Apple executive lied about payment policy
Also Office loads faster by loading all the time.

The "Oopsie" That Might Require Federal Counsel

The ongoing corporate feud between Apple and Epic Games has officially escalated from a mere civil disagreement to something that requires a potentially awkward conversation with a US Attorney. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has found that Apple violated a previous antitrust ruling, finding its attempt at "malicious compliance" to be intentionally anti-competitive. The centerpiece of this latest saga is Vice President of Finance Alex Roman, who the judge asserts "outright lied under oath" about the company's timeline for implementing its controversial 27 percent external commission fee.

For the non-technical employees reading this, this is the digital equivalent of Steve from accounting trying to sneak a personal expense report past the auditor by changing the date on the receipt, only for the auditor to find the original document taped to the back of a server rack. Judge Gonzalez Rogers was sufficiently annoyed by the blatant disregard for the court's injunction that she referred the matter to the US Attorney's Office for potential criminal contempt proceedings. Apple, ever the good sport, stated that it strongly disagrees with the decision, but will comply while preparing its appeal, which is exactly what you say right before HR calls you into a meeting with a large box and a nondisclosure agreement.

Microsoft’s Innovative Solution to Slowness Is Turning Itself Off and Back On Again

Microsoft has identified the root cause of the sluggish performance of its flagship productivity suite, Office; the software is too slow to load. The fix, being deployed via a new "Startup Boost" feature, is a masterpiece of elegant non-solutioning. Instead of optimizing the decades-old code base, Microsoft will now simply begin pre-loading the core components of applications like Word and Excel the moment Windows starts up.

This is the modern, high-tech version of putting your coat on your desk chair and leaving a half-drunk coffee mug out so everyone thinks you are in a meeting, when really you are just hiding in the stairwell for an extra fifteen minutes. The new feature gives the illusion of speed by using your computer's precious boot time to solve its own efficiency problem. This approach is reminiscent of the old osa.exe Office Startup Assistant from Office 97, which tells you all you need to know about the trajectory of software engineering. For users with less than a terrifying amount of RAM, this will likely lead to a faster Word loading time, followed immediately by everything else running at the pace of a heavily sedimented glacier.

The Great Redis License Migration: A Return to the Walled Garden, But With a Different Wires

After an ill-fated dalliance with "source-available" licensing that the community, and the Open Source Initiative, largely rejected, Redis is attempting to mend fences. The company is adopting the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3) as an additional option for Redis 8. The move is designed to bring Redis back into the fold of proper open-source licensing after its previous switch to SSPLv1 and RSALv2 caused an exodus and the creation of the popular Valkey fork by cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services and Google.

AGPLv3, known for its strong copyleft provisions, is the legal equivalent of a developer telling the cloud giants, "You can have the code, but if you run it as a service, you have to show everyone all your work." This is the perennial drama: the small, innovative software company wants to protect its lunch from the hyperscale cafeteria next door. It’s a bold move, guided by the return of original creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, and essentially shifts the debate from whether the license is open source to whether the license is simply too restrictive for a cloud era.

Briefs

• AI Integrations: Anthropic’s Claude is expanding its footprint by offering integrations with companies like Dolly and Jasper. It seems every company now requires a large language model bolted onto its backend to justify its Series B funding.
• Academic Publishing: Starting July 1, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will require that all NIH-funded research be made freely accessible without an academic publisher paywall. The knowledge gatekeepers are reportedly upset that the public funding will lead to the public actually accessing the research.
• Self-Driving Safety: A new study by Waymo suggests its autonomous vehicles are reducing serious crashes and making streets safer. The self-driving cars appear to be performing just fine, as long as you do not count the disengagements, the unexpected stops, or the occasional existential human panic.