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The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

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Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#161

Post by ppseafield »

dpower wrote: post #95
ekianjo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux users who understand where Linux come from (don't bag Linux users under a single umbrella, there's a wide variety of them) have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few) or seen the effect of "bad proprietary apps" (Chrome systematically trying to spy on you, software with backdoors, etc... that it's going to be a difficult case to come a…

>have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few) And here lies the main point - they believe that many users will simply reject their proprietary software on principle. If the community was seen to embrace proprietary, which is what I'm calling for in the article, they might just support Linux. Also worth noting that the largest contributor to t…

> many users will simply reject their proprietary software on principle.

Yes, because we've grown tired of companies abusing their relationships with customers: abandoning products and leaving them useless, charging more and more for the same or less levels of support, removing features, suing users for repairing their own property... The list goes on. Sure, similar issues can happen with FOSS, but at least you have some recourse if the creators disappear.

> Also worth noting that the largest contributor to the Linux kernel is... Microsoft.

Yes, but only now. And only because they did what they could to kill Linux, and they still lost. That former behavior is the kind of thing we like to never be an issue in the first place.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#162

Post by AsyncAwait »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #45
mherrmann wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did read the section "Maybe you also dislike the fact that my project is not open source" right?

Yes, it's a small part that provides "I think I can't make it" as the only argument. That doesn't really bring anything into the discussion.

That's another of these developers who benefited greatly from FLOSS, yet write condescending posts. Ironically, the author of fman makes use of Qt, which is a great example of how to make a business and still have a copyleft licensed codebase.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#163

Post by AsyncAwait »

village-idiot wrote: post #49
throwaway4799 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that the author is so much reliant on this specific business model that they would likely end up homeless and starving to death if they were deprived of it?

Don’t be silly, no. But the chance that they would quit this job and go work on open source code for a living is about 0%. Would you rather they go make proprietary code for a megacorp instead? Nobody seems to single out Google engineers for abuse when it comes to FOSS vs proprietary, it’s always the little guys who get all the abuse.

He did not get abuse. He got one or two responses two years ago that said that they'd prefer this to be FOSS, I'd prefer Google's tools to be FOSS too.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#164

Post by sbuk »

cybervegan wrote: post #124

But Free Software is a reaction against Proprietary Software... it exists because some people don't want to embrace PS. Hey ho. You go your way and I'll go mine.

> Hey ho. You go your way and I'll go mine.

That is the attitude that I can get behind, however neither side of this argument is really prepared to do that. In my experience, FLOSS advocates do appear to have a more fundamentalist all or nothing approach when espousing their opinion online, often aggressively. Ideology is great, but it does lead to book burning on occasion.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#165

Post by magissima »

dpower wrote: post #79
maeln wrote: post #69

The complains about FOSS fundamentalists coming from proprietary software dev' (which I am) always seems a bit hypocritical to me. The reason is, you probably use a lot of FOSS software that were made possible only because a lot of people dedicated time and effort to it. Your servers probably run Linux, if not, the services that you use everyday probably do. Your compiler/language is probably FOSS too, if not, the so…

I think I was pretty clear in the article - I absolutely support FOSS. The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software. It's not a zero sum game - FOSS vs Proprietary. Rather they can support each other.

Obviously FOSS supports proprietary software, but I'm curious how you think proprietary supports FOSS. Seems like a pretty one-sided relationship to me.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#166

Post by beefhash »

nwah1 wrote: post #133
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.

Open core can go wrong if you're not coupling the valuable functionality tightly enough to the open core, though. This seems to be happening with BitWarden, where at least two free third party implementations of the password storage backend exist[1,2].

[1] https://github.com/jcs/rubywarden

[2] https://github.com/Odysseus16/bitwarden-go

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#167

Post by pdonis »

dTal wrote: post #159
dpower wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put nuts in their products Sure, this would be morally wrong (and also illegal). But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false. Quite insulting to those of us that do work on proprietary software.

I don't see where they said "everyone". The fact that anyone does that is cause for concern. It's great that you don't include malicious code in your proprietary software. But why should you defend the right of others to do so? It's not really "insulting" to note that this is a common occurrence. As you note, it is illegal for food manufacturers to put anything secret in food, let alone secret and harmful. Why tolera…

> As you note, it is illegal for food manufacturers to put anything secret in food, let alone secret and harmful. Why tolerate it in software?

We don't enforce laws against food manufacturers putting secret ingredients in food by opening up food production processes so that any member of the public can walk into the factory and watch them at work. A major reason for that is that the FDA is bound by law to respect trade secrets, so it can't just make public every detail of the food production processes it inspects; all it can say is whether or not they are safe in the FDA's judgment.

If we wanted to make laws against putting secret ingredients in software, the enforcement mechanism analogous to the one we use for food safety laws would be to create a huge government agency that inspected software source code. It wouldn't be to open up the source code to anyone who wants to see it.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#168

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #154
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have only themselves to blame (as a whole, not individuals) because their platform is a pain to develop for compared to others unless your code is open source so distros can compile it themselves. One does wonder whether this situation is intentionally exacerbated by the fundamentalists. Case in point, there are people against Flatpak because it makes it easier for developers to bypass repos and their package ma…

> there are people against Flatpak Hello there. An not so much against it, as not "for it". > it easier for developers to bypass repos and their package maintainers. No, that's not the problem at all. The biggest problem is duplication of libraries, most of which will not see security updates nowhere near as promptly as the system version would, integration with the DE and the problems there, fundamentally replicatin…

Then I guess this is the trade-off you've agreed to. However, there are a whole lot of Linux and potential Linux users who complain about the lack of proprietary software ports, and package managers and their implications are one of the reasons for that.

Flatpak isn't even good enough, in my opinion, since it adds complexity to an otherwise simple scheme in an effort to accomplish some of the deduplication you and other fans of package managers want. Ditto its repo model.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#169

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

maeln wrote: post #69

The complains about FOSS fundamentalists coming from proprietary software dev' (which I am) always seems a bit hypocritical to me. The reason is, you probably use a lot of FOSS software that were made possible only because a lot of people dedicated time and effort to it. Your servers probably run Linux, if not, the services that you use everyday probably do. Your compiler/language is probably FOSS too, if not, the so…

You know, sometimes I wish we had a way to contextualise our upvotes, on HN, to add more emphasis when upvoting comments we find ourselves in particular agreement with- you know, the kind of comment that makes people watching you read it assume you're listening to ACDC on your headphones? That sort of thing. Perhaps we could have a way to channel some of our karma to the upvote arrow, and pass it on to the poster of the comment?

Anyway, sometimes I really wish I could upvote a comment twice of three times, etc. I mean, I know there's a way to do it but it actually feels like doing a disservice to the poster (and I'm pretty sure accounts get shadow-banned for that sort of thing anyway).

I'm digressing. Dude (I assume?). That's a good comment. Thanks.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#170

Post by pjmlp »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #151
TimJYoung wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is going to use software for anything critical that doesn't have someone "waiting around" to fix any bugs that appear, even if they are several years down the line from the original release (and yes, this happens a lot ). So, what you call "rent" is, in actuality, the cost of keeping the lights on and the original developers around so that such long-term support can be provided. And yes, these same developers…

> Nobody is going to use software for anything critical that doesn't have someone "waiting around" to fix any bugs that appear This is exactly why you're often able to make money and sustain yourself out of free software.

Not really, because there are thousand others that can out offer you.
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