What comes after open source • Hacker News Board

Re: What comes after open source

#121

Post by bradknowles » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #110

heathjohns wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a different mechanism with the same outcome. If the scale of a solution is so immense that only one or two of the largest corporations in the world can realisitically implement it, then you've got a duopoly and all the bad power imbalances that come with it. Which is part of why I think freedom is the wrong goal. You're free to choose between Kodos and Kang, but the ability to choose conveys no power.

I think you're seriously overrating Google Search. Try DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com. They give you at least the exact same results as Google, and in many cases actually better, more up-to-date, or more fitting/filtered ones (except that Google image search seems consistently better, however). After all, these crawl the same web that Google is crawling, and there just isn't that much really new stuff out there these da…

Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan of DDG. It is my default search engine everywhere, and I go so far as to actively delete Google wherever I can.

But no, it's not the same. DDG uses Google on the backend, to populate their data. And that means there is a time delay between when Google gets the data and when DDG gets the data.

And sometimes you do want the personalization that Google brings to the table, to help you find the answers you're looking for faster. Precisely because DDG doesn't have much information about you, that means their search function won't be able to be as personalized.

DDG is fine as a primary default search engine, but as it stands, you still need to have Google around to provide the data and to provide a backup search engine in case DDG doesn't cut the mustard.

Re: What comes after open source

#122

Post by morenoh149 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #118

morenoh149 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@intelliderp you got buried. I'd love to see links to such anti-union hn discussions. I kinda get that HN is very capitalistic and unions check reckless capitalism. But at the same time HN is very dev focused and unions promise larger benefits/money to devs. I'll go on the record saying I'm pro dev union. Even if its just a glorified professional organization. I'd love to hear the holes in the argument. The corporati…

Here's a recent HN discussion about unions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19433610 You can read the thread and draw your own conclusions. My impression is taken from reading a number of these threads over years; I could be wrong!

My guess is that that sentiment arises from the meritocratic attitude that if you are disproportionately talented you should be compensated much much more. And I get that. To a point.

I don't like when corporations collude to artificially suppress wages either. Or when information asymmetry is used to keep an engineer's salary low or prevent negotiating higher salaries.

I'll read that discussion.

Re: What comes after open source

#123

Post by meditate » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 10:11 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #56

meditate wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Veganism might have been a fad for you, but for others it is a necessary undertaking to remain healthy. I can't blame you for finding some choices difficult to make, but at the same time it's disheartening to see these "anti-religion" arguments brought out to dismiss the very real need of people (and companies) to be able to retain control of their own devices, for their own purposes which are not explicitly approved…

It wasn't a fad; it was a moral commitment. I certainly agree that some people are vegan for health reasons, but health was part of why I stopped being vegan: it was harming my health. Not for any of the reasons that anti-vegans trot out, mind you, it was that I was mostly consuming vegan junk food. My comment was focused on this moral aspect because that's the part of veganism that I was a part of and are familiar w…

If the moral aspect of it is really important to you then I hope you can find the path to trying again in a different capacity that doesn't compromise on your health. If not then forget I said anything.

The AGPL does have traction, just not in the places you might expect to look. I think that's a red herring anyway because it is indeed a niche license, useful specifically for free software communities where growth and development focused around a network API is happening actively and rapidly, and there is active worry that a bad actor could move in and try to take over the network. This is absolutely not the only issue threatening free software communities currently because not all of them fit that description, so I see why it is quite common for people to dismiss the AGPL. But know that it may just not be what is correct for your use case, and that for many communities a lot of other licenses are still adequate, including the non-copyleft licenses that you have mentioned are gaining a lot of traction due to their popularity within proprietary, closed-source companies.

I have heard a lot of rambling recently about "post-open source" and "post-free software" movements lately but I still think it's jumping the gun. The fact that it's still so difficult to find working libre drivers for wifi chips (and a lot of other pieces of hardware) is proof to me that we still have a lot of work to do, not a convenient excuse to dismiss things entirely and stop caring.

Re: What comes after open source

#124

Post by davidjnelson » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

Townley wrote: post #16

I recently wrote a piece of software and wanted to make it open source. GitHub's helpful dropdown of license choices gave me more pause than I expected as I struggled to choose between MIT and GPL. "I definitely want someone to be able to modify, fork, and publish better versions of this code. Do I also want them to be able to commercially license their derivatives?" On one hand, this code was contributed to the publ…

I wish license selection was mandatory. A massive amount of projects have no license at all.

Re: What comes after open source

#125

Post by jgamman » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 12:28 AM UTC

i don't see anyone saying the problem with OS is "developers have to eat" - i mean honestly, when did the concept of "a fair days pay for a fair days work" become anathema? Even wildly successful OS packages don't generate enough $$ for the developer to just work on it full time - i mean it's cents per user kind of levels would generate enough for a handful of full-time developers (sagemath is the one i'm thinking of specifically but all sorts of critical plumbing seems to be in the same boat).

