Location: USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Mostly Haskell and Flutter, but also experience in Scala, Java, and Python
  Résumé/CV: available upon request
  Github: http://github.com/joyfulmantis
  Email: joyfulmantis@gmail.com

I am a US national and a self-made developer looking for a starting position working in software development. I took part in the Haskell Summer of Code this summer, and have also been working on a flutter (android) application to help people learn Chinese (https://github.com/joyfulmantis/risingtone). I would be happy to relocate anywhere globally or work remotely.

This is a fork of iamadev's extension on github https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome . Is there a specific reason why that's not mentioned and what is different/better about this fork then the original?

>Bypass Paywalls Clean for Chrome Lot of updates/bug-fixes and custom sites (and no Google Analytics tracking)

Seems this fork removes the bit that tracks the user.

Custom sites is not flexible (block cookies and googlebot-fix).

iamadamdev has got no clue: 10 of his last commits are all copied from magnolia1234. Some maintenance is done by other committers, but no real paywall fixes.

So are you saying that companies operating in New Zealand shouldn't follow New Zealand law to ban the Christchurch shooter's manifesto?

One of the traps that the CCP like to employ is to compare their own policies to other countries.

The key difference is that most of the comparisons are towards democratic countries with judicial independence which makes the whole thing irrelevant. Following laws in New Zealand which could be changed if the people there find the laws unjust.

Nobody is arguing that the Chinese government’s behaviour is morally equivalent to that of the New Zealand government, or that their justifications first their actions are reasonable or fair. Nevertheless the fact is they are the government of China and anyone working, operating or doing business in China is subject to Chinese law.

This is a difficult issue. I’m sick of seeing big western companies abasing themselves to the Chinese government over activities occurring outside China, such as US sports leagues and media companies suppressing opinions about Hong Kong expressed by people in the US or Europe. That’s got to stop and we need to make it clear to these companies that China’s influence on discourse outside China cannot be allowed.

Nevertheless we can’t expect people working and doing business inside a China itself to four Chinese law. We can push for them to stop doing business in China in extreme cases, but expecting companies to criminalise their own employees to satisfy our consciences is not reasonable.

No, I’m saying that there isn’t an immediate answer to any of these questions and companies need to evaluate it themselves when deciding.

The country’s own legal framework isn’t enough to decide for you.

I think your moral relativism is lame, both here and in your other comments. It might feel good to offload that responsibility, but if you do, and you operate in a country that has problematic laws, then your self-assured relativism can get others killed.

You're basically saying that different nations can't develop their own moral and legal conversations fast enough, and thus an international intelligentsia needs to pick up the slack; a bit of noblesse oblige.

Not a very reliable mechanism, and kind of a story of a ticking time bomb.

I'm saying that we all have responsibility for the software we put out into the world, and we're complicit in how it's used.

It's wrong to offload that ethical responsibility entirely to others.

Things get better because we want them to be better, as people that build these things we have to care.

Surely it doesn’t come as a surprise to you that there exist in this world who no only don’t think like you...

There are people in this world who are happy to write cigs than can be weaponised against those they disagree with.

So in that sense, I’d suggest you’re wrong.

Software Developers are not a homogeneous while who do or should think like you.

Whether or not we agree that way of being is reprehensible is a different matter, in which I tend to agree it is.

Sure - there are people that don't agree with me (often a lot of people). I think we actually agree more than we disagree on this.

If people are doing what they think is ethical and they really think it's the right thing then at least that's consistent.

I might not agree - I might think it's terrible even, but there's genuine disagreement there and genuine discussion can be had about it (assuming discussion is still allowed).

What I'm arguing against is more about the people that know better, or are doing something that's in direct conflict with what they believe to be right. They rationalize it by off-loading that ethical responsibility to others (things like the legal framework of the country they're operating in, it's not my place to determine policy, etc.). They tell themselves their mere presence is helpful, or that if it wasn't them it'd be someone else who doesn't care as much as they do.

They structure something like this in their mind for the purpose of being able to hold these contradictory opinions that enable them to do something they think is wrong.

That's mostly what I'm fighting against.

It's one thing to argue that censorship of citizens is a good idea (I obviously disagree), but at least that's a real position.

These other ones are mostly rationalized bullshit.

Evil triumphs when good people do nothing, but it also triumphs when good people do evil things while telling themselves it's okay.

Yep, ok, gotcha.

