17 ms·

I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

796 points by ekiauhce 1y ago

froh 1y ago
(2022)
NoboruWataya 1y ago
Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).
- diggan 1y ago
  > But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.
  - rafaelm 1y ago
    Probably because in our countries (I'm also from S.America) the reliability of the post office is questionable at best, so it wasn't something I ever really used.
    - Symbiote 1y ago
      In most/all of Europe, letter volumes are reducing but they're still used. Even where email is common, letters are usually possible. In your country, - how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires? - how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity? - how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
      - tranceylc 1y ago
        All of these examples are about receiving though.
        Symbiote 1y ago
        Yes, but that's still dependent on the reliability of the post office.
      - sdf4j 1y ago
        To answer your questions: receiving letters is easy, companies know how to do it. Sending letters is not common for the public.
      - johannes1234321 1y ago
        Danish Post will soon terminate general mail delivery due to low need. https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-mail-ce78db2f2234a50e676063fac790a617 https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-m... To our questions from Germany: - by Post, but I can imagine this changing as payment via phone/watch/... is spreading and I can imagine banks willing to reduce cost, making physical cards an paid extra. - on my contract via e-mail and the energy company's website. There are paper based contracts available, though. - In Germany/Europe SEPA wire transfers work well for that and are being used for decades, even with online banking being wide spread in the 90ies. (Pre Internet via BTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext )
      - warp 1y ago
        You physically go to the bank. The electricity company has their own employees to deliver paper monthly statements to all their customers, they can attach other communications if needed. My bank has a connection to the electricity company, and can look up in realtime what my open balance is, which you can view and pay in the banking app. You can also pay it in cash at various offices (e.g. Western Union) around the city. You can also just give the electricity company permission to automatically take it out of your account every month (ppl don't trust the electricity company to get the amount correct, so folks don't usually do this. I do this for the water bill though). (this is my experience living in Ecuador for 10 years, I'm from the Netherlands, most of this is weird to me :)
- remram 1y ago
  The paper size and foreign stamps make sense, but I must say the inability to use a pen surprised me a little more.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    I'm not an American and I did write letters in my country of origin as a kid, but one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address - you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. If you're used to writing on lined paper because that's the standard in your country (including envelopes!), it can be frustrating. The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%82#/media/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:%D0%93%D0%BB%D1%83%D1%85%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B5_%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A0.png https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...
    - cormorant 1y ago
      Do they still say Министерство связи СССР ?
      - int_19h 1y ago
        They did for a few years after USSR was gone, as they were still going through old supplies. AFAIK modern Russian ones just say "Почта России", but the overall design is retained, including pre-labelled lines for various parts of address.
    - rascul 1y ago
      > one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years. Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.
- 3np 1y ago
  Sending physical mail is one thing. I no longer consider myself "digital native" after reading this: > Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    I grew up pre-smartphone (pre-Web, partially, even) and even through college probably half my total output for school was hand written (friggin' blue book exams, LOL) Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year. I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.
  - slightwinder 1y ago
    Even digital natives are using pens with their smartphones and tablets these days. It's just a choice now whether you use them. Though, not sure whether kids these days are still learning it in school.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xTJ 1y ago
  Sending mail being a challenging or difficult thing does come across as odd to me, being in Canada and born in the late 90s. Sure I haven't mailed a letter in a couple years, but when I do the main hassle is just finding where I put my stamps. I can however understand that finding return postage would be a hassle; I'm not sure why the UK and Canada (amongst others) don't do IRCs anymore. It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
- palata 1y ago
  Agreed. I am a millennial, so most likely older than the author. Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind. I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff. I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).
  - alias_neo 1y ago
    > but ordering stamps... on eBay OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps. As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me. I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
    - mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Sure but, on the other hand, this was overly kind of him. In general, unless it is explicitely requested that you must provide a stamped envelope for the reply the assumption of snail mail is that each side pays for its own envelopes and stamps.
      - palata 1y ago
        And you could also put a dollars bill in the envelope?
        FeepingCreature 1y ago
        From the UK...?
        pansa2 1y ago
- bradley13 1y ago
  Honestly, sending letters is increasingly alien: I rarely send one letter per year. This year I have sent two, only because I am trying to contact an incredibly old-fashioned directorate of the German government that doesn't seem to have an email address. The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- liampulles 1y ago
  Sending international postage in my country (South Africa) is not a very reliable process, so couriers and email are used quite heavily here instead. Its not necessarily an age thing.
- drivingmenuts 1y ago
  I have a roll of Forever stamps, purchased years ago. I don't even remember why, specifically, I purchased them. In theory, I could post a letter on my deathbed (I'm Generation X, so it's not that far off) and be assured that the delivery fee is covered by the cost of one stamp. Unfortunately, most of the people I would wish to correspond with will also be deceased at that time. So … I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.
- rwmj 1y ago
  Disappointed that International Reply Coupons are no longer a thing too! I used one back in the 1980s to write to the authors of the Power C compiler[1] in the US about a bug (yes, a bug report by mail). I enclosed an IRC in case they wanted to reply. They were kind enough to write back, and didn't use the IRC (but sent it back). They did however include a floppy disk with the fixed compiler, which was nice of them. [1] Still around: http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
  - relistan 1y ago
    I still use them for ham radio QSL cards. They work everywhere that is a member of the Universal Postal Union (nearly all are). You can buy them online from Swiss Post. They will mail them for free. https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/registered-prepaid/international-reply-coupon/p/554094 https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility Which changes as times change. In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access. Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult. But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible. In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into. Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable! Accessibility and convenience >> convenience
  - Misdicorl 1y ago
    > the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible. This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.
    - creaturemachine 1y ago
      You're paying that cent, but in the form of endless ads hijacking your consciousness.
      - overtomanu 1y ago
        you can still do some setup and access mail by using applications like thunderbird, which have no ads.
        odo1242 1y ago
        Or use an adblocker
- ryandrake 1y ago
  > Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    > I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. Some adults were born in 2007
    - xmprt 1y ago
      Younger than Gmail, YouTube, and the iPhone.
      - layer8 1y ago
        The iPhone is not yet 18.
        adastra22 1y ago
        By only two months.
    - bigstrat2003 1y ago
      Anyone, even someone born in 2007, should know how to use pen and paper. This is a basic component of being an educated person, not knowing how to do that is as shocking as being illiterate.
