My rule: when buying a 'lifetime' service, assume that equals 10 years and weigh the cost accordingly. A lifetime Nebula subscription is $300, so $30/year. Is that reasonable to you for the service? Then go for it, and be pleasantly surprised if it lasts more then 10 years.
I do this too, but I use 3 years instead of 10. I think that's mostly due to the idea that lifetime memberships are most often offered by start ups that can be very short lived.
You're motte-and-baileying here, since you began with "WordPress has been built by people employed by Matt either via Automattic or via his other entities", and are now writing "WordPress would not be where it is today if it depended on free labour." The second sentence is unquestionably true, but doesn't mean that "every piece of Wordpress was produced by paid labour".
I disagree. They're fundamentally the same at the core. The argument at hand is whether or not Matt is where he is because of free labour. And the answer to that is a clear no. Automattic would not be a multi-billion dollar company because WordPress powers so much of the internet that Automattic gets lots of hosting customers. WordPress has such a big market share because Matt has invested heavily in the open-source version of WordPress.
And since the argument is based on wether of not Matt is where he is because of free labour the other person needs to prove that he is. I can't prove a negative. I can prove that nearly all the top contributors to the project have been paid by an entity related to Matt.
While you've attempted to frame the argument as something else, I believe that would be considered a strawman fallacy.
I noticed the README comment about NNTP's limitations. I wonder if a new NNTP-over-HTTP protocol could find enough traction among the text-using crowd, or if ActivityPub could be used to provide a similar feature set efficiently.
I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging:
SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey.
... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ...
"The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.
In the book club I run, we voted on books for a few years. I kept hoping the non-attending voters would choose the right books to bring them to a meeting, but the choices sometimes felt aspirational like that -- people voted for a heavy title but still didn't attend, and it was irritating to be reading dull books chosen by someone else.
So we switched to making selections in person at a session; if you can't come, you can submit suggestions, but the people who actually bother to show up make the final choices. We choose a monthly book for a whole year at a time, so we just do an hour-long discussion in December and pick 11 titles. In a monthly group you could probably do it in 10 minutes after the regular discussion.
Also, as the organizer feel free to put your thumb on the scale: pick 3 books you'd personally like to read, and ask them to choose one. You may want to be completely democratic about it, but people often appreciate someone else reading reviews and limiting the choices (avoiding the paradox of choice).
Of the names on that list, GvR, Barry Warsaw, and Paul Everitt were all at PyCon in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. Barry is currently a member of the Python Steering Council and participated in a panel presentation about what's going on with Python 3.13. So, 29 years of contributions -- very good!