Thanks for the conversation and your comprehensive responses.

We have international human rights, we could enforce companies to follow those guidelines everywhere if they want to do business on our own countries.

Fact is that the US government puts money over the very human rights it’s supposed to believe in. The US isn’t alone in this of course, but it’s where the majority of international human rights infringement companies reside.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...

Yeah, it’s only as good as the local laws and their enforcement.

Something to strive for though.

Human rights don't need enforcement to exist. Part of the point of clarifying rights is clarifying wrongs when that happens.

In other words, rights come from human dignity and inherent value. They do not spring into being by fiat from rulers and politicians.

The choice for companies is to either follow a country’s laws, or not operate in that country. It’s not moral relativism, it’s just business.

I’ve been spouting the same rhetoric, but it isn’t strictly true.

It shouldn’t be difficult to recall at least a handful of recently examples in the US. Uber and Apple come to mind.

There is an immediate answer: comply with local laws.

If you don’t like them then lobby to change them.

Zoom says it is a US company, and the account it banned was a US account. Imagine if everyone did that. China doesn’t get to make their laws for our companies to enforce for us. We have our own laws. Freedom of speech would be dead otherwise.

Zoom needs to own up to being a Chinese company or stop bowing to the CCP, at least outside of China.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23506965)

Yes. They should absolutely fight for free speech rights.

The idea that your country knows best and that your countries companies can feel free to ignore other countries laws while operating in them is -- imperialism.

Call it whatever you want, I'll take the imperialist country that doesn't censor activists' accounts.

I too have forgotten about Snowden and Manning, the latter of which has undergone extensive psychological torture at the hands of the US military government.

Snowden and Manning were perfectly free to engage in political activism without leaking classified information. Leaking classified information didn't amount to anything good.

And which country would that be?

Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc.

Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.

> And which country would that be?

With your apparent standard for freedom of speech, isn't pretty much every country excluded? So now everyone is the same as an authoritarian one-party state that outlaws opposition parties and actively censors all internet websites.

Saying "many" conservatives get censored in the west is inaccurate, considering the most popular cable news channel in America is proudly conservative, as are many local news outlets and some of the top national newspapers.

In addition, the few people and organizations that have been deplatformed from social media and other hosting solutions in the west have had that fate befall them due to companies making a decision that it is not in their financial interest to allow that type of content on their platforms, given its unpopularity among other customers.

This is a completely different situation to China, where companies are directed by the government to explicitly censor certain types of content, and individuals are routinely arrested and imprisoned for creating or sharing content that the government does not agree with.

I live in China. It makes a very big difference.

"Angry mobs", as you put it, are just ordinary people freely expressing their opinions to companies that they choose to do business with. No company is forced to comply with the requests of an "angry mob". No government agency is going to punish a company that doesn't comply. Nobody is getting thrown in prison for something they said online.

Please, it does a disservice to those who are actually experiencing real oppression at the hands of an authoritarian government to make this comparison. Here is just one list of people who have been imprisoned in China largely for expressing themselves online: https://www.chinesepen.org/english/category/writers-in-priso...

Meanwhile, the "many conservatives" who you suggest have been censored in the west are still free to broadcast their content to anyone who wants to listen.

You moved the goalpost from censorship to prison.

We were talking about people being banned/censored/"de-platformed" from social media companies, in China and in the west. I'm aware that, otherwise, human rights abuse are way worse in China.

As for the idea that abuse only matters when done by a government, it's absurd. We're seeing now private companies talking about censoring the US President, so it's pretty clear who has most power. You can hide behind technicalities like them being private companies or whatever (I note that this argument does not hold when a small mom and pop company refuses to bake a cake, but apparently much larger companies can do whatever they want), but it just means that those companies have the power to censor speech _in practice_ (which is what actually matters in the end), and at the moment they're following angry mobs and not elected officials to define those censorship policies.

I certainly agree people are being hypocrites if they only support freedom of speech for speech they agree with. Of course that isn't everyone. Or even close to a majority. The big tech companies tend to have extreme left-leaning leadership nowadays, presumably due to their location in SF/Seattle.

It's no cop out - businesses don't hold a monopoly on violence. They can't summarily remove the right of travel and speech (by jailing someone).

A Nazi getting banned from Facebook isnt comparable to a human rights lawyer being stuck under house arrest for years.

ahem Julian Assange cough

America is no better than China when it comes to repressing dissent. American military industrial pharmaceutical organisations are better at usurping insurrection and revolutionary movements, however.

