I think the idea is that the cost of producing standardized hardware is lower than the cost of producing a custom version without that codec just for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Raspberry Pi Foundation was not interested in that codec, so they didn’t buy a license. Separately, as a special agreement, they then allowed the few interested users to get a personal license directly from the IP owner. Sounds like a great solution to me.

Not sure if the same reasoning applies to BMW, though.

I just shared my opinion. I didn’t need those keys because I was not interested in using their proprietary codecs.

For what it matters, if Broadcom decided to license the IP for some hardware accelerator I don’t have anything against it. As long as they don’t make me pay for it when I don’t need it.

Dedicating a small portion of the silicon to optional features is cheaper than designing two separate silicons one with and one without such features.

This was actually probably an efuse, so not really just firmware, but hardware. In any case we are not talking about a software/firmware feature to decode videos, we are talking a section in the silicon that stays dormant unless you activate it with a valid license key.

Imho it makes sense from an economical perspective: they develop, test and fabricate a single silicon that does everything, then they allow you to specialize it on demand for a fee.

In any case, we can agree to disagree.

I have to partially disagree on this point. Take the first generation of Raspberry Pi as an example.

The first Raspberry Pis came with hardware to decode certain video codecs, but this feature was protected by royalties (not by the Raspberry Pi foundation, but a third-party I don’t remember the name of). They decided to sell you the base hardware for cheap, and if you wanted to enable hardware decoding you could later purchase a license key for your specific device, which could then be used to flip a switch in the firmware.

In my opinion it makes sense: I would rather pay 35€ + optionally 5€ for that feature, rather than 40€ mandatory.

I have a feeling that this human step might be at the end of a chain of automated filters.

No, only the local FS. But they have recommendations in their README for integrating with S3 with the help of other tools.

You are invited to join the CopyParty! This has a web UI accessible from the browser, also from mobile, files are stored directly on the filesystem (not encrypted or on a database) and you can mount it as a network drive on Windows and Linux. But it doesn’t let you sync files for offline use, at least not without the help of some auxiliary tools.

You won’t find anything simpler to install and configure than this.

This sounds amazing, but this post is just a “it would be cool if”. Lots of theoretical ideas but nothing concrete.

Here’s my config for reference, which works for me:

name: forgejo
services:
  forgejo:
    image: codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:12
    environment:
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      #- 80:3000
      - 2222:22
    networks:
      - nginx
networks:
  nginx:
    name: nginx
    external: true

If you can share your error message we might be able to better pinpoint the issue.

EDIT: I searched a bit and now I understand better what you are trying to do. I didn’t know about this “SSH shim” idea. This is not what I have done on my setup, sorry.

If port-forwarding is an issue, you can always use a free VPN to reach your self-hosted services. Or if you want to make them public, you can set up yourself a relay on AWS LightSail for less than 5$/month. Or if you want to save as much as possible you can use TailScale or CloudFlare’s Zero Trust network to self-host for free using their server as a relay.

Are they referring to OpenXML, the format used in modern office documents?

What are they suggesting? To build a new standard set of specs to replace it?

For what it matters, without reading the 8000 pages of specs I still managed to programmatically produce a spreadsheet document from scratch. It took me a few tens of hours, that’s true, but it wasn’t that difficult after all.

They provide decent defaults for all the not-so-straightforward configurations, and they provide a web UI to configure the rest. That’s the sole reason I would recommend it to get one’s feet wet without having to work too much.

If one is committed to do things “the right way” they could switch to Nginx and “proper” self-hosting later.

Yeah, I’m afraid you have to use a reverse proxy to host multiple subdomains. The CloudFlare daemon is the reverse proxy.

I would say this would be the proper way to do it (at least as a sysadmin), but since it’s OP’s first time I would simplify it to:

1. Install CloudFlare ZeroTrust daemon on your local server;
2. Set up reverse proxy such as Nginx (optional, the alternative is to use a different subdomain for each service, which might be easier);
3. Point the FQDN to CloudFlare.

Let CloudFlare handle the certificates, DDoS protection, etc… Link if you’d like to give this setup a try.