Some good responses here already. One angle that's not been mentioned yet is informed consent at the time of purchase.

When "buying" not "renting" there is presently no information for the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are purchasing when it comes to a live service game because no end-of-service date is available at the time of making the purchasing decision.

This is in large part why the end of The Crew was problematic for many people.

Had the service end of life been advertised at the point of purchase the consumer could have knowingly "purchased" a time-limited product, or not, but the decision would have been informed.

All this stuff about end-of-life plans, releasing self-hosted servers, patching out online-only stuff and leaving behind an offline-only game, etc, is great, but it's only one of the possible remedies that SKG have been discussing for the last couple of years.

Another perfectly feasible one is not to dress up a time-limited entitlement to participate in a live service as the same thing as an "own forever" product at the point of purchase.

There's absolutely merit to this. If Reddit can't fund itself, and goes under, all users loses a valuable community resource.

That Reddit have decided to end free access to their APIs isn't itself an issue.

The way they're doing it, and the significant departure from the decade and a half long de-facto agreement that a large body of the user base believe themselves to be party trading user generated content and user sourced moderation in exchange for platform access does seem to have missed the mark though.

It doesn't take much creative thought to conceive of a scheme whereby the paid Reddit Gold includes API access, for example. Which should be a bit like a YouTube Premium or Spotify Premium kind of deal - direct contribution as alternative to advertising to achieve per user monetization.

It's not even a stretch to partner with third party apps and let them collect the user payments as an alternative to requiring users to pay for the app and Reddit Gold separately.

But the very short notice period and seemingly unpalatable pricing, together with some of the reported questionable comments and actions from Reddit, don't come across as reasonable from any rational perspective.

> And the Foundation's goal is more about access to computing _education_

A couple of months ago I attended a talk given by Eben Upton. He talked through the history of the entire RPi initiative, starting with his observation that Computer Science admissions at Cambridge University were falling away at quite an alarming rate, and how that inspired the whole thing.

Before attending the talk, I had understood the proposition to be that a cheap home computer put into the hands of kids might spark some natural curiosity, like what happened during the 80s and early 90s home microcomputer era, which would then ultimately lead to more tech-literate kids who would go on to study Computer Science and ultimately have careers in the field.

I'm not sure this was wrong, but it definitely wasn't the whole story.

Eben described the work of the foundation, and it's far more extensive than I had any appreciation for whatsoever. For example, both domestically and internationally the foundation are heavily involved in teacher training, and have played a role in developing curriculum across the globe to further or even initiate IT/CompSci education.

The structure of the Foundation and Trading, he explained, was the most appropriate vehicle under UK tax rules for funding charitable educational work with commercial enterprise. I'm probably simplifying this massively but in essence the flow of profits/dividends/whatever up from the for-profit Trading arm to the charitable Foundation helps to pay for the significant amount of educational work that Foundation does around the world.

I hadn't appreciated many of the forms of educational work that the foundation are involved in at all.

From this perspective, it is perhaps easier to hold a charitable view of Eben's comments around preferential stock availability for small businesses. In the position that they have been in, whereby they're going to sell every unit produced easily whatever the channel, and keeping in mind funding the education goals of the foundation, I think it's entirely reasonable to also help keep some small businesses afloat along the way at the expense of hobbyists.

Prior to this talk, I think my blind spot had been that the entire mission was to put cheap home microcomputers into the hands of kids around the world. I can understand that throttling this home or hobbyist supply in favour of commercial sales takes a bit more to interpret charitably.

But the Foundation is doing so much more than that, and that was entirely lost on me, that failing to fulfill hobbyist market demand no longer looks to me like failing in the original mission.

I ride a Tern Link D8. It has 20" rims, usable gears, and a pannier rack. It rides really well for a folding bike and is half decent for transporting a couple of bags of stuff around. Most of the running gear is off-the-shelf Shimano which helps when sourcing spares.

The trade-off is that it's quite big when it's folded and fairly awkward to carry. Unlike some folding bikes, it doesn't wheel when it's folded up so you have to lug around a fairly awkward metal lump when you're not riding it. And it rarely fits under seats on public transport - it can be quite awkward in places.

I've also found it fairly tricky to lock. The narrow gaps between the spokes and the very small triangle in the frame make it hard to pass a serious lock through; I constantly worry about wrecking spokes when I try to lock it up. It lives indoors most of the time so it's not a serious drawback for me but might be something to think about based on your needs.

Overall I've been happy with the good riding, luggage options, and replacement parts story. A good option if the drawbacks don't really hold you back in your day-to-day usage.