What? Julien Assange never received a clearance, he was simply the publisher.

Oh my bad, I mistook that for Edward Snowden.

So what? If you don't think your country is implementing the best ideas out there--what the hell are you doing?

If they don't operate in those other countries, then yeah, they should feel free to ignore the laws of that country. If they operate there, it is a different story.

The practice of those ideas is imperialism.

If you read the zoom blog post they admit they made mistakes as they did not have the ability to block meetings by region. They have absolutely no desire to enforce chinese laws globally.

From their blog post

"We strive to limit actions taken to only those necessary to comply with local laws. Our response should not have impacted users outside of mainland China. We made two mistakes:

We suspended or terminated the host accounts, one in Hong Kong SAR and two in the U.S. We have reinstated these three host accounts.

We shut down the meetings instead of blocking the participants by country. We currently do not have the capability to block participants by country. We could have anticipated this need. While there would have been significant repercussions, we also could have kept the meetings running."

> They have absolutely no desire to enforce chinese laws globally.

I do wonder about this. Given how many core product developers they seem to have in China, if the CCP demanded they... 'enforce their values' globally, or else, I don't think they'd be in much of a position to say no.

Chinese companies operating mostly in China have refused government requests in the past, because compliance would have been bad for business: https://technode.com/2019/09/19/tencent-alibaba-refuse-to-di...

Of course if the CCP cared more about enforcing the law than about money, nobody could ever say no to them, but fortunately that's not the case, so there's always room to negotiate.

I guarantee the Chinese authorities know his IP and could have blocked him at the great firewall. This was absolutely a punitive measure to restrict his speech globally.

These were accounts that were holding meetings with large amount of mainland chinese users. Whatsmore they admitted the blocking was a mistake caused by their inability to prevent users from joining a meeting by region, a functionality which they are now developing because of this problem.

I don’t think that’s an excuse at all. As an American, it’s fully within my rights to critique the CCP to as many mainlanders I want to, including holding meetings with mainlanders.

They should have been never blocked.

As an american you don't have the right while in mainland china to criticize the CCP. While there is no simple way to apply sovereignty to the internet, the decision to follow the laws of the participants countries seems relatively reasonable.

The interesting thing about this is that it's asymmetric.

If you are a Chinese citizen you can be arrested for sharing content the Party objects to, even if you were overseas when you did it[1]. You do not even have to be inside China or a Chinese citizen, the authorities may still kidnap and imprison you for exercising your right to free speech in jurisdictions where it is not restricted[2]. So it seems like it doesn't really matter to the Chinese government what the laws are in other countries, when it comes to suppressing speech.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials and propaganda outlets continue to enjoy full freedom of speech in both social media and traditional media in the west.

[1] https://www.axios.com/china-arrests-university-minnesota-twi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...

Chinese propaganda operating freely in the west platforms, while western propaganda being filtered in Chinese platforms is a real conundrum since both parties are... following relevant local regulations. I suppose labeling state actors and revealing misinformation campaigns is a start. The other insidious strategy is suppressing speech on foreign campuses that target foreign citizens, particularly anti-China advocates who can be coerced with threats to family back in China. No real good solution except punishing obvious bad actors. Maybe ban children of CCP officials from attending these institutions if they can stomach the retaliation in withdrawn Chinese enrollment. Censorship between US and Chinese platforms are a difficult structural asymmetry. Hard to see how west can match without adopting similar (anti)values. Not much to do but mitigate.

On your examples: CCP sees some speech as national security issues, which in itself is not controversial i.e. wikileaks. On Luo Daiqing in, countries have subject matter jurisdiction, laws that apply to citizens at all times and regardless of location, i.e. treason. If certain speech is outlawed in China then Chinese nationals can legally be prosecuted by China for them regardless of jurisdiction. Other countries have same legal arrangements on other issue, i.e. sex tourism, organ transplants, drug use. Causeway Books is more complicated, HK(Chinese) and foreign nationals operating in HK to distributed banned books to customers IN mainland which is illegal but also un-prosecutable due to lack of extradition treaty with HK. Basically the reason behind current HK national security law designed to close one-country security loopholes. CCP believes selling illegal books to mainland undermines national security. It was less of a free speech issue than shenanigans comparable to foreign NGO meddling that CCP thinks jeopardizes one-country national security and worth expending political capita on to control. Since national security in context of one-country was legally undefined, CCP was forced to resort to coerce or rendition. It's like how the west will prosecute whistleblowers wherever they are, sometimes through extraordinary means, no matter the optics. Even though in this context the book sellers were (from my understanding) peddling salacious gossip.

