Open Source Demands Google Pay Its Bills
Also Apple Wants to Sell You Pants

The "Community" Has Filed a Cease and Desist Order

The long-running open-source video project, FFmpeg, has finally done the thing we all think about in the office, they have politely asked Google to stop phoning the help desk unless they are prepared to pay the support fee. It turns out that Google, a company with an organizational chart that looks like a fractal art project, is a prolific source of bug reports for the project, reports that come with zero associated funding, which is a classic move. It is the corporate equivalent of eating all the free coffee and then complaining the break room is out of creamer.

The FFmpeg team is essentially saying: stop giving us unpaid work, or we will stop accepting your defect reports. It is a wonderfully passive-aggressive corporate memo played out on the global stage, proving that a high-profile open-source project is no different than a small design agency demanding payment from a slow-moving client. The comment section is predictably a war zone of people arguing about whether Google's bug reports are a service in and of themselves, or if the developers are simply supposed to subsist on "exposure" and the moral high ground. Spoiler: the moral high ground does not pay the cloud hosting bill.

Apple Solves a 500-Year-Old Problem, Introduces iPhone Pocket

Apple is back at it again, reinventing the wheel and demanding a luxury price for the axle. The company announced the iPhone Pocket, which is not a software feature, but appears to be a physical hole in your clothing, presumably a very expensive and 'seamless' one. This revolutionary carry solution, which has existed in human clothing for centuries, is now being marketed as 'a beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone,' which is corporate speak for 'we want you to buy a new line of designer pants.'

The cynics on the message boards are calling it "Peak Apple" while simultaneously acknowledging that, yes, they will probably buy the accessory kit. It is a brilliant piece of marketing incompetence; they tried to solve the 'where to put the phone' problem, only to realize the clothing industry beat them to it, so now they are just selling the clothing industry back to itself. The only logical next step is the iGlove for cold-weather touch screen use, followed shortly by the iShoe for walking on ground. Also, apparently, the original iPod Socks from 2004 are suddenly back in the discourse, because everything old is now 'curated heritage.'

Microsoft Ships .NET 10, Confirms Plans to Eventually Ship Everything

In a move that surprised no one who works in enterprise IT, Microsoft has released .NET 10. The framework continues its relentless march towards unifying all of existence under a single, large, and slightly confusing umbrella. The update is framed as a big win for developers, as the documentation now takes up two terabytes less space on the server. There is a whole lot of buzz about performance gains, which is always nice, but mostly it is a reminder that Microsoft releases things on time, every time, much like the company cafeteria serves chili every Tuesday, whether you want it or not.

The interesting subplot is the community-driven push to bring .NET MAUI to Linux and the browser using Avalonia, which is a bit like the employees organizing a potluck because the company catering is too slow. Microsoft is fine with it; they have decided that 'open source' means 'let the community clean up our architectural debt.' In any case, it is another number on the board, and we are now one year closer to the inevitable .NET 20 release, which will probably include a built-in AI assistant to write the code you should have written yourself.

Briefs

• Nvidia Shares Dump: SoftBank, a company whose entire business model appears to be "buy things and then panic-sell them later," sold its entire stake in Nvidia for a cool $5.83 billion. This is a classic move where someone cashes out their retirement fund right before the market opens, but on a massive corporate scale.
• Google Handwriting Solved: Google's new model is reportedly "nearly perfect" at automated handwriting recognition, solving two of its biggest challenges. This means soon your doctor's illegible notes will be perfectly translated into perfectly legible, yet still baffling, digital text. Progress.
• Office Collaboration is a Lie: A post by PostHog suggests that collaboration inherently sucks, which is something every Systems Administrator has known since the invention of the group chat. It is a highly-cited philosophical paper arguing that meetings should be an immediate dischargeable offense.