      - 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago
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- SpaceNoodled 1y ago
  I think the strangest part is that it had been years since they had used a pen.
  - immibis 1y ago
    Keeping a pad of paper at your computer is one of those underrated things. You'd think the computer can record information just like the paper, and it can, but psychology is weird.
    - SpaceNoodled 1y ago
      Agreed. Grabbing a pen and a post-it is faster for me than opening a text document, and a pad of paper allows me to format and diagram things freely. The post-its can be sorted, stacked, moved, stuck to pertinent notebook pages, altered, and ultimately recycled when they are no longer relevant. It's much freer than a document on a phone or computer, where it can still be a pain to move information from one domain to another.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  I don't send letters by post but I often need to send packages by post. Perhaps it's returning some merchandise where the merchant didn't have free shipping. Perhaps it's shipping a security key to a close friend so I can have offsite backup of a key. When I moved, I got rid of my book collection by asking friends which books they wanted and I shipped it to them (media mail is cheap). It's efficient to transmit information over the internet, but it's still essential to send physical items by post. When I visit USPS branches, I always see plenty of people mailing packages.
- Scoundreller 1y ago
  > Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time. Sometimes I cut out my address from a bill and tape that on as my return address. I know it’s formatted right. I’d definitely do the same on a “self”-addressed stamped envelope that I need returned.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  As far as I know there are still some things you have to post in the UK, like sending your cut up old driver's licence to the DVLA and maybe you still have to post your V5 when you sell a car. OP might not own a car or drive, though, so who knows?
  - desas 1y ago
    V5Cs have been online for 3-4 years now. You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.
- wink 1y ago
  I mean, yes it reads a little awkward, but not too long ago I had misplaced the stack of envelopes + stamps I keep in my desk drawer and I needed to send something by snail mail (hey, remember that term?) and yeah. I am not someone who takes notes on paper, so I'm holding a pen only about once a week (the years quoted in the article sounds weird even to me) and it was a bit of a task (the whole sending, this time, not the writing). Bonus points for trying to use up old stamps when they're constantly changing the needed amount every couple years - so I usually need to put about 3 stamps even for local postage. But I guess that's just because I'm cheap and don't want to buy "new" code stamps when I have about 20 EUR in old stamps I can still use up. Always interesting discussions with my wife who works in an office where paper mail, fax machines, and signing things on paper all happen multiple times every single day.
- lproven 1y ago
  > it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Indeed. The author also seems unaware that a 1991 document could not contain a Web address because the world wide web did not exist yet. They guess it is because it is not widely available. That astonished me.
- elzbardico 1y ago
  Man. I am generation-X, from a time when teachers would take the kids to a local post office and teach them how to send a letter and a telegram. And yet, while I have a vague idea of how could I send a letter nowadays, I would have absolutely no idea of how to send postage for the international return.
diggan 1y ago
> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the US and some other countries decided to do things differently... As a European, I don't think I've ever seen something not A4 or A3/A4 in a professional context in my life, ever. Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so), and do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing? Or just happens to be something FSF only seem to be doing?
- jodaco 1y ago
  It’s a US thing and most printers in the US default to it. You would be hard pressed to find someone who knows what A4 is. Letter size is 8-1/2 x 11 inches by US standards.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    I've found that many Americans know what A4 is - that "weird European size that doesn't print right".
- robin_reala 1y ago
  It’s US standard. Hence the infamous default PC LOAD LETTER message on HP printers that made zero sense to anyone outside the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER
  - bombcar 1y ago
    PC isn't Personal Computer, it's Paper Cartridge. That's the missing link for Americans.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    That's implying it made sense to people in the US...
PaulRobinson 1y ago
I'm interested in hearing from someone at FSF (and I used to know someone, but I don't think he's there any more), who can tell us how often this has happened. I can't imagine it's a frequent occurrence.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  Yeah I sort of hoped it would cover that bit not just the author's foibles at writing a letter.
- bluGill 1y ago
  As I implied in my top level comment, it should happen more often than it likely does. If you work on a commercial project with any GPL code ask your test group who has done that and when - if you don't see a lot of hands go up then your test group isn't doing their job. (if you are only automated tests, then I assume you have an automated test to send this letter and verify the response)
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    For April fools I should set up an API for sending postal mail as a service
    - xoe26 1y ago
      https://docs.lob.com/#tag/Letters https://docs.lob.com/#tag/Letters
    - layer8 1y ago
      I’m pretty sure that’s a common business use case.
      - razakel 1y ago
        Yeah, there's several companies that do it.
- stusmall 1y ago
gwd 1y ago
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes... Wow -- I mean, sure, I don't use a pen that often, but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month...
- dharmab 1y ago
  I'm at the point where the only things I handwrite are gift labels and holiday cards. Maybe an occasional doctor's office form, but those are increasingly digital.
- int_19h 1y ago
  I can't even remember the last time I've used a pen for anything other than writing a check.
  - cormorant 1y ago
    Well, there's my minimum of once per month :)
  - maccard 1y ago
    I've never written a check in my life.
    - dharmab 1y ago
      How do you pay for things above a few thousand dollars? I guess if you don't ever buy a pricey car or own a home you wouldn't need it.
      - gwd 1y ago
        Not the person you're replying to, but the bank payment system in Europe is waaaay better than the US; nearly all four- and low-five-digit sums in the last 20 years I've paid for with bank transfer.
      - Gnuke 1y ago
WaitWaitWha 1y ago
This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author. I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
- munchler 1y ago
  > flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) These are called “index cards” in the US, although you can certainly use them to make flash cards if you want. Source: Am old enough to have used index cards unironically.
  - NelsonMinar 1y ago
    my flash cards all store at least 32 GB of data but are so tiny I keep losing them.
- voidUpdate 1y ago
  What places don't have postcards? Whenever I go to places in the UK, tourist tat shops will often have hundreds of them in every flavour of souvenir
  - alberto-m 1y ago
    It seems to be a cultural thing. As an European I am used to find postcards in every town, but when I went to Singapore I had a hard time procuring them. None of the souvenir shops had them, and when I asked the employees they often looked at me as if I were some kind of strange animal. I finally found a small, dusty selection in the darkest corner of a huge department store.
  - philipwhiuk 1y ago
    I always like to buy a postcard. Occasionally actually post them before I leave a place (ideally soon after I arrive). Generally they arrive substantially after I get back.
cormorant 1y ago
Different addresses are stated in different copies of the license. https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 has: "59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA" https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address. https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: " Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text." Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).
yapyap 1y ago
> as I haven’t used a pen in several years Lol this is a bit ridiculous but a fun blogpost!
pabs3 1y ago
The FSF has moved address at least once, and more recently, now closed their offices entirely. I wonder if the new owners of their old addresses will or did get confused by copy-of-GPL requests.
- vinceguidry 1y ago
  Postman probably just redirects, with a business or institution it's easy to just have the Post Office direct all mail addressed to "Free Software Foundation" to the current address.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    For a few months. The post office will do it for anyone for a few months, but then they stop forwarding mail. Maybe businesses get that treatment longer, but when people move they only get a few months.