In response to the first point most countries retain the right to prosecute their citizens for crimes committed overseas even if it wasn't a crime where it was committed. For the application of US law on US citizens abroad see https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/6503/are-there-an...

You certainly have the right, all humans do, even PRC citizens. It's the natural right of free speech. That some governments (the PRC, for example) have passed laws abridging that natural right means you'll suffer consequences for exercising that right anywhere CCP cronies can get their hands on you.

I think it's an important distinction. Might doesn't make right.

Following the local laws of countries where a company operates in is a fundamental condition necessary for globalization. The idea that the americans know best and don't need to follow local laws is really just another form of imperialism.

It depends on the law. At a certain point local laws transgress international norms and it’s justified for countries and companies that have the power to get away with it to flout them: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-xpm-2013-12-15-ct.... More broadly, it’s akin to how courts in the US will generally enforce judgments of foreign courts, but not if those judgments are based on laws that deviate too far what US courts consider to be the basic norms.

> Many companies adopted the Sullivan Principles, prepared by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, a board member of General Motors. The Sullivan Principles asked its signatories to treat all workers equally, in effect calling on U.S. corporations to violate South African law, but only a few acted.

> IBM became the first company in South Africa to appoint a black as a supervisor of white employees. On the other hand, IBM's largest client was the South African government, and its computers were used primarily by the military.

Free speech is a concept even the west is struggling with -- Twitter hiding Donald Trump's tweets for example, or New Zealand banning the terrorists manifesto. If even the bastion of free speech is starting to have second doubts about it, how can you claim the moral high ground when a third country wants to restrict free speech?

If you have a problem with twitter hiding trump's tweets and new zealand banning the christchurch shooter's manifesto, there's no inconsistency. There's also room for applying your own standard of free speech vs hate speed across international borders: I might say that the protestors in china were exercising free speech for political change, while trump's speech has no important theoretical or political content and is purely harassment. I might have to massage it to get to something fully agreeable, but I don't think this kind of position is necessarily inconsistent.

I think the parent is right in that free speech is not an absolute and has geographical restrictions. Most western nations restrict free speech mostly by broadly defining some forms of speech as hate. Saying hate speech laws and free speech are consistent with each other is disingenuous considering one exists to limit the other.

I can understand the argument that hate speech is a fair restriction, but one must concede that it is a restriction and other countries may add their own restrictions to it which you may disagree on.

I should clarify: most americans think everyone is entitled to some right called "free speech" but there are philosophical justifications of this that cut across the boundary between ideas and acts (kind of hard to summarize it) that exclude a lot of speech acts from "free speech" [0]. I was trying to say that it's not inconsistent to apply a single framework for free speech across national borders or despite companies like twitter blocking trump's tweets because there are theories of speech rights that work that way.

[0]: There is an interesting paper on this called 'A Theory of Freedom of Expression' by Thomas Scanlon that can do a better job of explaining it. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2264971?seq=1

As is brought up every time this is mentioned, freedom of speech is the freedom from suppression of speech, not the guarantee of universal availability of a specific platform for speech. The latter never has been and never should be enshrined in law.

Here I would disagree, freedom of speech is an ideal, and the constitutional amendment was based on that ideal. Universal platforms for speech are somewhat of a new concept, but there is still some precedent against de-platforming, for example with John Adams and his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston massacare[1], a precedent that still holds (held) with attorneys defending very unsavory characters not because they ideologically support them but because the basis of a healthy society depends upon it.

John F. Kennedy famously said "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." [2]

The time has come when America is afraid of it's own citizenry.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/boston-massacre-trial-john-adam...

[2] https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkvoiceofamerica.htm

If you live in China you will quickly realise the restriction of freedom of speech is quite limited. It actually became a phenomenon very recently (2010 onwards in my opinion). Even on highly 'scrutinised' Wechat there are many posts and rumours with titles 'read before it (gets) taken down'. The "lack of political freedom" is mostly about the same old scandals. Yes I agree it would be great to have civilised 'free to express' platform but culture norms differ greatly.

