When I started doing open source software, that meant posting tarballs to Usenet and mailing list, occasionally mailing someone a hard floppy on request. I don’t have a github profile sparkling with emojies, but I think I’m doing all right.

I have 15+ years of experience being a software engineer and now I’m making a mid-six-figure income by going into companies who staff their “engineering department” with people who have five years or less of experience and cannot write a line of code without internet access to save their lives. So by all means go ahead and continue down the road you are going. We thought that stack overflow would guarantee a stable business but now that “AI” has come into play, we can’t even keep up with demand. We’ll probably raise prices by 25% next quarter. By the time that AI can actually produce decent results, I can probably retire twice over.

I’m a software engineer […]

No… No, you’re not …

You are that guy who takes 50 guesses at the easy trivial pursuit questions and then claims you knew the answer all along.

If you look at cloudlfares strategy here, they want to be the sweetheart of everyone who knows what a VPN is in order that they will be selected by those people for corporate projects. Monetising the data that flows through their network is antithetical to that objective.

This is just naïve. Cloudflare is a business and if they see more value in selling you out, and legally you agreed they may, then they will. Acting “antiethical” has never stopped a big player from infringing on the rights of small players, especially in the tech industry where individuals essentially have zero rights.

Additionally I would venture that the data doesn’t really have any value, it would be impossible to use it to build data about an individuals browsing or buying habits.

Interesting. I would pay you $5 monthly for all the data going through your tunnel under the same conditions that cloudflare requires you to agree to. How about it?

Surely you have to acknowledge that it’s disingenuous to copy the last sentence of the clause and omit the first sentence that says the exact opposite of the point you’re trying to make.

No it doesn’t. The first sentence does not state anything that is not already clarified by law. Hence, it adds zero value to the actual meaning of the paragraph.

You are a person. Your basic human rights are guaranteed to you by law. Given that, you hereby grant me the right to enter your house and shave your head at my discretion and however often I wish, if I deem it necessary to provide to a free service that I don’t classify further in this agreement.

Same thing, you can say if I redact the first two sentences from the quote I’m being disingenuous, but really I’m just trying to get one over on you by making you feel like you have some control in this when in actually you do not.

Disagree. “Necessary to provide the service” means whatever they want it to mean. If they deem it necessary to monetize your data so they can offer you their service “for free”, that is well within their right to do. The fact that you " retain all rights" just means you can use your data too without asking Cloudflare for permission.

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, fully sublicensable, worldwide, royalty-free right to collect, use, copy, store, transmit, modify and create derivative works of Customer Content, in each case to the extent necessary to provide the Services.

You’ll have to be fine with Cloudflare having any and all rights to the data transmitted through the tunnel, while you in return have none. They pinky promise not to fuck you over, but they also promise to legally burry you for any infringement at their discretion.

For me, this is a non-starter.

GDPR does not apply to individuals.

I’d put my money on asymetric network routing due to the VPN trying to route packages into the tunnel that should probably go to your LAN. A simple workaround, if you are unfamiliar with how to investigate and fix this, would be to put stuff that is supposed to go through the VPN into a virtual machine and have it download things to a shared folder that you can then stream from. Cuts out a whole bunch of problems.

Then you are good either way. All of the IaC tools generally revolve around the same principles, they just express them in different ways. Learning terraform is definitely not a waste, you’ll be able to transfer what you learned to other tools like pulimi, CDK or what have you pretty easily.

If you were to buy into a technology for a long time project, then I’d encourage you giving the alternatives a closer look.

That is a rather short sighted interpretation of what is happening I feel. Essentially the company is moving from FLOSS to “free as in beer”, which will very likely affect the product in the long run.

Switch over to pulumi, it’s essentially the same thing

https://www.pulumi.com/