    - jen20 1y ago
      Standard US Mail forwarding is 12 months and may be extended for a further 18 months.
    - thesuitonym 1y ago
      Standard mail forwarding is one year, and you can extend that for an additional 18 months. I don't know of any reasonable person who would call that "a few months"
  - pabs3 1y ago
    They don't have a current address to redirect to, they went completely virtual.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mattl 1y ago
  I used to work at the FSF and one of my jobs was replying to these letters. They would be so infrequent by 2008 that I think I handled less than 10 in my time there. I sent way more copies of books to prisoners who requested them, gave more tours of the office, etc. I also did some other stuff when I worked there but if you were to look at the FSF website today you might think I’m still there as pages often have the name of the person who created the page listed as the author still. The FSF has moved a few times. * 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge. * 59 Temple Place, Boston * 51 Franklin St, Boston * 31 Milk Street, Boston The first address wasn’t around for too long, but does still exist. It’s an office building above a bank in Central Square, Cambridge right above the Red Line stop. The second address was around for a long, long time. A few years ago, the building was demolished and turned into a hotel. I don’t know if 59 Temple Place is still a valid address or not. For this one, I found many of most frequent places and filed bugs to get it updated. Greg K-H helped me update the kernel and many of the issues I opened got resolved with other projects. Worth noting too that the FSF had two different offices in the same building but mail would go to the building. Mail did forward from here to the next address for a while, but I’m not sure if it’ll forward again to the latest address. 51 Franklin St is just around the corner from 59 Temple Place. When they moved here, many staff were able to walk their stuff over to the new office. This one finally closed last year. I worked here my entire time at the FSF. The final one is a PO Box but also around the corner from 51 Franklin St.
bluGill 1y ago
At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly. A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license. The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".
- diggan 1y ago
  An updated version would say to make sure every email address you use/show in the application/terms/policies are usable and someone receives it. When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
- terinjokes 1y ago
  Why should the test process be sending physical letters (edit: in 2025)? Nothing in the GPLv2 requires a physical letter. The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.
  - 1y ago
terinjokes 1y ago
A few countries I'll be visiting this summer still sell International Reply Coupons. It might be interesting to pick some up and see how difficult it is to exchange them. Would a PostNL point even know what to do with one?
- relistan 1y ago
  As a ham radio operator who still likes paper QSL cards, I’ve bought international reply coupons from Swiss Post because they still sell them and you can order them online (I live in Ireland but here they no longer sell them). Any postal service that is a member of the Universal Postal Union (nearly all of them are AFAICT) is obliged to accept them. They work in most places.
  - terinjokes 1y ago
    Hey, I'm KG8ORS. It's been aong time since I've sent a QSL card (and I've never received one), but it's where I first heard about IRCs. I agree that UPU members are required to accept them. PostNL closed all of their post offices a few years ago in favor of contracting out to businesses, who may not be familiar with them. It looks like Omniva (aka/fka Eesti Post) also ships worldwide and charges in Euro.
maxloh 1y ago
Perhaps the FSF got confused about which license the author was referring to, or perhaps they intentionally mailed back GPL v3 — this isn't the first time they haven't been generous. In the old days when they released GPL v3, Linus Torvalds considered it "not the same license at all". He felt betrayed because the FSF "try to sneak in these new (tivoization) rules and try to force everybody to upgrade". People could fork the Kernel and relicense the fork in a way that prevented him from merging their improvements upstream. He referred to the FSF's move as "dishonest", "sneaky" and "immoral" and decided he would "never have anything to do with the FSF again". https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU
- coldpie 1y ago
  > Perhaps the FSF got confused about which license the author was referring to When no version is specified in the request, returning the latest version seems like a reasonable thing to do.
  - maxloh 1y ago
    IMO, the correct response would be "Hey we have version 1, 2, and 3 of this license, all of them have been attached. Please make sure which one you were talking about".
    - coldpie 1y ago
      That would also be reasonable, sure. Triple the cost though!
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roywashere 1y ago
That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product: https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d77e250fc33baccd4e0 https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d... And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'
- craniumslows 1y ago
  The FSF offices have moved again if you weren't aware. The new address is Free Software Foundation 31 Milk Street, # 960789 Boston, MA 02196 USA https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/mailing https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/mailing
  - collinfunk 1y ago
    In Gnulib we distribute and use the license with just a link to <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/> [1]. I would just use that. Many GNU projects use a rule that will fail 'make distcheck' when it sees an address in the sources [2]. [1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=bf31b26be8574bd64fbd7e5456740d7d029b311c https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=bf31... [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=086c5c1c67b379ffcdbad47460e1366a35f8b8c0 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=086c...
    - pabs3 1y ago
      Hmm, I wonder if there is a linter somewhere for copyright notice and license grant smells. Made a note to add an fsf-address check to check-all-the-things.
deleted 1y ago
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sinuhe69 1y ago
It would be a perfect story for the "Dull Men Center" or alike :D
martopix 1y ago
Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; Really??
VikingCoder 1y ago
I think these licenses are incredibly useful. I have a really, really dumb question. Why don't we have more licenses and contracts like this? Do we just need to set up a foundation that drafts them and makes them freely available to use? Like, for instance, "Hi, Mark - we'd like to offer you a job here at our daycare, but first we need you to look over this contract and sign it." This contract says, roughly, that if there's an accusation of sexual abuse against children that it will go to a mediator who has final say, and if they say it was a credible accusation, that Mark immediately loses his job, and can never work anywhere that uses this same contract, ever again. Sorry, you lost your chance to work with kids. It sucks that it might have been a false accusation, but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems. Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this. Another one, "Hi, Greg. We understand we'd like your endorsement from our political party? Sounds good, here's a contract for you..." It says, among other things, that if Greg switches political parties that he must resign from office. Sorry. He's welcome to run again, but he can't stay in office on our votes. Like, shouldn't we have more contracts like this?
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  If I follow correctly, then yes I agree that having more widely used standard licenses/contracts would be nice. One of my crazy legal fantasies is that all EULAs have to go through a central government authority that pushes back on new ones, because one of the things I love about FOSS is that there's only a handful of common licenses, so you can reasonably read them once and then just see them and know what you're getting. I don't need to re-read the GPL every time I use a new piece of software using it, because I already know what it says. To a specific point, though, > Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this. Er, yes, that does sound bonkers; where are you that every school, church, and daycare isn't already doing a background check on every single person working there?
rietta 1y ago
I am impressed that the FSF has kept up the same office / mailing address for 32 years at the time the article was written!
yukiAkita 1y ago
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low_tech_punk 1y ago
Exploring implications of an absolute physical address. FSF basically claimed a physical "domain name" and no future organizations will be able to reside in that address. FSF can move out and ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.
