Latest thoughts, if any, of Rachel Lawson...

It's time to say farewell to Idris, my BMW S1000XR. In the five years since I bought it, we have made a pretty good job of living up to the "adventure" category this bike supposedly falls into in the BMW Motorrad line-up. We have travelled across dozens of countries in two, nearly (!) three, continents and ventured off-road once or twice in that time. 

Well, Pride Month is over, we saved the gays.

It's truly amazing how changing a corporate logo for a month can have such an effect. Obviously, we don't need to actually do work to improve the lives of a marginalised group all year - that would be far too much like work - stick up a colourful logo for a month and maybe a few posters. That'll do!

I have even removed all the colour from my own website in support of this approach.

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“Would you like to come to my wedding?” I receive as a Slack message from a friend in the Drupal community.

“Sure! When is it? Where?”

“It’s in November, in Kota”

“Oh - wow - yeah, I’ll come if I can!”

At this point, it seemed like a good idea to look at a map - where on Earth is Kota????

How many times do we see corporates declare a love for the LGBTQIA community when Pride Month comes around? And then all that support seems to mysteriously go back into hiding at the end of the month? It's almost like it's "just for show"...

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US President, Joe Biden, recently suggested that the US Government would be in favour of a waiver of patent protection surrounding COVID vaccine development. Whilst the US is only one country at the WTO and they generally only act on consensus, it will certainly make other countries think hard.

To be honest, though, I can't say I'm in favour of a patent waiver here. Avoiding the patents of other pharmaceutical companies isn't the "hard problem" in the pandemic environment we find ourselves in; getting hold of the ingredients to manufacture at global scale is.

A twitter thread by Heather Burns has yet again struck me as so important at this time and it makes me want to re-state something that I feel is so important in open source conferences: pay your speakers — all of them.

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