I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

The author mentioned this exact problem. Quoting:

> There was a problem that I noticed right away, though: this text was from the GPL v3, not the GPL v2. In my original request I had never mentioned the GPL version I was asking about.

>The original license notice makes no mention of GPL version either. Should the fact that the license notice contained an address have been enough metadata or a clue, that I was actually requesting the GPL v2 license? Or should I have mentioned that I was seeking the GPLv2 license?

This is seemingly a problem with the GPL text itself, in that it doesn't mention which license version to request when you mail the FSF.

How does a sender who only has a GPLv2 license notice even know that there is a v3? Should they first send a letter asking which versions are available?

> > Standard mail forwarding lasts 12 months. You can pay to extend mail forwarding for 6, 12, or 18 more months (18 months is the maximum).

That's kind of awkward when you consider people will find that address for source code where that license file just wont be updated for decades to come, if at all.

If the goal is to be annoying, sure make sure folks can jump through hoops. I just don't think in 2025 a company legitimately intending to satisfy the GPL requirements needs anything to do with physical mail, since they'll provide it online.

I stopped putting in requests for source code offers because I've had a 0% success rate.

Most of the time the GPL request is a waste of time with no purpose other than annoy a company. You can download linux source code from many places, why do you want to get it from us?

There is a slight possibility we have a driver that you could get access to, but without the hardware it won't do you any good. Once in a while we have hacked the source to fix a bug, but if it isn't upstream it is because the fix would be accepted (often it causes other bugs that don't matter to use), and in any case if it isn't upstream, the kernel moves so fast you wouldn't be able to use it anyway.

You're paying that cent, but in the form of endless ads hijacking your consciousness.

accessibility: the quality of being able to be entered or used by everyone, including people who have a disability

Not sure if this works in other countries, but here in the Netherlands, homeless folks can get a postal address at municipal offices. People who move can set up (albeit paid) mail forwarding for up to a year.

Other than that, there’s good old ‘poste restante’, in which you can supposedly address mail to any post office and they’ll hold it for the recipient (even internationally), although I’ve never tried this.

(I appreciate that not everyone may actually know about these options, though.)

Don't forget the next part: whenever you point out that Discord requires you to give them your phone number, hundreds of Agent Smiths appear in the replies to say that actually you don't. Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?

(The Agent Smith effect is something conspiracy theorists made up to explain why every time they show off their conspiracy theory in public, every single person around them suddenly gains the same opinion of them. I'm using it humourously)

If you're talking about packages via USPS, you can use print + pay & drop boxes for anything that fits.

https://www.usps.com/ship/online-shipping.htm

If you're talking about letters, the innumerable blue drop boxes.

I mean it is the fallback method. The solution for the "I never heard of this internet thing, or something else is preventing me from finding the licence online" problem.

Almost everyone will just use their search engine to find this page: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

What can you do to serve the licence to those who can't or won't do that (for whatever reason)? I think it is hard to find something more universally accessible to serve that edge case.

You describe your story of how sending a letter went to you, and I admit it sounds like a bit of a pain. But you managed to do it. And by the sound of it you were totally novice at it. (didn't even bring your own pen!) Someone can do the same thing you did anywhere from Nairobi, McMurdo, Pyongyang, or Vigánpetend.

It is not "universally accessible" in the "easy and comfortable" sense. It is "universally accessible" in the "almost anywhere where humans live you can access this service" sense.

> I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country

I would try to buy them online from their post office. For the USA, there is https://www.usps.com/business/postage-options.htm:

“Print Labels Online with Click-N-Ship

With your free USPS.com account, you can pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online”

Germany has (https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/deutsche-pos...):

“You simply need to open the app, select the appropriate postage service, tick “Code for labelling” (Code zum Beschriften), and pay with PayPal. You will then immediately receive a code, consisting of the letters #PORTO and an eight-digit string, which you must write in pen in the top right-hand corner of the envelope or postcard. Then, just pop it in the post box, and you’re done! The code is valid for 14 days and can only be used for Germany-bound mail.”

That 14-day limit may not be a good idea for this use case.

Offhand, I don't think I've ever mailed an International letter or package.

Is return postage something that, normally, my local post office would help me with? E.G. do they have some method of marking or adding post to a package that would be accepted globally (or at least within the destination country)?

Sure but, on the other hand, this was overly kind of him. In general, unless it is explicitely requested that you must provide a stamped envelope for the reply the assumption of snail mail is that each side pays for its own envelopes and stamps.

> I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.

How long ago was that? The machine have gotten really good at deciphering regular handwriting quite a while ago.

When and where were you required to write the ZIP so strangely? I've never heard of such a bizarre requirement.

It's bizarre to hear about people not even having a single pen, like the author. What's the last time you ever used one? What is your daily life like?

We don't have a printer at home (UK), sending parcels is the only time we'd need it but our small local post office prints labels (eg for Amazon returns, or parcel companies).

I did print a page at work recently, the second one since I started my job 5 years ago.

That weren’t the reasons stated, though.

Anyone, even someone born in 2007, should know how to use pen and paper. This is a basic component of being an educated person, not knowing how to do that is as shocking as being illiterate.