- jraph 1y ago
  they actually did move in the meantime :-) [1] Can this redirection be forever? > no future organizations will be able to reside in that address You are supposed to put the name, no? "Some Organization, <old address>" would unambiguously refer to the new org. [1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
- reaperducer 1y ago
  ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect. The USPS doesn't honor either 301 or 308. As someone who moves just about every year, and fills out the paperwork to get my 301s and 308s for free, instead of paying a third-party service, I can tell you that the 301/308 at USPS is only good for one year. To get around this, I used to use a 305: Use Proxy, but then my UPS Store of choice closed, and I was back to 301/308 land.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
  At my first job, we'd occasionally have old people showing up to pay their water bill (with checks, of course!) because 20 years previously, the local water utility occupied the same building that we were in. They were generally pretty upset because we had no idea where the water company was and they were paying in person because the bill was late, and their water could potentially be shut off.
crmi 1y ago
> After a few weeks of waiting, I eventually received the ‘African Daisy global forever vert pair’ stamp which was round! I should have noticed that the seller sent me the item using stamps at a much lower denomination that those I had ordered. Oh well. Wild that so many commenters don't see the satire dripping from the post. Is it just a UK thing to never take things at face value?
- Luc 1y ago
  I don't think that's satire. A wry observation perhaps.
- returningfory2 1y ago
  I don't understand the satire, can you explain? We can't see the full set of "lower denomination" stamps on the letter, but I'm not 100% sure it's actually lower denomination. The sender of the stamps seems to be using the "2 domestic forevers + some amount of cents = 1 global forever" formula. I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.
  - returningfory2 1y ago
    Indeed, the formula is correct. Wikipedia maintains a list of historic Forever pricing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_postage_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta... From the blog, the letter from California was dated April 2022, at which point the rates were domestic = $0.58 and global = $1.30. So the California sender correctly attached two domestics valued at $1.16 total plus an additional $0.14 to make $1.30.
  - sudobash1 1y ago
    > I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers. It would be hard to know that ahead of time though. The global forever stamp is good for letters up to 1oz which can be as little as 4 US letter pages. It took the FSF 5 double-sided pages. Granted, it looks like lightweight paper & the post office doesn't seem to be very picky about this. But I think sending two forever stamps was being on the safe side.
davisr 1y ago
This is funny because I was the operations assistant (office secretary) at the time we received this letter, and I remember it because of the distinct postage.
- MadnessASAP 1y ago
  How wonderful! Since the game of the day seems to be the technicalities of the minutiae, could you explain the decision to send the GPLv3 vs GPLv2? Is this a request that happens often?
  - jenscow 1y ago
    The version wasn't specified in the request
    - yoda222 1y ago
      They should have responded a code 300 Multiple Choices
      - dolmen 1y ago
        Or still 200, but with a "Vary: Accept-Version" header.
  - self_awareness 1y ago
    The sender didn't specify the version in his request, so I find it natural that they've sent him the latest version.
    - kevincox 1y ago
      How does a sender who only has a GPLv2 license notice even know that there is a v3? Should they first send a letter asking which versions are available?
      - 1y ago
samspot 1y ago
If you never pick up a pen to sign a birthday card, thank you note, or wedding album, that's a symptom you are too isolated!
supportengineer 1y ago
“Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes”
ray023 1y ago
Dude wastes the FSFs time, complains about wrong license without telling them the one he wanted. Then complains again that he needs to recover from the HORROR of using the postal service that was a deliberate, POINTLESS CHOICE. Gets fame on Hacker News for it. YAY!
avodonosov 1y ago
I once was reading a software license, and deep inside it there was a promise: who has read till this place will get a certain prise. I emailed them, they kind of confirmed that I am eligible for the prise. But it was a far away city, so I never went to claim it.
johnea 1y ago
This was such a laugh! I have to wonder if the whole exercise was a prime example of a brit "taking the piss" 8-) > the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier I literally laughed out loud at this 8-) And the outrageous expectation of obtaining... stamps! It was just too funny. For unfamiliar muricans: The success, according to british cultural standards, in the humiliation of the intended victim is increased, when the victim replies while being completely unaware that they are actually being mocked.
renecito 1y ago
is the owner of the address a perpetual owner of the GPL? Example: - Step 1: Create evil Corporation - Step 2: Buy that address - Step 3: Create a new GPL, still GPL but technically a new version. This can make sure the sole owner of the claimed IP (remove the FSF of course). - Step 4: Sell your updated license to anyone that'd want to go around previous GPL.
AxEy 1y ago
Tangentially related: I've always wanted to write a hello the address that they show during the opening credits of MST3K. Has anyone tried?
pcbmaker20 1y ago
Why would you do this, the text is available online!
rs186 1y ago
Looks like no other comment dwells on the fact that FSF was based in Boston. I heard that Boston was a small hub for tech companies back in the 90s (which is is much less true these days), which might explain this.
- philwelch 1y ago
  FSF was founded by Richard Stallman, who was a Harvard student and worked at the MIT AI Lab.
stevage 1y ago
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; I wonder if this was just rhetorical flourish? Are there really people who never ever use a pen? I barely ever handwrite anything but there are still crosswords and the occasional form to fill in.
srott 1y ago
the building seems to have 4 floors only https://www.google.com/maps/place/51+Franklin+St,+Boston,+MA+02110,+USA/@42.3556017,-71.0581372,67a,35y,250.36h,40.98t https://www.google.com/maps/place/51+Franklin+St,+Boston,+MA...
neilv 1y ago
It's kinda charming when some old-school address or phone number, that perhaps few have used in a long time, still works. Circa 2010, I bought a vintage Concept2 Model B rowing machine, made in the 1980s, and wanted to fix it up. The paper order form I found for parts was similar to those tiny order forms at the bottom of an ad in an old comic book, where you'd handwrite your return address, and it told you the address to mail it to, with your payment. Somehow, not only did this address still reach them, but they were set up to fulfill parts orders this way, they actually had the parts for this decades-old model, and sent me the parts (for a pittance), and they tossed in a free service manual. I already loved the product (from using it at gyms), and now I loved the company. I wonder what percentage of 25 year-old URLs still work.
INTPenis 1y ago
Funny how the later generations of IT people often have poor penmanship. I'm old enough to remember penmanship in school, but I was into computers from a young age so my penmanship ended up just as bad as author. I did improve it a lot by getting a penpal through reddit. We communicated for a year and change, and during this time I went through the process of learning to be patient and write my letters slowly so they were legible. It hurt my hand a lot to write a whole letter and I felt like I had said about as much as I have in this comment, but with time I became faster and faster. Now probably 10 years later I still take a greater care when I write, ensuring each letter is legible.
gitroom 1y ago
man, seeing folks still dealing with mailing letters for code gets me every time - crazy how much the basics trip people up after a few years online. you think well ever really get rid of physical addresses or is this just another forever headache?
- andix 1y ago
  Why should we get rid of physical addresses? It's not really relevant for letters anymore, but people still need to go to places. Deliveries of goods are a bigger thing than ever before. I can imagine that in the future a company doesn't need to have a physical address to be registered. But we already have that too, PO boxes and addresses where you can register your company without having an office here.
rkagerer 1y ago
It's an "I wrote a letter" blog post - which I suppose may be novel for some in today's audience. TLDR: To save space, some old GPLv2 software didn't include the full license text, instead just a short notice with an address you can contact to obtain it. Blogger did so (glad the address still worked after 30+ years), included return postage (some nifty US stamps bought off eBay), but the reply received was version 3 instead. So they did so again, and received the correct version.

