> Blizzard are well within their legal (and moral) rights to shut that down.
Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
Oh yeah, I remember when they abandoned it for years, third party servers revived it, Blizzard realized they can make money off it and shut the third party servers down.
It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment during wartime.
> The objective of wartime censorship was to prevent the exposure of sensitive military information to the enemy. Similar censorship had been practiced by the U.S. Army in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. During World War I, however, the press censorship system was formalized and extended, according to the Army's official history, to include anything that might "injure morale in our forces here, or at home, or among our Allies," or "embarrass the United States or her Allies in neutral countries."
It's entirely common for the government to wipe their ass with the first amendment whenever it suits their interests, using whatever plausible-enough pretense they can find.
I admit I'm having a visceral reaction to this analogy. A bicycle is a sophisticated product whose form is almost pure function. Despite being apparenty simple, almost no regular person can draw even a reasonable facsimile of a bicycle from memory ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0_vXZ-3LFU ). Which is to say, for actually designing a functioning bicycle, the devil is in the details, and details are exactly where vibecoded apps fall down. Our lower bound for this analogy should instead be the downhill go-kart cobbled together from scrap wood you found in the dumpster.
There's no free lunch here. Delays in publishing not only slow down attacks, they also slow down critical security patches. There's no one-size-fits-all policy here, you're at risk either way.
> If version 0.7 turned out to hit the right API and not require backward incompatible changes, releasing a version 1.0 would be as disruptive as a major version change
TL;DR: You take the 0.7 library, release it as 1.0, then make a 0.7.1 release that does nothing other than depend on 1.0 and re-export all its items. Tada, a compatible 1.0 release that 0.7 users will get automatically when they upgrade.
Even more interesting is that you can use this to coordinate only partially-breaking changes, e.g. if you have 100 APIs in your library but only make a breaking change to one, you can re-export the 99 unbroken APIs and only end up making breaking changes in practice for users who actually use the one API with breaking changes.
That cannot work. Nor should it work. However can we make things so that users don't need to care in the first place?
Note that the above probably isn't 100% answerable. However it needs to be the goal. A few people need to care and take care of this for everyone. Few needs to be a large enough to not get overwhelmed by the side of the job.
LLM providers are interested in maximizing their profits, not minimizing your costs. The eventual goal of the providers, and the reason that they have trillion-dollar valuations, is because the objective is to capture the market and then increase the price to capture the value of any time you may be saving by using them. In other words, if your time savings amounts to $100 per hour by using LLMs, their goal is to eventually charge you $99.99 per hour for the privilege of using them.
It's not ahistoric. Going back to the bad old days of forbiddingly high costs to developer tooling (not to mention the hardware needed to run it) would be a societal regression. Imagine needing a subscription to use a programming language in 2026, you'd be laughed out of the room. That's the world that the LLM providers are trying to drag us back to.
Legal rights, sure. Moral rights, you're gonna have to explain yourself, because I see no moral objection here. Culture advances through remixes, and while we can grant artists some exclusive period to profit through their work, we're not morally obliged to let them have a stranglehold on culture forever. People of my generation might not want to hear this, but Classic WoW is a retro game. We, here in 2026, are as far from WoW vanilla as WoW vanilla was from Ultima II. A year from now, replace Ultima II with Ultima I. A year from then, replace that with motherfucking Rogue itself! Morally speaking, Blizzard^W Activision^W Microsoft can go eat their own ass.
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