Younger than Gmail, YouTube, and the iPhone.

There's a difference between writing a letter longhand, and simply knowing how to use a pen.

As someone born in 2003, I did this just last week when filing my tax returns.

I just sent in my taxes by USPS mail a couple of weeks ago. Long after online payments were available, I would pay my monthly bills by writing checks and sending them in the mail, as that process actually took me less time than logging in to five or six different websites and navigating through their online payment flows.

Do you not send thank you cards for birthday and holiday gifts?

> 3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label

This sentence really captures the absurdity of this story.

> FedEx should be out of business.

Those crazy retail rates exist so businesses can get big discounts. The company I work with ships maybe half a dozen packages international with FedEx a year and they still give us like 60-70% off retail.

>12. Went to another USPS to drop the package

You have a USPS drop box for tiny boxes in front of your house.

In most/all of Europe, letter volumes are reducing but they're still used. Even where email is common, letters are usually possible.

In your country,

- how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?

- how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?

- how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?

> one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address

I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years.

Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.

>you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly.

It only has to be lined up well enough to be read by a human, they don't reject them just because it's sloppy or not lined up correctly.

We have envelopes like that, too, but they're not all that common.

Do they still say Министерство связи СССР ?

In the UK at school in the 90s we were taught how to write a letter including addressing and stamping the envelope. It's quite strange to see it done "wrong" like in the OP. You're supposed to have the first line of the address centred vertically, leaving the top half for stamps. At least they got the stamps on the correct (right) side, though. I've seen a lot worse.

One time at my old job I was trying to load the printer, and I said something like "Oh shoot, these are oversized sheets; I need the 8.5x11."

My coworker looked at me like I was crazy. "The what?"

"The normal printer paper, the 8.5 by 11 inch paper"

"Why do you know the exact size of printer paper??"

I did not know how to respond to this question.

In a country using ISO paper, national paper sizes of one of the few places not using this standard are obscure.

I've never seen it in any office or stationary shop in Europe. It's available online, at a premium.

They're not just uncommon, they're not used at all. You will only see US legal in the UK if an American company/person sends it to you, how often do you think that happens? I've had it maybe once or twice, but you could easily never see it, especially people born ~this century growing up with less paper of any size anyway.

Odd take. It seems perfectly natural that the country using different sizes from everybody else would be aware of that fact, but that a country using the same size as 95% of the world might not know about the weirdo sizes used by those 5%.

I live in Italy and I've never seen a normal "office" paper sheet which is not A4.

The problem is that the rest of the world is not aware of US sizes.

Thus HP printers continually displaying "PC LOAD LETTER" on printers outside the US dealing with documents generated by people in the US.

It's one thing to know that the US, Canada and the Philippines don't use the same paper sizes as the other 190 countries in the world; it's quite another to be given a physical example for the first time in your life.

It's exceedingly rare to encounter US paper sizes in the UK and I expect the rest of Europe too. I've only received these from two places: the FSF and Donald Knuth.

> I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.

Back in the old days when people still wrote by hand, they also made mistakes, but just scribbled them out and kept going. Starting over was only necessary with doing something special.

Or they do it all digital, or don't even do it at all. Label printers and note-apps are very popular with IT-people.

Unopened, a jar of pasta sauce is good basically indefinitely, but as soon as you actually open the jar the clock starts ticking. We don't make enough pasta at a time to use a full jar, (and in fact will usually use a small fraction of the jar) so I write the date that I opened the jar on the lid to plan its use a little better. "Hey, better find a use for this sauce, it's going to go bad eventually."

I batch cook and freeze meals, and some of them look similar (sauce and chicken vs sauce and pork) and I want to eat the older stuff first. There are also some products that are recommended to be disposed of within X days of opening, which fall well before their best by date.

Food that's not prepackaged. e.g., I recently threw out a container of eggs that had been in my freezer for about two years because my hens were laying so much faster than we could consume, that we had dozens of extras.

I also label things like the date I install a new HVAC filter, or how much to cut off on a piece of lumber, etc.

This is handy if you're doing things like separating a package into portions for your fridge for near term use and freezer for long term storage. Such as the large packages from Costco/Sam's Club.

When I open milk, I write the date on the cap to help keep track of how long it'll remain good.

I prefer an app for grocery lists since it can be managed with a single hand while shopping - no need to stop in the middle of an aisle to pull out a pencil and cross something off, nor to print anything out before heading to the store, for that matter. Plus, I won't have to re-sync the list with what remain on the physical list at the end of the trip.

Apple Reminders has native grocery lists now. The collaboration feature (a household can keep just one shared grocery list) and auto-categorizing by store section are serious time and frustration savers. No "oh shit, I left the list at home", no "I could go to the grocery store while I'm out, if we need anything... but the list's at home...", no manually organizing the list, no grocery-list-by-text. It's so nice, saves far more time than any faff it introduces (I'd agree that without the collaboration and auto-categorizing, grocery lists on phones would be more trouble than they're worth)

(I know other apps have also done it, but having it on a built-in is really handy and it works well)

I use a text editor for notes. I do have a drawing tablet for digital art but that's not really the same as a pen or pencil.

