I've written ones band tours, failed attempts to limit covid spread, and dance weekends; Saturday night I ran the music for the 2025 Boston Secular Solstice, so here's another one!

While zoning is complicated and I'm not a lawyer, it looks to me like people commonly describe the situation as both more restrictive and more clear cut than it really is. For example, Tufts University claims:

The cities of Medford, Somerville and Boston (in addition to other cities in the area) have local occupancy ordinances on apartments/houses with non-related persons. Each city has its own ordinance: in Medford, the limit is 3; in Somerville, it is 4; in Boston, it is 4, etc.

As far as I can tell, all three of these are wrong:

• Yes: Lists, links, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, bold, italics, underlining, headings, simple tables.
• No: Colors, fonts, text sizing, text alignment, images, line spacing.

Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:

A: This is cool, X is now open source!

B: It's cool that we can read it, but we can't redistribute etc so it's not "open source".

A: Come on, if it's not "closed source" it's "open source".

B: That's not how the term "open source" has historically been used. This is why we have terms like "source available".

A: It's bizarre that "open" would be the opposite of "closed" everywhere except this one term.

I'm generally with B: it's very useful that we have "open source" to mean a specific technical thing, and using it to mean something related gives a lot of confusion about what is and is not allowed. While A is right that this is a bit confusing, it's also not unique to open vs closed source. Some other examples:

Radiators heat passively: they warm the nearby air, which rises and allows cooler air to flow in. This new air then warms, and the cycle repeats. This works pretty well: no electricity, no noise, just smooth heating.

What we can do with a fan, though, is accelerate this process in a targeted way, at the cost of a small amount of electricity, hardware, and noise. By fanning the radiator we want more output from, we can bring the system into balance.