796 points by ekiauhce 1y ago

froh 1y ago

(2022)

Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).

diggan 1y ago
> But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.
- rafaelm 1y ago
  Probably because in our countries (I'm also from S.America) the reliability of the post office is questionable at best, so it wasn't something I ever really used.
  - Symbiote 1y ago
    In most/all of Europe, letter volumes are reducing but they're still used. Even where email is common, letters are usually possible. In your country, - how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires? - how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity? - how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
    - tranceylc 1y ago
      All of these examples are about receiving though.
      - Symbiote 1y ago
        Yes, but that's still dependent on the reliability of the post office.
    - sdf4j 1y ago
      To answer your questions: receiving letters is easy, companies know how to do it. Sending letters is not common for the public.
    - johannes1234321 1y ago
      Danish Post will soon terminate general mail delivery due to low need. https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-mail-ce78db2f2234a50e676063fac790a617 https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-m... To our questions from Germany: - by Post, but I can imagine this changing as payment via phone/watch/... is spreading and I can imagine banks willing to reduce cost, making physical cards an paid extra. - on my contract via e-mail and the energy company's website. There are paper based contracts available, though. - In Germany/Europe SEPA wire transfers work well for that and are being used for decades, even with online banking being wide spread in the 90ies. (Pre Internet via BTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext )
    - warp 1y ago
      You physically go to the bank. The electricity company has their own employees to deliver paper monthly statements to all their customers, they can attach other communications if needed. My bank has a connection to the electricity company, and can look up in realtime what my open balance is, which you can view and pay in the banking app. You can also pay it in cash at various offices (e.g. Western Union) around the city. You can also just give the electricity company permission to automatically take it out of your account every month (ppl don't trust the electricity company to get the amount correct, so folks don't usually do this. I do this for the water bill though). (this is my experience living in Ecuador for 10 years, I'm from the Netherlands, most of this is weird to me :)
remram 1y ago
The paper size and foreign stamps make sense, but I must say the inability to use a pen surprised me a little more.
- int_19h 1y ago
  I'm not an American and I did write letters in my country of origin as a kid, but one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address - you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. If you're used to writing on lined paper because that's the standard in your country (including envelopes!), it can be frustrating. The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%82#/media/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:%D0%93%D0%BB%D1%83%D1%85%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%87%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B5_%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A0.png https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...
  - cormorant 1y ago
    Do they still say Министерство связи СССР ?
    - int_19h 1y ago
      They did for a few years after USSR was gone, as they were still going through old supplies. AFAIK modern Russian ones just say "Почта России", but the overall design is retained, including pre-labelled lines for various parts of address.
  - rascul 1y ago
    > one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years. Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.
3np 1y ago
Sending physical mail is one thing. I no longer consider myself "digital native" after reading this: > Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time
- alabastervlog 1y ago
  I grew up pre-smartphone (pre-Web, partially, even) and even through college probably half my total output for school was hand written (friggin' blue book exams, LOL) Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year. I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.
- slightwinder 1y ago
  Even digital natives are using pens with their smartphones and tablets these days. It's just a choice now whether you use them. Though, not sure whether kids these days are still learning it in school.
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0xTJ 1y ago
Sending mail being a challenging or difficult thing does come across as odd to me, being in Canada and born in the late 90s. Sure I haven't mailed a letter in a couple years, but when I do the main hassle is just finding where I put my stamps. I can however understand that finding return postage would be a hassle; I'm not sure why the UK and Canada (amongst others) don't do IRCs anymore. It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
palata 1y ago
Agreed. I am a millennial, so most likely older than the author. Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind. I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff. I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).
- alias_neo 1y ago
  > but ordering stamps... on eBay OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps. As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me. I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Sure but, on the other hand, this was overly kind of him. In general, unless it is explicitely requested that you must provide a stamped envelope for the reply the assumption of snail mail is that each side pays for its own envelopes and stamps.
    - palata 1y ago
      And you could also put a dollars bill in the envelope?
      - FeepingCreature 1y ago
        From the UK...?
        pansa2 1y ago
bradley13 1y ago
Honestly, sending letters is increasingly alien: I rarely send one letter per year. This year I have sent two, only because I am trying to contact an incredibly old-fashioned directorate of the German government that doesn't seem to have an email address. The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
liampulles 1y ago
Sending international postage in my country (South Africa) is not a very reliable process, so couriers and email are used quite heavily here instead. Its not necessarily an age thing.
drivingmenuts 1y ago
I have a roll of Forever stamps, purchased years ago. I don't even remember why, specifically, I purchased them. In theory, I could post a letter on my deathbed (I'm Generation X, so it's not that far off) and be assured that the delivery fee is covered by the cost of one stamp. Unfortunately, most of the people I would wish to correspond with will also be deceased at that time. So … I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.
rwmj 1y ago
Disappointed that International Reply Coupons are no longer a thing too! I used one back in the 1980s to write to the authors of the Power C compiler[1] in the US about a bug (yes, a bug report by mail). I enclosed an IRC in case they wanted to reply. They were kind enough to write back, and didn't use the IRC (but sent it back). They did however include a floppy disk with the fixed compiler, which was nice of them. [1] Still around: http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
- relistan 1y ago
  I still use them for ham radio QSL cards. They work everywhere that is a member of the Universal Postal Union (nearly all are). You can buy them online from Swiss Post. They will mail them for free. https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/registered-prepaid/international-reply-coupon/p/554094 https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...
ethbr1 1y ago
Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility Which changes as times change. In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access. Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult. But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible. In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into. Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable! Accessibility and convenience >> convenience
- Misdicorl 1y ago
  > the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible. This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.
  - creaturemachine 1y ago
    You're paying that cent, but in the form of endless ads hijacking your consciousness.
    - overtomanu 1y ago
      you can still do some setup and access mail by using applications like thunderbird, which have no ads.
      - odo1242 1y ago
        Or use an adblocker
ryandrake 1y ago
> Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!
- petesergeant 1y ago
  > I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. Some adults were born in 2007
  - xmprt 1y ago
    Younger than Gmail, YouTube, and the iPhone.
    - layer8 1y ago
      The iPhone is not yet 18.
      - adastra22 1y ago
        By only two months.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Anyone, even someone born in 2007, should know how to use pen and paper. This is a basic component of being an educated person, not knowing how to do that is as shocking as being illiterate.
    - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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SpaceNoodled 1y ago
I think the strangest part is that it had been years since they had used a pen.
- immibis 1y ago
  Keeping a pad of paper at your computer is one of those underrated things. You'd think the computer can record information just like the paper, and it can, but psychology is weird.
  - SpaceNoodled 1y ago
    Agreed. Grabbing a pen and a post-it is faster for me than opening a text document, and a pad of paper allows me to format and diagram things freely. The post-its can be sorted, stacked, moved, stuck to pertinent notebook pages, altered, and ultimately recycled when they are no longer relevant. It's much freer than a document on a phone or computer, where it can still be a pain to move information from one domain to another.
kccqzy 1y ago
I don't send letters by post but I often need to send packages by post. Perhaps it's returning some merchandise where the merchant didn't have free shipping. Perhaps it's shipping a security key to a close friend so I can have offsite backup of a key. When I moved, I got rid of my book collection by asking friends which books they wanted and I shipped it to them (media mail is cheap). It's efficient to transmit information over the internet, but it's still essential to send physical items by post. When I visit USPS branches, I always see plenty of people mailing packages.
Scoundreller 1y ago
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time. Sometimes I cut out my address from a bill and tape that on as my return address. I know it’s formatted right. I’d definitely do the same on a “self”-addressed stamped envelope that I need returned.
globular-toast 1y ago
As far as I know there are still some things you have to post in the UK, like sending your cut up old driver's licence to the DVLA and maybe you still have to post your V5 when you sell a car. OP might not own a car or drive, though, so who knows?
- desas 1y ago
  V5Cs have been online for 3-4 years now. You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.
wink 1y ago
I mean, yes it reads a little awkward, but not too long ago I had misplaced the stack of envelopes + stamps I keep in my desk drawer and I needed to send something by snail mail (hey, remember that term?) and yeah. I am not someone who takes notes on paper, so I'm holding a pen only about once a week (the years quoted in the article sounds weird even to me) and it was a bit of a task (the whole sending, this time, not the writing). Bonus points for trying to use up old stamps when they're constantly changing the needed amount every couple years - so I usually need to put about 3 stamps even for local postage. But I guess that's just because I'm cheap and don't want to buy "new" code stamps when I have about 20 EUR in old stamps I can still use up. Always interesting discussions with my wife who works in an office where paper mail, fax machines, and signing things on paper all happen multiple times every single day.
lproven 1y ago
> it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Indeed. The author also seems unaware that a 1991 document could not contain a Web address because the world wide web did not exist yet. They guess it is because it is not widely available. That astonished me.
elzbardico 1y ago
Man. I am generation-X, from a time when teachers would take the kids to a local post office and teach them how to send a letter and a telegram. And yet, while I have a vague idea of how could I send a letter nowadays, I would have absolutely no idea of how to send postage for the international return.