I get in the old days that builders/users were the same people and sharing OS code made sense but those days are long gone.

you don't have a problem with licences - you have a problem with an economy that expects a major _critical_ chunk of it to work for free. well it aint me, it aint me - i aint no fortunate one, no...

Re: What comes after open source

#126

Post by astazangasta » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 4:07 AM UTC

projektir wrote: post #103

zanny wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value in strictly adhering to religions like software freedom or veganism isn't so much to cause any meaningful change yourself - you are actively harming your own experiences and potential in restricting yourself in most any way dogma would limit you - but it projects to those around you an adherence to that belief that can inspire and promote the change in those you directly interact with. This happens in all m…

The point is that the presumed benefits of said dogma just don't seem to be there. Mostly these things concentrate around people for whom the sacrifice is relatively small and scare off everyone else with the holier than thou attitude.

The entire technology stack the modern Internet is built on exists because Stallman clung to his dogma, how's that for "presumed benefit"? Stallman isn't the world's smartest person or best programmer or even a particularly gifted organizer. His superpower is his fanaticism. And it worked.

Re: What comes after open source

#127

Post by ilaksh » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 4:20 AM UTC

heathjohns wrote: post #53

I think we need to zoom out more, even. The focus on freedom is too narrow - freedom at the cost of becoming disconnected is a raw deal. What we want is power. In the desktop era, having source code gave us power, so we associated the two and demanded the former - but this obviously hasn't translated to the cloud. You can't download a Facebook profile and then re-upload it somewhere else and still be connected to all…

This is related to my comment on the Iron Cage article.

I think that public decentralized protocols and platforms can provide a base level of holism without being controlled by individual monopoly technology companies.

Re: What comes after open source

#128

Post by rambojazz » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

bradknowles wrote: post #121

tannhaeuser wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're seriously overrating Google Search. Try DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com. They give you at least the exact same results as Google, and in many cases actually better, more up-to-date, or more fitting/filtered ones (except that Google image search seems consistently better, however). After all, these crawl the same web that Google is crawling, and there just isn't that much really new stuff out there these da…

Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan of DDG. It is my default search engine everywhere, and I go so far as to actively delete Google wherever I can. But no, it's not the same. DDG uses Google on the backend, to populate their data. And that means there is a time delay between when Google gets the data and when DDG gets the data. And sometimes you do want the personalization that Google brings to the table, to help you…

Actually, DDG seems to me like it matches yandex results more closely than Google's.

Re: What comes after open source

#129

Post by dannyobrien » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 6:27 AM UTC

bojanz wrote: post #71

Fascinating article, and one that matches my recent thinking. I am a part of a large GPL open source project, but am not sure that the GPL made a big difference there, since "distribution" is a loophole large enough to drive a truck through. If you extend & modify software just for your site / your client's site, you have no obligations. Conceptually, a great followup article is Kyle E. Mitchell's "Unhappy Coincidenc…

Also more recently by Kyle: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/17/License-Utopia.htm...

(Thank you for linking to this site — it is truly fascinating Also thank you to Steve for starting a great and timely debate.)

Re: What comes after open source

#130

Post by kakwa_ » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 10:47 AM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #46

Townley wrote: post #16

I recently wrote a piece of software and wanted to make it open source. GitHub's helpful dropdown of license choices gave me more pause than I expected as I struggled to choose between MIT and GPL. "I definitely want someone to be able to modify, fork, and publish better versions of this code. Do I also want them to be able to commercially license their derivatives?" On one hand, this code was contributed to the publ…

My solution is to start of with GPLv3, then I can always relax it later if needed. If your project takes a lot of external contributions, you can always require that the contributions be licensed under a less restrictive license in case you need to relicense later. The other thing is you can grant exceptions to people if they have an unanticipated need (i.e., mixing your code with other free software code with incomp…

For that solution to work, you need to be extra cautious about ownership.

If you are the sole contributor, no issue there.

But if you start receiving contributions from outside (Pull Requests on Github for example), then part of the code is owned by the external contributor.

It means that if you want to change the license, either you made the external contributors sign some (digital) papers stating they give away ownership of their contributions, or you chase down each individual contributors and manage to make them agree to the license change, or you remove any code from external contributors.

The first is doable but is a bit of of barrier to external contributions, the middle one can work on a small project with few external contributors, but is a bit risky (the external contributor can say no, or more likely be difficult to contact), the later is somewhat impractical.

Changing the license of a project is not impossible, but it can be somewhat of a nightmare, specially if there is a lot of external contributors.