Yes, absolutely, we should defend the right of people to say things that we don't want to hear, and we should say true things that others don't want to hear; but there is a difference between defending someone against the legal consequences of the exercise of freedom of speech, and using my voice to amplify their speech (as I am doing, implicitly, if I am a large corporation that presides over a platform with global reach). The former is not legally required, but perhaps is ethically required; I'd argue that the latter is not ethically required, and may even be ethically enjoined. Even if I am wrong in this ethical calculation, it is a fact that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right in the US that I, or any corporation, will protect your freedom of speech, only that the government will not infringe it.

the offical blog post is at: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/06/11/improving-our-poli...

Was it wrong to suspend accounts outside of mainland china? Ultimately yes, but as they stress these were accounts that were holding meetings with mostly mainland chinese participants in it.

Any company operating globally needs to follow all the local laws where they operate in. Zoom's decision to develop technology to ban participants from specific countries joining meetings seems to be a good solution to this problem.

They are asking $50 for something that there are other open source solutions for. It would be interesting to find out how much of the original source code is the developers and how much is just repackaging of one of the multitude of open source X servers for Windows that are currently available.

Originally thinking it was another open source project, I looked at the website to see if there were some features that would be worth it to switch from VcXsrv. Mostly it talked about how there was a windowed mode that allowed seamless integration with Windows. Wow how revolutionary! /s

The most successful open source company ever (RedHat) made their whole business packaging up open source in a nice manner.

People will pay for convenience and polish. Also, i would guess that Windows users are not likely to be free software purists and just wants something that works with a minimum of fuss.

The price of software should be based on the value it provides to the user, not on what it cost to make it.

That glosses over RedHat's strong arm sales tactics of the community, and rules-lawyering the GPL. Redistributing "their" source, as allowed by the GPL, is liable for your support license to not get renewed. And where's the Red Hat kernel source in a digestible format? I haven't followed recently, but they were at one point distributing their diffs to the mainline kernel as a single giant patch file and arguing that it was okay. It may abide by the letter of the GPL, but it's against the spirit of interoperability.

RedHat's the first billion dollar Linux company, but first and foremost it's a business. Their sales people are aggressive and their lawyer's hungry. Support contracts don't exactly fly off the shelves, especially when there's a huge community of experts.

How many people do you know that have given money to Canonical for Ubuntu?

I've given money to Canoncial for Ubuntu.

Also, RedHat stopped providing detail changelogs and started doing just one bug diff dump after Oracle started hurting their business -- where Oracle's work at the time was basically repackaging RedHat's work and doing "sed s/RedHat Enterprise Linux/Oracle Unbreakable Linux". RedHat did what it felt needed to fend that off.

Up until that time, they were publishing their internal repositories.

While I agree with the criticism of Redhat, Oracle's behavior was shitty. I'll have remember this next time I land on a "Support Contract Only" Redhat knowledge base page. Oracle is just a bully.

> ...rules-lawyering the GPL. Redistributing "their" source, as allowed by the GPL, is liable for your support license to not get renewed.

There isn't anything wrong with that at all. If someone is undermining RedHat's business model it is reasonable for RedHat not to support them.

The spirit of the GPL is the source code should be available and the user can do what they like with it. RedHat makes the source code available and the user can do whatever they like with it. No principle says RedHat has to like what people do with their GPL-ed code. Quite the reverse is expected, in fact.

The reverse is not expected.

The spirit of the GPL is to make source code available. Why? So that anyone can maintain the software. Thus there's an expectation (however naive) that the code is in a usable format because that's kind of the point of having the source. RedHat, however, provides the source in an obtuse format, a format that isn't even how it's used it internally. That is to say, they go above and beyond, in order to make their source harder to use. I'd say that pretty directly violates the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL.

The other part is that the GPL explicitly grants customers the right to redistribute the changes. That's pretty wild. Buying a DVD copy of Avengers doesn't give me the right to setup Avengersflix.com and sell subscriptions. GPL software does. RedHat then turns around and says if you actually do that, then fuck you (paraphrased a bit). They are entirely within their rights to do that, but if you're telling me the spirit of the GPL gives me a right that I'm not actually supposed to exercise, then we'll just have to disagree. (Un)forunately for me, the legal system looks at the letter of the GPL rather than the spirit, so what Redhat's doing is legal.

Why does the GPL explicitly grant that permission if it isn't meant to be exercised? Why did RedHat choose the GPL?

