There appears to be a push to control open source software, in the guise of protecting children via age control.
With OSS, anybody can tweak the code on his device to pass the control, so the idea would be to only allow certified software. Which is expensive, and out of reach of most open source projects. Enter big, reliable companies that can afford the ticket for the certification of horrendous piles of slop.
see this recent HN post about it, I find it resonates, so to speak, with what you explain :
Can confirm : I'm reading this from France, we're in the 8th day of the meanest heatwave the country has known since records exist, and it's expected to last two more.
>If contract broken, sue them. Why throwing a scene?
Haha! tell me about it.
A client of mine ended his contract in 2010, pretending he did not use my software anymore. He had the source because I had to compile on site for technical reasons.
A disgruntled employed called to tell me and my associate he was still using it. It took me 3 years to find a proof, lawsuit started in 2014, the expertise began in 2016 and ended in 2021. I have a first trial hearing scheduled Feb, 12 2026. Expect 6 to 12 months before a decision, and of course, an appeal after that.
The guy had stocked up 5 million dollars net when I stopped him with the lawsuit [0], he is using the money to pay well known lawyers to delay the procedure every which way.
I'm out largely over 100 000 euros in court, expertise and lawyer fees, plus the countless hours spent responding to the endless, senseless dribble their lawyers produce.
As far as I'm concerned, my services are now hosted by me, and failure to pay shuts down the service, it's in the TOS.
[0 : he subcontracted for a big entity. I would never had gotten that contract myself, lacking the thief's network; said big entity never replied to our mails about our software]
Did not intend to at first, but having quit Windows, I had to replace the Access application I had built with an accountant friend of mine to manage my small business. Looking around the web, I could not find something I liked.
I ended up re-writing the thing as an SaaS for my own use, but then figured that if I'm using it, others might want to, and all I had to do was to add an 'id_client' field to the database. It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that, as users tend to come with different needs, and to think of ways of using your app you did not anticipate.
Also, when I tell an accountant that I wrote an accounting application, his eyes pop, his head tilts slightly, and he appears to be evaluating whether I'm the dangerous kind of crazy before ending the conversation. Must be due to the horrors they have to deal with all day.
It's a hard sell, revenue is closer to $500/year than $500/month, because I have very low fees and very small clients. But I take great pride in counting one accountant using it in his professional practice. It's also great fun to tune as the number of lines grows, however odd this may sound.
>This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone
I see some people disagree with you, but reading this reminds me of this anecdote :
My brother has a very high IQ score, but poor social skills. He once found employment in one of the very early companies developing websites in our area.
There was a process requiring to manually check hundreds of links for validity, which took large amounts of time to do (as in several developper hours weekly), and was error prone at that. The details are fuzzy as this happened some 30 years ago or so, but essentially he found a logical way to do the thing without error in 15 minutes.
The other developers went on a rampage to dismiss the solution, for fear of looking like idiots, and even though the solution was provable, my bro go fired, and went on to become a mechanic. What a shame though.
So, your comment rang a bell.
Also : I make a living developing and maintaining a handful of custom made SaaS for small clients on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache Mod_perl Postgresql). Very thrifty.
Little money, but loads of fun as far as I'm concerned
Haha! we named our software Marica for "Management des risques et des contrats d'assurance" (we're a French company).
We have since translated the software in several languages. It appears that marica in spanish means something like queer in English when used against homosexuals, only _more_ derogatory amongst these macho people :-(
http://libremen.com