If they won’t pay with it, isn’t it just an email address with a password? If the laptop is company issued OP can just use their new compwny email address, than don’t use that address for anything outside work related stuff.

2017 was 7 year ago, Aaron died 11 years ago. There are a lot younger users who can’t remember these things.

Let’s see a 20 years old university student was 13 when the source was closed down, I think it’s not easy to find a 13 years old who is familiar with such legal things.

Reddit was open source until 2017, and one of the founders was Aaron Schwartz. So it didn’t look like that for a long time.

It was a terrible sub for years much before the apicalypse. It was full of apple fanboys who believed every marketing bullshit.

It’s a marketing article with nearly zero actual facts. One screenshot about the actual product.

MS and others already use AI for drawing building countours for OpenStreetMap and OvertureMaps from aerial imagery. In osm these AI generated lines are only allowed to be imported after a human supervision and currently it’s very hit or miss. On low density areas it’s mostly good, but in dense city centers it’s unusable.

In overture maps these lines are imported automatically, that’s why you can see buildings on rivers.

They don’t write about these shortcomings in the article, and how they solved AI hallucinations

They are users not developers. An academic or civil engineer who uses a CFD simulator usually has not enough programming knowledge develop such a complex application. The employer has not enough funds to pay for developers (see, they use a pirated software). Paying for developers is still more expensive than buying an already developed product.

Just look at the state of FOSS CAD software. There are some, but they are very-very limited compared to proprietary alternatives. Most people don’t care, they just want to get the work done. Not everyone is a programmer, even if it looks like that from our lemmy bubble.

In the Register article they didn’t copied from the source that the scientists were from Egypt.

Flow3D has different academic and research licenses: https://www.flow3d.com/academic-program/

• There is a free research license available, but it’s only for 4 months. It’s short, researches can take much longer than that.
• There is a free teaching license, but it can have limitations for using the software outside education. It may be forbidden to use outside classes, so it’s possible that they had a teaching license, but they couldn’t use that for research?
• There are licenses for full departments, but it’s available for selected countries only.

It’s strange that they went after these scientists. In 2nd and 3rd word countries software privacy for work is still common. Everything is cheaper, but software prices are the same as in the US, so they pay relatively more for the same tool. I found that a normal license for Flow 3D can cost USD 100k. According to a quick search civil engineers get USD 2000 yearly in Egypt.

Usually American software companies don’t really care about piracy by individuals in these countries. The rationale is that it’s better for them if they use their software without payment instead of using a software from another vendor without payment. They go after bigger companies, at least that’s my experience.

That’s why this story is strange to me, or at least something else should be behind it.