They didn't, is the answer. It chose them. The two fundamental pieces, GNU libc and the Linux kernel, are LGPL and GPLv2 licensed, respectively, along with many other packages, and relicensing them is not something RedHat has the rights to do.

Hence, RedHat's strong-arm tactics to force people into buying expensive support contracts.

There's nothing legally wrong with what they're doing but it's still a dick move by RedHat. Sure, RedHat's dick move is in response to Oracle's dick move, but two wrongs don't make a right. They do make a billion dollar business though.

There are other more opinionated licenses that RedHat could adopt for new software that they do own the copyright to. For the conscientious objector software developer, there's the idea of the Non-Military Open Source License which says the military is not allowed to use the software. There's the AGPL, which is a further left license that says if you use my website, I owe you the source, and all modifications to it. Hell, RedHat can afford the lawyers to write their own license that says companies started by Larry Ellison aren't allowed access to the source.

I don't know the support contract details from RedHat, but they are one very large contributor to the kernel and other parts of the eco system as they employ lots of the contributors. Also, their source is freely available, they call it CentOS.

RHEL and CentOS are different things. RHEL source is available on its own, independent of CentOS. e.g. http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/7Server/en/os/...

> Also, i would guess that Windows users are not likely to be free software purists

The ones looking for an X server may be more likely to be

I'm kind of one and will prefer FOSS solution on Windows well, even though I know there's no chance of the system ever being "pure".

That, or they're IT people and their employer is paying for the software.

RedHat make money on customers support, NOT on selling code/software itself; code/software from RedHat is fully free & open-source.

I think RedHat does a lot more than just packaging open source in a nice manner. AFAIK, they actively shape the ecosystem and contribute to quite a few projects. Wasn't the whole systemd transition spearheaded by RedHat for example?

But I agree with you, that consumers pay for convenience and companies require Service Level Agreements for which they are willing to pay.

Red Hat made its fortune selling licenses with support contracts for software to risk-averse industrires. That the software happened to be free wasn't really relevant to the revenue stream except insofar as it made it cheaper for Red Hat to provide the service.

I don't see how a desktop X server is going to tap into that need.

I mean... I've been using and relatively happy with the Cygwin X server integration for more than a decade. I'm not about to drop $50 on a polished replacement.

RedHat does give back to the community a lot -- their packaging and distribution is paid-for, but a great deal of their projects are open sources and reused by others.

I really hope that's the case with this software. There have been many in the past that provided "free source", but the binary from the app store is paid-for.

> People will pay for convenience and polish. Also, i would guess that Windows users are not likely to be free software purists and just wants something that works with a minimum of fuss.

I would say "companies" will pay for ....

not sure about "people" undesrtood as individual persons

In general.. if things are being priced then the price should be based on what it costs to make it.. for the price floor.

Otherwise you get a lot of perverse incentives.

It never was the model, even from day one? The service is not free, even if the code is. You can do it yourself fine. If you need somebody else effort not related to source, you should pay for it.

I think you don't understand what I'm saying. I'm saying the effort that has gone into it sets a PRICE FLOOR, not a PRICE CEILING.

I don't know how much code is shared, if any, but I do know that xming and vcxsrv both crash for me constantly and X410 doesn't. Like, ever. I got it on sale, but I'd pay full price solely for the amount of headache it has saved me.

50 bucks is peanuts if it saves headaches

They used to sell it for much cheaper - way back when I got it, I'm pretty sure it was under $10. If they raised it that much, surely that's a sign of demand?

I have little doubt that it's a polished fork, but what ultimately matters is the value added - in this case, the value is, "it just works". The only thing I had to do manually was to configure DISPLAY=:0 system-wide in my WSL.

Have you tried Cygwin's X server? I've been using it for many years already with no problems, and it's free (both as in beer and as in freedom).

I've used Cygwin X and Xming before WSL even existed.

The beauty of X410 is that you click "Install" in the store (which also means it auto-updates), run it, and that's it - it's configured out of the box to work in desktop integration mode. Top-level windows are projected onto the host desktop, clipboard is shared etc. It also has some convenience stuff, like DPI scaling.

I don't think I'd have paid $50 for that myself, to be honest (although I don't think they are actually selling it at $50... this looks more like one of those "permanently on sale" psychological tricks). But when they just got started and were selling it for cheap? I think it was a bargain then. OTOH for somebody who has never even seen an X server before, I can see how it can be a bargain even now.

