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The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

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Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#131

Post by vinceguidry »

peterwwillis wrote: post #123
vinceguidry wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The third part, "our competitors will fork and steal our business!", is possible, but extremely unlikely, unless you suck at your product. I don't think you appreciate the danger here. Someone can sink a few tens of thousands of dollars into cloning a codebase, then make it to market in a bare fraction of the time it took you to get there. When you say "incumbents don't get unseated without tremendous effort," you'…

You can claim a lot of things that don't happen are dangerous. Skating on ice is dangerous, because someone could bring out a flamethrower or napalm. Flying on a plane is dangerous, because someone could fire a shoulder-mounted rocket at your plane. Eating food with a fork is dangerous, because someone could come up behind you and slap the fork into your throat. All of these things are dangerous possibilities that do…

The HN crowd tends to stay outside of these kinds of business circles, but I have a friend who doesn't, and he would ping me from time to time about "cloning a site and building a business around it." It took me awhile to understand the mentality. But "Uber for X" is very much a thing. We just don't pay attention to them because those companies never reach Uber growth. But you don't get to be Uber by just acquiescing to competition. It's not just about execution, you can't just take the high road, Uber's taken a lot of low roads to get where they're at.

It's basically like the kudzu that grows ubiquitously across the SE United States. Find a tree, climb it, then steal all its sunlight. Look at an existing business, find out what makes it tick, then clone its business model and go after its customers using the same marketing channels its using.

I don't think you'd have to read many business books to find an account of this happening, albeit with non-software products. It works because customers simply don't have the bandwidth to be loyal or to thoroughly research everybody they do business with.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#132

Post by ruskerdax »

aethertron wrote: post #85

Here's another old argument from Stallman against using nonfree software, not addressed in the blog post: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.en.html > As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A pers…

Copyright is not a form of cooperation. It is a threat. If you copy something without permission, you risk retaliation that is, ultimately, backed by violent force. It is hardly honest to call something "cooperation" under these circumstances.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#133

Post by nwah1 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #4

There's another problem with the "make money by offering support" argument: it incentivizes creating software that requires support, usually via added complexity. Similarly the customization argument: it incentivizes creating inflexible software. I'm not sure there is a monetization strategy that actually aligns with what should be the goals of FLOSS.

Models I know of are open-core, dual-licensing, paid support, selling developer tools, and providing hosted cloud service offerings.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#134

Post by rubatuga »

What is the point of attacking such a minority? If the author claims it is a group of people so close to the "horizontal line", then why feel the need to negate their arguments? If the author is the one saying that strong opinions are rarely correct, why would he mention a different strong opinion that Linux users should embrace proprietary software with open arms? It seems as if the author never realized the true struggles that open source or FOSS (not the same thing, I know) movements had in the early 2000s, with corporations such as Microsoft being outright at war with them. The author only uses the example of his small inconsequential startup.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#135

Post by watwut »

rubatuga wrote: post #134

What is the point of attacking such a minority? If the author claims it is a group of people so close to the "horizontal line", then why feel the need to negate their arguments? If the author is the one saying that strong opinions are rarely correct, why would he mention a different strong opinion that Linux users should embrace proprietary software with open arms? It seems as if the author never realized the true st…

1.) Refuting arguments is not an attack. The article does not read like attack. It is civil and non inflammatory and non insulting.

2.) Those people vocally disagreed with his previous article, him following up defending amd explaining his stance is how discussion work.

3.) Why not?

4.) Why do you want him to be silent and that group to hAve monopoly on discourse?

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#136

Post by zzzcpan »

zeveb wrote: post #128
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Open Source license cannot limit for what purpose the software will be used.

That's because restricting the use of software is restriction of user freedom …

Most open source licenses don't respect user freedom at all and are promoted precisely because they allow corporations to use such software to restrict user freedom. And among those licenses that claim to respect user freedom none actually respect it enough to prevent corporations from distributing such software as user freedom restricting services. Even GPL was not merged with AGPL because corporate interests outweigh respect for user freedom.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#137

Post by tokai »

vinceguidry wrote: post #131
peterwwillis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can claim a lot of things that don't happen are dangerous. Skating on ice is dangerous, because someone could bring out a flamethrower or napalm. Flying on a plane is dangerous, because someone could fire a shoulder-mounted rocket at your plane. Eating food with a fork is dangerous, because someone could come up behind you and slap the fork into your throat. All of these things are dangerous possibilities that do…

The HN crowd tends to stay outside of these kinds of business circles, but I have a friend who doesn't, and he would ping me from time to time about "cloning a site and building a business around it." It took me awhile to understand the mentality. But "Uber for X" is very much a thing. We just don't pay attention to them because those companies never reach Uber growth. But you don't get to be Uber by just acquiescing…

>I don't think you'd have to read many business books to find an account of this happening, albeit with non-software products.