This is very much an American thing. And it's only a thing because our banks don't offer a truly universal and no-fee equivalent of easily transferring money between accounts across bank boundaries.

How do you pay for things above a few thousand dollars? I guess if you don't ever buy a pricey car or own a home you wouldn't need it.

That would only work if the phone system in El Salvador is operating.

As a Brit, the concept of "My lawyer" is slightly unfamiliar. The average Brit doesn't "have a lawyer"; they would only find a lawyer if they had a specific need, eg being accused of a crime or wanting to write a contract etc.

And yet as far as I can tell, most middle class Americans seem to refer to "their lawyer". Do you pay a monthly fee? Are they a criminal defence lawyer, or something broader? How often do you talk to them? How do you find them?

Whiteboard brainstorming is an interesting scenario that I haven't considered, but even then I'd have to say no because I've been fully remote for a while now.

Good point!

https://docs.lob.com/#tag/Letters

I’m pretty sure that’s a common business use case.

Standard mail forwarding is one year, and you can extend that for an additional 18 months. I don't know of any reasonable person who would call that "a few months"

Standard US Mail forwarding is 12 months and may be extended for a further 18 months.

By the time I joined in 2008, I don't think they were being offered anymore as IIRC the person locally who was handling the compiling and tape archiving didn't have access to the systems anymore.

> Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM)

Using French Revolutionary units doesn’t really matter in STEM, either: one can conduct science just as well in any units one wishes. One unit of measure is not more scientific than another. For example, degrees Kelvin and Rankine measure the same thing with different units. If anything, the Rankine degrees are more precise!

Every single country in the world that is on metric today had to switch from something else at some point in the past. Why overfocus so much on UK when you have literally a hundred successful examples?

One does have to wonder what it is about Anglo countries specifically that makes it so difficult for them, though. Well, Canada at least has the excuse of being next door to US, with the resulting economic effects. For UK I'm pretty sure it's just about not being like "the Continent" at this point.

Interestingly, it's actually codified in US law that the metric system is the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" -- however it wasn't a mandatory change so most industries didn't make the change, nor did the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...

The UK uses metric for almost everything. Miles/mph for driving and pints in the pub are the only things that are always non-metric. Human height and weight are the only other thing that is often non-metric, and even then a lot of people will know their weight in kg rather than stone.

It is a weird mix in the UK, distances are measured in miles, and speed limits are set in miles per hour, but fuel is sold in litres, for example.

People get very worked up about it too. People got very worked up about a government proposal to allow people to put imperial units on food in larger type than metric (at the moment it has to be metric larger - or at least the same size).

Everything in engineering and science has been entirely metric since the 80s.

For the UK in practice it is only distance measurements that are non metric now. For some things like small liquid amounts we colloquially use imperial - pints - which differ from US pints. I think the actual official volume is the metric it is just you could say slang that keeps to pints.

Anything to do with STEM is metric.

Other countries switched. Short term pain for long term gain.

Also, switching everything to metric is just not necessary. We already use the metric system all the time. We also use imperial.

Legal size folders exist and are widely used by people who use ... legal size paper.

Legal folders can be great to be able to print letter-sized things on, then you have an area at the bottom to write notes and stuff.

Not sure where you got “random format” from the comments, but we (U.S.) also use a very precise method for defining the size of paper, which is 8.5x11 and legal as 8.5x14. For the US, both are sized to fit in the same standard envelopes. I’ve never thought, “boy, I really need half this sheet length-wise but made shorter to keep the same aspect ratio for this situation”, so while I can understand why that could make sense when creating an international standard, it isn’t more or less random or more/less precise than any other basis. Our basis simply evolved naturally from our system of measurement and our needs with countries we traded most closely, rather than as an international standard based on a different system of measurement that needed to be shared among numerous countries situated closely together.

True, but I don’t understand why this would make letter size confusing to Americans. European office workers are not sitting around marveling at the mathematical elegance of the definition of A series paper. It just doesn’t matter in daily life.

Not only that but C envelope sizes match the A size. So an A4 piece of paper fits a C4 envelope flat.

A4 folded in half (size of an A5) fits in a C5 envelope.

An ISO standard that makes sense and isn't based on different professions like "letter" vs "legal" vs "folio" and other US sizes.

But also the reason that, for example, screens have 80 columns, (also related to punch cards), but that was about the width of a "letter" page at 10cpi.

Why is this useful if you want to write a letter?

> A4 isn’t some random format, you can derive it with three pieces of information …

You can derive letter paper with two pieces of information: 8½ and 11. Just having a laugh, of course — I do admire the A/B series, even if I wish that they were based on a square yard :-)

Right, but why does that make letter size confusing?

Even if every other country in the world used A4, the only people in the US who would even notice would be people who commonly do business with other countries or who live near the border. And in reality, Canada and Mexico also use letter so the border thing doesn’t apply.

So why should letter confuse us just because other people use something else?

No, letter is used throughout North America and in parts of South America.