It doesn't matter what X server you are running. It is a server, you can send data to it, and it will render the windows. In this case you tell WSL to use X server on Windows and it will work. I think I used Xming for this purpose before. You can also render windows on other computers if network is open and access is provided.

There's no way to run a XServer under WSL because WSL doesn't expose the Win32 session at all, unlike Interix.

I'm about 100% sure this thing just wraps the Cygwin X server, seeing its rootless support has exactly the same glitches.

Cygwin consists of ordinary Windows programs, WSL2 is a specialized virtual machine: they are partly redundant (for the purpose of offering well-behaved POSIX tools) but perfectly compatible.

This would be a correct comment in other contexts but you seem to be unaware of the architecture of X. You can run an X server under cygwin and X clients under WSL.

I did not know this. Makes sense now. Thanks for explaining it.

I also bought it for I think $5 maybe a year or two ago. I've also purchased a license for Xming (while strictly not necessary, at the time I had some version specific issues), and X410 is a very nice set-and-forget application. I would not say it's worth $50, but I have definitely gotten my $5-10 out of it.

Can you please tell me the exact location of the file to configure the system-wide WSL?

Would it be the equivalent of /etc/profile?

Start WSL, say by opening a terminal window in it. Then in an Explorer window navigate to:

  \\wsl$

Or, in the terminal cd to your homedir and then type "explorer.exe ." including the dot. This will get you specifically to your homedir.

Where to set global environment variables (and I mean global for all users here!) depends on the distro. On Debian and most derivatives, you can use /etc/environment for this.

The ~/.bashrc file usually.

I mean, that's the only thing you have to do with VcXsrv..

What's wrong with selling software?

I don't think there is anything wrong with paying for software. Free software isn't about the price, it's about the liberty,freedom of the software itself.

Is this free software? It looks like this doesn’t give the user freedom, either.

Zero mentions of the licensing terms on the main page, which makes me very suspicious.

As others have said, it's normally on sale for less. Back when I was using Windows, I found it much less troublesome than the alternatives coupled with WSL, and it's well documented and comes with decent support. It was well worth the $ for me.

I don’t mind the price. They need to fund development. More open source projects should do the same. And being rather niche on the Microsoft store means they’re already catering to a consumer that is under the impression to buy something whereas if this were a normal Ubuntu desktop it’s free.

I bought it for $10 ("$40 off") and that's still how its listed for me. I never tried the other free options but reviews online were consistent that X410 was good. I've been happy with it.

Same, that was probably at least a year ago. For all intents and purposes, it's $10.

I've also been pretty happy with it, and substantive new features are added regularly. There's a couple little annoyances from the design assumption that the user's main interest is WSL, but for the most part, it's been much smoother than the other X11-for-Win32 variants.

Support was recently added for listening on a hyperv vsock, but again, it assumes that you're using Windows on the hardware and connecting to a virtualized Linux. The vsock-win32 driver for KVM is supposedly coming soon and then it will be fun to explore just reversing the tunnel and see what we can get done that way.

What do you mean by "reverse the tunnel" and what would you hope to get done with it?

It sounds like they mean running X apps on the Linux host displayed in a Windows VM.

I picked it up for around 10 IIRC. Have also used Xming in the past (not on Win10). Liked how simple and easy X410 was to setup. It worked flawlessly with WSL.

Is there one I have tried in the past and not had any sucsess

It's 80% discount for next 16 days in app store apprently

I just bought it on spec. The terms claim you can install it on 10 machines! $1/box is pretty cost effective.

I've paid for xming a couple times in the last few years. Doesn't quite cut it with certain applications; various show stopper glitches. Really would like to solve the X Windows on Windows problem once and for all.

There are other posts speculating on the code base; isn't this just X.Org for Windows repackaged? Yes, it is based on X.Org. The publisher explains it on the site; it's X.Org with pre-Window 10 support removed and otherwise optimized and enhanced.

I've never seen it being sold at less than 75% off. "Limited Time Offer" you say, "technically illegal tactic" I read

Could you please explain the illegality?

At least in the UK there is some guidance and judgement around discounted prices being related to a price that was actually used in the past.

https://www.asa.org.uk/advice-online/promotional-savings-cla...

I'm not sure how much of it legally enforceable vs adhering to some code of conduct.

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