What comes after open source • Hacker News Board

Re: What comes after open source

#131

Post by projektir » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #126

projektir wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think his technical contributions are much more relevant here than the dogma, which, as I said, seems to be scaring people away to this day.

Re: What comes after open source

#132

Post by tannhaeuser » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 5:40 PM 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…

I don't believe you're correct. DDG doesn't use Google Search, and Google wouldn't be ok with them doing that - it only has an option to redirect to Google Search using !g. I have numerous cases where Google Search lately just doesn't cut it, and DDG's results are actually better and more up-to-date. Whereas with Startpage.com, you at least get actual results, rather than useless "108912398 matches retrieved in 0.000001 ms" type crap results for shovelling ads in your face.

For important recherche-type searches, I always perform an additional Google Search, but then again, the links Google gives you are personalized results which gets in the way of neutral recherche.

Re: What comes after open source

#133

Post by zanny » Wed, Apr 03, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

projektir wrote: post #131

astazangasta wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think his technical contributions are much more relevant here than the dogma, which, as I said, seems to be scaring people away to this day.

There is ample evidence that in the absence of substantial GPL contributions (Linux kernel, KHTML, GCC, etc) there would be a much reduced substantive body of influential free code available.

Apple in 1998 definitely weighed their options between writing their own proprietary browser engine vs forking a GPL one. To this day almost all free software hardware device support is exclusively due to how second class proprietary drivers play in the Linux driver ecosystem. Before the prevalence of GCC compilers were one of the deepest and most tightly protected proprietary secrets of corporations.

And none of that would have happened with permissive licenses because it required compulsory source disclosure to force businesses to contribute back. The alternative is what we see Sony do with their Playstation OSes - they built the PS3 and PS4 OS off FreeBSD, but neither contribute code back to said projects, provide any sponsorship or support (dozens of companies do, but the one making grotesque profits by exploiting user freedom isn't), and use an open source product to cripple fully functional computers with unmodifiable proprietary operating systems.

We would absolutely be in the PS4 world in regards to almost all software if the free software movement didn't push its dogma in the 90s.