It was pretty funny when push came to shove and they all pulled their heads in. “Well if I don’t do what they’re saying they might remove me so I have to do what they say for the good of the community”. That’s… not how that works.
Firstly, imposing on someone else’s intellectual property is not “illegal”, because that usually refers to crimes. This is a civil issue, as in the some company is demanding the dev stops or else they’ll sue him or something.
Secondly, it doesn’t really matter whether the dev is “right” or could prevail against a legal claim - because you just wouldn’t bother trying. Imagine you have an ok job, take care of your family, and made this plugin on a whim just because you can. Your days are full of taking your kids to the park, spending time with your wife, playing around with your hobbies, that stuff. Maybe you’re not wealthy, but your salary is enough to look after your family and make your mortgage repayments. Then Haier threatens to sue you, and although you could likely prevail mounting a defense would probably cost you a years worth of mortgage repayments. Maybe you could represent yourself but that might take a years worth of saturdays writing and responding to legal stuff that you don’t really know much about. Bear in mind that there’s no financial support from the open source community.
It just doesn’t really matter whether Haier has a legit claim.
Honestly, I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. Yes it’s possible that someone could be compelled to update a warrant canary, but it’s infinitely more likely that they’re simply coerced, like their lawyer tells them to.
EFFs Canary Watch project found that warrant canaries were a flawed principle for a number of other reasons.
As I recall working with EXIF is generally a pain in the butt. In js the best you can hope for is a wrapper around some CLI based thing that I can’t remember the name of right now.
I mean… the wisdom not really incorrect - the oil would soak into the ground. In this era people just piled up garbage in their back yard and burned it. Obviously this isn’t an appropriate way to dispose of things in 2024.