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

Thank you for proving my point.

See, here you are automatically assuming that I was "telling a maintainer what they can do with their own project" when that wasn't the case at all. As a matter of fact, I wasn't even talking about Material UI when I posted a comment on one of their issues. I was addressing another user about their ads in NPM.

I'm also not calling someone an asshole for disagreeing with me - I'm calling them an asshole for acting like they're better than you and me and that "contributing code to open source is the only way to support open source". (Did you miss the part where I said he acted like not contributing to any large open source projects made me less of person? Because that's exactly what happened. If you don't believe me then that's probably because you have a personal bias. There's absolutely no reason for me to lie and it's not like I go around talking about this all the time - it's precisely on topic and I happened to see Asshole Tassinari's name in the Twitter thread...)

It'a a lie that code-only contributors are better than others and one that is swallowed hook and sinker by many, many open source maintainers. People who believe it are just protecting their fragile egos.

> They can decide what project roadmap is, they can spam your terminal with ads[1] and they can even remove or abandon the project.

Incorrect. I have since blocked all ads in NPM logs (and then NPM subsequently banned them) thank you very much :) I'll never see another one. And you can't take back an open source project once it's been released in the wild. But thanks for all the free work! I'll continue to use it for as long as I wish.

> See, here you are automatically assuming that I was "telling a maintainer what they can do with their own project" when that wasn't the case at all. As a matter of fact, I wasn't even talking about Material UI when I posted a comment on one of their issues. I was addressing another user about their ads in NPM.

See, I am not naming you asshole.

> I'm also not calling someone an asshole for disagreeing with me - I'm calling them an asshole for acting like they're better than you and me and that "contributing code to open source is the only way to support open source". (Did you miss the part where I said he acted like not contributing to any large open source projects made me less of person? Because that's exactly what happened. If you don't believe me then that's probably because you have a personal bias. There's absolutely no reason for me to lie and it's not like I go around talking about this all the time - it's precisely on topic and I happened to see Asshole Tassinari's name in the Twitter thread...)

Provide citation or it never happened.

> Incorrect. I have since blocked all ads in NPM logs (and then NPM subsequently banned them) thank you very much :) I'll never see another one. And you can't take back an open source project once it's been released in the wild. But thanks for all the free work! I'll continue to use it for as long as I wish.

You are mistaken, read linked policy. There is a number of cases where ads are permitted. You can decide to block ads but many projects can ask for funding in postinstall.

That being OSS guarantees higher quality and safety than proprietary software, because unlike with proprietary software "with enough eyes all bugs are shallow, and anyone can fork or contribute."

The reality is popularity and budget are more relevant than licensing in that regard.

Opensource does make things cheaper at scale. Some of those SaaS services run software that is or based on opensource. This is especially true when you have multiple SaaS companies providing services based on the same opensource software. Even closed source software benefits from using libraries with permissive licenses.

The part that's not cheap is running software yourself, regardless of whether it's open or closed source.

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