laziest devs while the rest of us are stuck with open source ides

The way I understand software licenses.

Cool bro MIT: Free to do whatever you want as long as you include a copy of the license and you can't hold the original accountable.

fair dude Apache 2.0: Like the MIT license but more bureaucratic and few more minor things you need to keep track of.

scumbag GPL: free as in the same way that prison food is free. used by java in gotcha cases as a source of revenue because no one understands java licensing. Often used in the form of a deterrent so you never dare to open up the github page.

scumbag GPL who, realising they have no friends, becomes slightly less of a dick LGPL: But please stop using this and use our more restrictive "freedom" license.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.

I learned over this weekend that there are no good tape backup systems for Linux. Oh sure, there are a couple of open source projects like Bacula and AMANDA, but they're both a bit too much on the .conf file hell side for me. And fuck literally everything about .tar scripts.

And then you've got things like Backup Exec that, while having its own problems like not being hostable on a Linux machine, will talk to a Linux machine and its connected tape devices with very little hassle.

Linux people: UX is important! Licenses for expensive software are often cheaper than teaching people how to use obtuse systems!

I no longer have commercial licenses for Visual Studio at home.

I'm looking at getting VS Code. I can keep support for C#, and also do any HTML5 and PHP here. It looks promising because it is free, open source, and uses an environment I'm already familiar with. Projects I work on at home ate usually single developer projects.

Thoughts?