So it's a general problem with businesses and not a valid argument against FOSS alone then. That being said I don't see "uber for x" companies to be a danger for legit businesses. To me it seems more of a way to milk investors, and not a viable way to steal markets.

Most systems have a potential for agents to act badly, but it is my lay understanding that game theory have shown cooperative strategies to win out.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#138

Post by peterwwillis »

vinceguidry wrote: post #131
peterwwillis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can claim a lot of things that don't happen are dangerous. Skating on ice is dangerous, because someone could bring out a flamethrower or napalm. Flying on a plane is dangerous, because someone could fire a shoulder-mounted rocket at your plane. Eating food with a fork is dangerous, because someone could come up behind you and slap the fork into your throat. All of these things are dangerous possibilities that do…

The HN crowd tends to stay outside of these kinds of business circles, but I have a friend who doesn't, and he would ping me from time to time about "cloning a site and building a business around it." It took me awhile to understand the mentality. But "Uber for X" is very much a thing. We just don't pay attention to them because those companies never reach Uber growth. But you don't get to be Uber by just acquiescing…

Again, I don't think this actually happens. Look at Toothpaste brands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_toothpaste_brands). The ones that aren't around anymore basically had a defective product, and the rest got bought out by the more established competitor.

Car ride-sharing business isn't a monopoly, and it also isn't one-eats-the-other. Uber and Lyft are competitors but they both still exist, even though they do the same thing, because (1) they both have strong brands, and (2) they both implement their business in different yet complementary ways. It's obvious that not every competitor cuts the legs out of the other competitors at every opportunity.

Likewise, not every start-up is going to steal the tech from its rival, even if your "friend" keeps suggesting you do it. And even if you did have your competitors' source code, source code isn't a brand, it isn't a development team, it isn't support, and it isn't sales. If you don't execute all the business aspects better than your competitor, the source code is useless.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#139

Post by ruskerdax »

Proprietary software which restricts its distribution and "unauthorized" modification (virtually all of it) is the very essence of fundamentalism. It relies on a rigid and literal interpretation of what constitutes property (e.g. that the concept of "intellectual property" is coherent and non-contradictory) and even goes so far as to use threats, ultimately backed by violent force, to ensure compliance with this belief. To conclude this blog post decrying the skepticism of proprietary software with "extreme opinions are rarely correct" strikes me as particularly ironic and absurd.

FOSS is the antithesis of this fundamentalism, as it expressly rejects the use of threats to intimidate others into not copying or modifying code. I'm sure there are some people who make sweeping generalizations that may not apply to all proprietary software, but being suspicious of an opposing viewpoint doesn't make one a fundamentalist.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#140

Post by TimJYoung »

enriquto wrote: post #103
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't eat at restaurants then?

> So you don't eat at restaurants then? Yes I do. I was talking about selling packaged food, but still, restaurants make a good example also. They will always tell you if one of their recipe contains a particular ingredient (of which you might be allergic), and whether there are vegan options. Many restaurants even write the complete list of ingredients on each item in the menu! Even then, except for very complex sau…

That's not quite true. You can easily decompile any binary and glean all sorts of valuable information from it. On Windows you can find out which API calls it makes and can even use detours/trampolines to redirect such calls:

https://github.com/Microsoft/Detours/wiki/Using-Detours

At one point I wrote a little piece of software as a proof of concept that used detours to redirect any file I/O in IE that was deemed "unsafe" to a special in-memory file system.

The bottom line is that you don't need the source code in order tell if an application is "phoning home" or if it makes suspicious API calls. In fact, it is often easier to just simply monitor how the software interacts with the host system to determine if it is performing (possibly) malicious actions. IOW, if you're concerned about a certain piece of software, then auditing the source code isn't going to be as good of a solution as just sandboxing the application so that it's impossible for the application to do something bad.

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