diggan 1y ago

> The first thing that came to attention, the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm. I completely forgot that the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the US and some other countries decided to do things differently... As a European, I don't think I've ever seen something not A4 or A3/A4 in a professional context in my life, ever. Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so), and do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing? Or just happens to be something FSF only seem to be doing?

jodaco 1y ago
It’s a US thing and most printers in the US default to it. You would be hard pressed to find someone who knows what A4 is. Letter size is 8-1/2 x 11 inches by US standards.
- bombcar 1y ago
  I've found that many Americans know what A4 is - that "weird European size that doesn't print right".
robin_reala 1y ago
It’s US standard. Hence the infamous default PC LOAD LETTER message on HP printers that made zero sense to anyone outside the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER
- bombcar 1y ago
  PC isn't Personal Computer, it's Paper Cartridge. That's the missing link for Americans.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  That's implying it made sense to people in the US...

PaulRobinson 1y ago

I'm interested in hearing from someone at FSF (and I used to know someone, but I don't think he's there any more), who can tell us how often this has happened. I can't imagine it's a frequent occurrence.

philipwhiuk 1y ago
Yeah I sort of hoped it would cover that bit not just the author's foibles at writing a letter.
bluGill 1y ago
As I implied in my top level comment, it should happen more often than it likely does. If you work on a commercial project with any GPL code ask your test group who has done that and when - if you don't see a lot of hands go up then your test group isn't doing their job. (if you are only automated tests, then I assume you have an automated test to send this letter and verify the response)
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  For April fools I should set up an API for sending postal mail as a service
  - xoe26 1y ago
    https://docs.lob.com/#tag/Letters https://docs.lob.com/#tag/Letters
  - layer8 1y ago
    I’m pretty sure that’s a common business use case.
    - razakel 1y ago
      Yeah, there's several companies that do it.
stusmall 1y ago

gwd 1y ago

> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes... Wow -- I mean, sure, I don't use a pen that often, but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month...

dharmab 1y ago
I'm at the point where the only things I handwrite are gift labels and holiday cards. Maybe an occasional doctor's office form, but those are increasingly digital.
int_19h 1y ago
I can't even remember the last time I've used a pen for anything other than writing a check.
- cormorant 1y ago
  Well, there's my minimum of once per month :)
- maccard 1y ago
  I've never written a check in my life.
  - dharmab 1y ago
    How do you pay for things above a few thousand dollars? I guess if you don't ever buy a pricey car or own a home you wouldn't need it.
    - gwd 1y ago
      Not the person you're replying to, but the bank payment system in Europe is waaaay better than the US; nearly all four- and low-five-digit sums in the last 20 years I've paid for with bank transfer.
    - Gnuke 1y ago

WaitWaitWha 1y ago

This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author. I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.

munchler 1y ago
> flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) These are called “index cards” in the US, although you can certainly use them to make flash cards if you want. Source: Am old enough to have used index cards unironically.
- NelsonMinar 1y ago
  my flash cards all store at least 32 GB of data but are so tiny I keep losing them.
voidUpdate 1y ago
What places don't have postcards? Whenever I go to places in the UK, tourist tat shops will often have hundreds of them in every flavour of souvenir
- alberto-m 1y ago
  It seems to be a cultural thing. As an European I am used to find postcards in every town, but when I went to Singapore I had a hard time procuring them. None of the souvenir shops had them, and when I asked the employees they often looked at me as if I were some kind of strange animal. I finally found a small, dusty selection in the darkest corner of a huge department store.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  I always like to buy a postcard. Occasionally actually post them before I leave a place (ideally soon after I arrive). Generally they arrive substantially after I get back.

cormorant 1y ago

Different addresses are stated in different copies of the license. https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 has: "59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA" https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address. https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: " Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text." Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).

yapyap 1y ago

> as I haven’t used a pen in several years Lol this is a bit ridiculous but a fun blogpost!

pabs3 1y ago

The FSF has moved address at least once, and more recently, now closed their offices entirely. I wonder if the new owners of their old addresses will or did get confused by copy-of-GPL requests.

