Let’s call it a prolonged international exchange program.

What they have is already done developing and they are flush in cash. A company that creates an ERP for a specialized industry does not care, unless a huge chunk of their customers demand a change all at once AND are ready to pay for it. I mean, I understand the idealism but this is just one of those “if everybody just…” situations that, imho, holds back open source solutions because their defendants look a bit excentric from established businesses’ points of view.

I’m reading all these comments and I guess no one here works outside of academia or 100% IT companies.

Reality out there is, that O365 is so deeply integrated with other business related software, that it’s never going away. My company uses an ERP system that has maybe 200 customers worldwide. It is highly specialized for what we do. There is zero financial incentive for the manufacturer to support any other ecosystem. So they won’t.

We said that a few times, first it was the harddisk factories flooded in Thailand IIRC, then it was GPUs for crypto, now it’s this shit. Not much bursting, more like a chain of bubbles.

Have you ever used a proper, three phase induction stove?

I’m somewhat hopeful, in the last ten years, new and renovated country roads have been getting dedicated bike lanes behind the guardrails. Miles away from the excellent, completely separate infrastructure the dutch have, but its a start.

Living in the boonies, I’m never going to get a bus going by every ten minutes so a solid market for good EVs is still what I root for.

Eh, ID7 and A6 are getting there. BMW i4 ain’t bad either.

On some level, water would work the same way. If you were to collect water from somewhere, feed it into a pump and hook that up to your kitchen faucet, as soon as you increased pressure a little above that of the public water pipe, water would flow backwards from your faucet through the pipes in the house into the public water supply and your water meter might run backwards, depending on its construction.

disclaimer: Unlike freshly harvested AC electricity from a solar inverter, home collected water does not meet the hygiene standards for public supply. Absolutely do not do that either.

Huh, the wiring just supports power spontaneously coming from an exit point rather than an entry? Is that commonplace?

Why wouldn’t it? Electrical wiring isn’t a one way road, electricity (this is an extreme oversimplification, especially when it comes to AC) will always flow from points of high voltage to points of lower voltage. That’s how solar inverters feed into the grid. Raise their voltage a tad bit higher than the grid and match the frequency and phase of the grid until the outflow matches their maximum available power.

Is that commonplace?

That is a hard question, because this isn’t a feature, it’s how things are. Only thing one needs to take care of is that the solar inverter doesn’t deliver so much power that the circuit can consume beyond the circuit breakers capacity, otherwise the breaker would be rendered useless. That’s why these small plug inverters are limited to 800W in Germany, that puts the entire possible load on a 16A circuit into the general upper limit that is still within the safety margin fro 16A circuits.

EDIT: Now before someone gets the bright idea to connect their diesel generator to the grid this way: Don’t. It will not be in sync or phase and that will make something spectacular happen, but it will not supply the grid. Either have an expensive generator that is able to sync to the grid or have a grid disconnect and switchover in front of your generator plugin socket.

EDITEDIT: Also please never connect an island capable solar inverter to a plug. The ones described above are safe that way, because they wait for grid voltage to be available before they do anything, so there will never be high voltage on the open plug. An island capable solar inverter does by definition not do that. There will be high voltage on the plug and it will kill you and it will hurt like a fucker the entire time you’re dying.

It detects a voltage connected to the plug and starts feeding with slightly higher voltage, done.

These are really common in Germany, even being sold as sets at supermarkets occasionally.

As long as you have one of the old Ferraris style meters, it just runs backwards, these usually pay for themselves in about three years on a sunny balcony that way.

I mean, you can always hook a trailer to a normal car or something like a Subaru Outback if you’re going off-road. That’s what people do here. Monday to Friday they commute in their normal, affordable, not extremely huge car and on Saturday the trailer comes out.