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> I'm just saying that in 2023 even if your printer is open-source, ain't nobody got time to dive into hundreds of thousands of line of code to change it.

I disagree. I disagree wholeheartedly, based on both practical projects and the retrocomputing world.

For example:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/

This is a repo for the Incompatible Timesharing System operating system, ITS to its friends. ITS ran on 36-bit mainframe hardware from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which went out of production in the 1980s. DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998, and Compaq ceased to exist as a company in 2002. Commercially, ITS is dead. It is dead-dead. It is old-university-project-with-no-grants dead. Doornails evince more metabolic activity than ITS, at least in the commercial world. Developing on ITS means reading and writing assembly language, TECO, and a Lisp dialect that only runs on ITS and a few other OSes of similar vintage and commercial utility. However, it is still under active development because people are interested in it.

Besides: Digging into a codebase to fix a dumbass printer? People will do that out of spite. People will do that for the blog post and Hacker News thread.



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