vinceguidry 1y ago
Postman probably just redirects, with a business or institution it's easy to just have the Post Office direct all mail addressed to "Free Software Foundation" to the current address.
- bluGill 1y ago
  For a few months. The post office will do it for anyone for a few months, but then they stop forwarding mail. Maybe businesses get that treatment longer, but when people move they only get a few months.
  - jen20 1y ago
    Standard US Mail forwarding is 12 months and may be extended for a further 18 months.
  - thesuitonym 1y ago
    Standard mail forwarding is one year, and you can extend that for an additional 18 months. I don't know of any reasonable person who would call that "a few months"
- pabs3 1y ago
  They don't have a current address to redirect to, they went completely virtual.
deleted 1y ago
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mattl 1y ago
I used to work at the FSF and one of my jobs was replying to these letters. They would be so infrequent by 2008 that I think I handled less than 10 in my time there. I sent way more copies of books to prisoners who requested them, gave more tours of the office, etc. I also did some other stuff when I worked there but if you were to look at the FSF website today you might think I’m still there as pages often have the name of the person who created the page listed as the author still. The FSF has moved a few times. * 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge. * 59 Temple Place, Boston * 51 Franklin St, Boston * 31 Milk Street, Boston The first address wasn’t around for too long, but does still exist. It’s an office building above a bank in Central Square, Cambridge right above the Red Line stop. The second address was around for a long, long time. A few years ago, the building was demolished and turned into a hotel. I don’t know if 59 Temple Place is still a valid address or not. For this one, I found many of most frequent places and filed bugs to get it updated. Greg K-H helped me update the kernel and many of the issues I opened got resolved with other projects. Worth noting too that the FSF had two different offices in the same building but mail would go to the building. Mail did forward from here to the next address for a while, but I’m not sure if it’ll forward again to the latest address. 51 Franklin St is just around the corner from 59 Temple Place. When they moved here, many staff were able to walk their stuff over to the new office. This one finally closed last year. I worked here my entire time at the FSF. The final one is a PO Box but also around the corner from 51 Franklin St.

bluGill 1y ago

At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly. A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license. The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".

diggan 1y ago
An updated version would say to make sure every email address you use/show in the application/terms/policies are usable and someone receives it. When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
terinjokes 1y ago
Why should the test process be sending physical letters (edit: in 2025)? Nothing in the GPLv2 requires a physical letter. The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.
- 1y ago

terinjokes 1y ago

A few countries I'll be visiting this summer still sell International Reply Coupons. It might be interesting to pick some up and see how difficult it is to exchange them. Would a PostNL point even know what to do with one?

relistan 1y ago
As a ham radio operator who still likes paper QSL cards, I’ve bought international reply coupons from Swiss Post because they still sell them and you can order them online (I live in Ireland but here they no longer sell them). Any postal service that is a member of the Universal Postal Union (nearly all of them are AFAICT) is obliged to accept them. They work in most places.
- terinjokes 1y ago
  Hey, I'm KG8ORS. It's been aong time since I've sent a QSL card (and I've never received one), but it's where I first heard about IRCs. I agree that UPU members are required to accept them. PostNL closed all of their post offices a few years ago in favor of contracting out to businesses, who may not be familiar with them. It looks like Omniva (aka/fka Eesti Post) also ships worldwide and charges in Euro.

maxloh 1y ago

Perhaps the FSF got confused about which license the author was referring to, or perhaps they intentionally mailed back GPL v3 — this isn't the first time they haven't been generous. In the old days when they released GPL v3, Linus Torvalds considered it "not the same license at all". He felt betrayed because the FSF "try to sneak in these new (tivoization) rules and try to force everybody to upgrade". People could fork the Kernel and relicense the fork in a way that prevented him from merging their improvements upstream. He referred to the FSF's move as "dishonest", "sneaky" and "immoral" and decided he would "never have anything to do with the FSF again". https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU https://youtu.be/PaKIZ7gJlRU

coldpie 1y ago
> Perhaps the FSF got confused about which license the author was referring to When no version is specified in the request, returning the latest version seems like a reasonable thing to do.
- maxloh 1y ago
  IMO, the correct response would be "Hey we have version 1, 2, and 3 of this license, all of them have been attached. Please make sure which one you were talking about".
  - coldpie 1y ago
    That would also be reasonable, sure. Triple the cost though!

deleted 1y ago

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roywashere 1y ago

That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product: https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d77e250fc33baccd4e0 https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d... And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'

craniumslows 1y ago
The FSF offices have moved again if you weren't aware. The new address is Free Software Foundation 31 Milk Street, # 960789 Boston, MA 02196 USA https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/mailing https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/mailing
- collinfunk 1y ago
  In Gnulib we distribute and use the license with just a link to <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/> [1]. I would just use that. Many GNU projects use a rule that will fail 'make distcheck' when it sees an address in the sources [2]. [1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=bf31b26be8574bd64fbd7e5456740d7d029b311c https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=bf31... [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=086c5c1c67b379ffcdbad47460e1366a35f8b8c0 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=086c...
  - pabs3 1y ago
    Hmm, I wonder if there is a linter somewhere for copyright notice and license grant smells. Made a note to add an fsf-address check to check-all-the-things.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

sinuhe69 1y ago

It would be a perfect story for the "Dull Men Center" or alike :D

martopix 1y ago

Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; Really??

VikingCoder 1y ago

I think these licenses are incredibly useful. I have a really, really dumb question. Why don't we have more licenses and contracts like this? Do we just need to set up a foundation that drafts them and makes them freely available to use? Like, for instance, "Hi, Mark - we'd like to offer you a job here at our daycare, but first we need you to look over this contract and sign it." This contract says, roughly, that if there's an accusation of sexual abuse against children that it will go to a mediator who has final say, and if they say it was a credible accusation, that Mark immediately loses his job, and can never work anywhere that uses this same contract, ever again. Sorry, you lost your chance to work with kids. It sucks that it might have been a false accusation, but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems. Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this. Another one, "Hi, Greg. We understand we'd like your endorsement from our political party? Sounds good, here's a contract for you..." It says, among other things, that if Greg switches political parties that he must resign from office. Sorry. He's welcome to run again, but he can't stay in office on our votes. Like, shouldn't we have more contracts like this?

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
If I follow correctly, then yes I agree that having more widely used standard licenses/contracts would be nice. One of my crazy legal fantasies is that all EULAs have to go through a central government authority that pushes back on new ones, because one of the things I love about FOSS is that there's only a handful of common licenses, so you can reasonably read them once and then just see them and know what you're getting. I don't need to re-read the GPL every time I use a new piece of software using it, because I already know what it says. To a specific point, though, > Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this. Er, yes, that does sound bonkers; where are you that every school, church, and daycare isn't already doing a background check on every single person working there?

rietta 1y ago

I am impressed that the FSF has kept up the same office / mailing address for 32 years at the time the article was written!

yukiAkita 1y ago

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deleted 1y ago

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low_tech_punk 1y ago

Exploring implications of an absolute physical address. FSF basically claimed a physical "domain name" and no future organizations will be able to reside in that address. FSF can move out and ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.

jraph 1y ago
they actually did move in the meantime :-) [1] Can this redirection be forever? > no future organizations will be able to reside in that address You are supposed to put the name, no? "Some Organization, <old address>" would unambiguously refer to the new org. [1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
reaperducer 1y ago
ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect. The USPS doesn't honor either 301 or 308. As someone who moves just about every year, and fills out the paperwork to get my 301s and 308s for free, instead of paying a third-party service, I can tell you that the 301/308 at USPS is only good for one year. To get around this, I used to use a 305: Use Proxy, but then my UPS Store of choice closed, and I was back to 301/308 land.
HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
At my first job, we'd occasionally have old people showing up to pay their water bill (with checks, of course!) because 20 years previously, the local water utility occupied the same building that we were in. They were generally pretty upset because we had no idea where the water company was and they were paying in person because the bill was late, and their water could potentially be shut off.

crmi 1y ago

> After a few weeks of waiting, I eventually received the ‘African Daisy global forever vert pair’ stamp which was round! I should have noticed that the seller sent me the item using stamps at a much lower denomination that those I had ordered. Oh well. Wild that so many commenters don't see the satire dripping from the post. Is it just a UK thing to never take things at face value?

