Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source?

#31

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 10, 2020, 5:41 AM UTC

iekahVa5 wrote: post #13

thevagrant wrote: post #4

That people/organisations (who benefit from a project) will contribute. Some do.. however many organisations take and don't give back. They are quick to move on when the open source project falters (or original maintainers burn out) rather than rally toward a solution.

That's the one I would have mentioned as well. When you release something as FOSS, you think people will offer contributions to your code. What you get instead is tons of issues on your issue tracker without anyone trying to solve their problems and taking the issue tracker as some sort of commercial support. If you assume the role of maintainer, you will get more work from sharing your code, not less. And most of th…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source?

#32

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 10, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

rurban wrote: post #25

Many: The more the better. - The contrary is true. The busfactor is only relevant to closed source. Design by committee works nowhere. Not in the arts, not in engineering. The project is not maintained anymore, the latest issue or commit was years ago. - This defines stability. no problems, no changes needed.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source?

#33

Post by austincheney » Sun, May 10, 2020, 11:44 AM UTC

Vetted by the community.

That is the biggest lie I see. It falsely equivocates a project’s security to its popularity. This is the primary adoption consideration for most JavaScript projects.

Re: Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source?

#34

Post by grizzles » Sun, May 10, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

I don't know if it's a lie but there sure is a lot of spyware these days. For example, if you follow the directions to disable telemetry in strapi, it still stays active in certain configurations (eg. devmode). In other modes it loads external resources that can be used for tracking.

Re: Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source?

#35

Post by kleiba » Sun, May 10, 2020, 5:39 PM UTC

kleiba wrote: post #9

2020 is the year of the Linux desktop.

Sorry, I forgot that HN is a humor-free zone. Or maybe some kids are too young to have heard of this joke. Or maybe some running gags have simple reached the EoL, in which case I understand the downvotes.

Re: Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source?

#36

Post by p0d » Sun, May 10, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

That there is no cost in open source software.

Someone is paying the price for open source software. Employers, employers being stolen from, individuals using their spare time, individuals who have been given/made a lot of money or the state.

I worry for younger people who have an over romanticised view of open source and would ask that they consider how their open source heroes created their software. Were they supported by academia, employment or the state? Make sure you can pay the bills before you think you are ARPANET or Linus Torvalds. Make sure the 100/0s of hours invested were a good use of your time.

Re: Ask HN: What's the greatest lie of open source?

#37

Post by eesmith » Mon, May 11, 2020, 3:08 AM UTC

niksmac wrote: post #30

eesmith wrote: post #2

"The effort[1] of making something open source will be more than made back by external contributions." "Well, if not contributions, at least it will help with your career, with consulting work or job offers." [1] Yes, even slapping the BSD license and doing nothing is effort. And odds are good you'll not get anything out of it.

The problem I can see is with all those PRs. Nobody ever merge them.

While my OSS projects rarely result in any feedback. Even with packages I know are used by many.