The minute that happens the more accessible community version with polished graphics and interface will become the dominant one. Only dilettantes will play the original.
The problem is he has zero motive to do so. His income is adequate for his needs and he apparently has no interest in fame or other reward. To him there's nothing to gain and everything to lose from open-sourcing it.
The idea is that you're no longer constrained by planning around the use of a shared computer lab space. Instead, any activities that benefit from computer use can be used immediately.
You don't have a "pencil and paper" lab that is used the entire school day and scheduled around, and now computers have reached the commodity price point where they don't need to either.
Well it's probably for the best that hacker news is not in charge of teaching our children. They'd be learning go or rust or JavaScript instead of how to read books.
He's not talking about creating a commercial venture that would necessitate thousands of devices. He's talking about an in-house project on the scale of dozens. Would contacting them directly get me that quantity at that price?
It's an incorrect and jarring usage of the phrase. Plenty of folks on HN are non-native speakers who benefit from knowing when colloquialisms are used incorrectly.
The transitive form "Begs the question <question>" is long attested, quite common, very clear and readily distinguishable from the intransitive form "Begs the question" [with no direct object], which refers to the petitio principii fallacy, when people prefer a translation into somewhat archaic English to the Latin.
In fact, the attempts I've seen to quantify usages (including those by prescriptivist pedants still trying to pedal the idea that the intransitive usage is the only correct one) find the transitive usage to be the most common, even in publication.
The intransitive use can even be seen as a generalization and rationalization of the transitive use, wherein the transitive use becomes equivalent to the intransitive use with an implied direct object of "the question which the argument was intended to resolve", which (while not the original etymology of the intransitive form) actually makes the intransitive form sensible and has a closer relation to the modern English sense of the words in the phrase than the original etymology of the intransitive usage.
Prescriptivist pedantry on this point is, if this is possible, even more obnoxiously pointless than that directed against the singular usage of "they".
tldr: Begs the question is a formal term for when a conclusion is not supported by given arguments. Using it the way most people do is technically incorrect, but has become common enough that it is in the gray area where one can consider it the new correct usage.
"Begs the question" refers to a logical fallacy[1], though in modern language usually it's conflated with "invites the question" (which is what people generally mean when they say "begs the question" outside of a comment thread on Reddit).
It's true that people use it that way without issue in everyday conversation, but technically "begging the question" is a logical fallacy in which a statement/proposition presupposes its own truth.
'begging the question' is the name of a specific logical fallacy and is not grammatically correct. You could say 'begs for the question' or as the parent comment suggests...
It seems unkind to conflate the current business model of the company and the employees. Many people serve lifelong careers in the postal service honorably.
The problem is he has zero motive to do so. His income is adequate for his needs and he apparently has no interest in fame or other reward. To him there's nothing to gain and everything to lose from open-sourcing it.