Luc 1y ago
I don't think that's satire. A wry observation perhaps.
returningfory2 1y ago
I don't understand the satire, can you explain? We can't see the full set of "lower denomination" stamps on the letter, but I'm not 100% sure it's actually lower denomination. The sender of the stamps seems to be using the "2 domestic forevers + some amount of cents = 1 global forever" formula. I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.
- returningfory2 1y ago
  Indeed, the formula is correct. Wikipedia maintains a list of historic Forever pricing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_postage_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta... From the blog, the letter from California was dated April 2022, at which point the rates were domestic = $0.58 and global = $1.30. So the California sender correctly attached two domestics valued at $1.16 total plus an additional $0.14 to make $1.30.
- sudobash1 1y ago
  > I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers. It would be hard to know that ahead of time though. The global forever stamp is good for letters up to 1oz which can be as little as 4 US letter pages. It took the FSF 5 double-sided pages. Granted, it looks like lightweight paper & the post office doesn't seem to be very picky about this. But I think sending two forever stamps was being on the safe side.

davisr 1y ago

This is funny because I was the operations assistant (office secretary) at the time we received this letter, and I remember it because of the distinct postage.

MadnessASAP 1y ago
How wonderful! Since the game of the day seems to be the technicalities of the minutiae, could you explain the decision to send the GPLv3 vs GPLv2? Is this a request that happens often?
- jenscow 1y ago
  The version wasn't specified in the request
  - yoda222 1y ago
    They should have responded a code 300 Multiple Choices
    - dolmen 1y ago
      Or still 200, but with a "Vary: Accept-Version" header.
- self_awareness 1y ago
  The sender didn't specify the version in his request, so I find it natural that they've sent him the latest version.
  - kevincox 1y ago
    How does a sender who only has a GPLv2 license notice even know that there is a v3? Should they first send a letter asking which versions are available?
    - 1y ago

samspot 1y ago

If you never pick up a pen to sign a birthday card, thank you note, or wedding album, that's a symptom you are too isolated!

supportengineer 1y ago

“Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes”

ray023 1y ago

Dude wastes the FSFs time, complains about wrong license without telling them the one he wanted. Then complains again that he needs to recover from the HORROR of using the postal service that was a deliberate, POINTLESS CHOICE. Gets fame on Hacker News for it. YAY!

avodonosov 1y ago

I once was reading a software license, and deep inside it there was a promise: who has read till this place will get a certain prise. I emailed them, they kind of confirmed that I am eligible for the prise. But it was a far away city, so I never went to claim it.

johnea 1y ago

This was such a laugh! I have to wonder if the whole exercise was a prime example of a brit "taking the piss" 8-) > the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier I literally laughed out loud at this 8-) And the outrageous expectation of obtaining... stamps! It was just too funny. For unfamiliar muricans: The success, according to british cultural standards, in the humiliation of the intended victim is increased, when the victim replies while being completely unaware that they are actually being mocked.

renecito 1y ago

is the owner of the address a perpetual owner of the GPL? Example: - Step 1: Create evil Corporation - Step 2: Buy that address - Step 3: Create a new GPL, still GPL but technically a new version. This can make sure the sole owner of the claimed IP (remove the FSF of course). - Step 4: Sell your updated license to anyone that'd want to go around previous GPL.

AxEy 1y ago

Tangentially related: I've always wanted to write a hello the address that they show during the opening credits of MST3K. Has anyone tried?

pcbmaker20 1y ago

Why would you do this, the text is available online!

rs186 1y ago

Looks like no other comment dwells on the fact that FSF was based in Boston. I heard that Boston was a small hub for tech companies back in the 90s (which is is much less true these days), which might explain this.

philwelch 1y ago
FSF was founded by Richard Stallman, who was a Harvard student and worked at the MIT AI Lab.

stevage 1y ago

> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; I wonder if this was just rhetorical flourish? Are there really people who never ever use a pen? I barely ever handwrite anything but there are still crosswords and the occasional form to fill in.

srott 1y ago

the building seems to have 4 floors only https://www.google.com/maps/place/51+Franklin+St,+Boston,+MA+02110,+USA/@42.3556017,-71.0581372,67a,35y,250.36h,40.98t https://www.google.com/maps/place/51+Franklin+St,+Boston,+MA...

neilv 1y ago

It's kinda charming when some old-school address or phone number, that perhaps few have used in a long time, still works. Circa 2010, I bought a vintage Concept2 Model B rowing machine, made in the 1980s, and wanted to fix it up. The paper order form I found for parts was similar to those tiny order forms at the bottom of an ad in an old comic book, where you'd handwrite your return address, and it told you the address to mail it to, with your payment. Somehow, not only did this address still reach them, but they were set up to fulfill parts orders this way, they actually had the parts for this decades-old model, and sent me the parts (for a pittance), and they tossed in a free service manual. I already loved the product (from using it at gyms), and now I loved the company. I wonder what percentage of 25 year-old URLs still work.

INTPenis 1y ago

Funny how the later generations of IT people often have poor penmanship. I'm old enough to remember penmanship in school, but I was into computers from a young age so my penmanship ended up just as bad as author. I did improve it a lot by getting a penpal through reddit. We communicated for a year and change, and during this time I went through the process of learning to be patient and write my letters slowly so they were legible. It hurt my hand a lot to write a whole letter and I felt like I had said about as much as I have in this comment, but with time I became faster and faster. Now probably 10 years later I still take a greater care when I write, ensuring each letter is legible.

gitroom 1y ago

man, seeing folks still dealing with mailing letters for code gets me every time - crazy how much the basics trip people up after a few years online. you think well ever really get rid of physical addresses or is this just another forever headache?

andix 1y ago
Why should we get rid of physical addresses? It's not really relevant for letters anymore, but people still need to go to places. Deliveries of goods are a bigger thing than ever before. I can imagine that in the future a company doesn't need to have a physical address to be registered. But we already have that too, PO boxes and addresses where you can register your company without having an office here.

rkagerer 1y ago

It's an "I wrote a letter" blog post - which I suppose may be novel for some in today's audience. TLDR: To save space, some old GPLv2 software didn't include the full license text, instead just a short notice with an address you can contact to obtain it. Blogger did so (glad the address still worked after 30+ years), included return postage (some nifty US stamps bought off eBay), but the reply received was version 3 instead. So they did so again, and received the correct version.