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“Open source” is broken

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Re: “Open source” is broken

#41

Post by kolbe »

‘Open Source’ has no implications about whether the writer gets paid or not, but I’ll set aside this semantic criticism.

There are many many FOSS projects where contributors get paid a great deal of money. Universities sponsor contributors. And most contributions to a project like say Kubernetes come from Google’s employees. Government agency grants. Et cetera. But if that’s not enough, tech giants throw a lot of money at places like the Linux Foundation to ensure that FOSS projects get maintained (and thus the maintainers get compensated).

The fact is that a little ‘buy me coffee’ link is simply an ineffective way to monetize a FOSS project. But FOSS is not broken. Some of the greatest things in computing today are FOSS.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#42

Post by pjmlp »

Whatever I put out there is mostly to keep HR folks happy to check their bullet points, or done under straight GPL.

Valuable stuff, only with commercial contracts.

I also buy books from folks, or do occasional contributions to all ecosystems which are valuable to me.

Like myself they have bills to pay, however none of them (buying books or donations) is a sustainable business, if only a couple of people occasionally do it.

Somehow I think open source has legitimated piracy, in the sense that those that would pirate, now feel safe because license, and just go on their merry way and don't need to fear that the economic activities surprise audit would close down their shop.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#43

Post by zaarn »

wyldfire wrote: post #26

> I simply do not want to be in a situation where my software that I develop as a passion project on the side is holding people's companies together. People love to hate on Richard Stallman but he was really clear about the motivation for Free Software (which is not the same as Open Source but shares some tenets). What companies do with the source is their thing. They get all of the benefits and all of the responsibi…

Except you can't because hundreds of thousands of project have "log4j" in their dependency list not "wyldfire-fixed-log4j". If log4j broke and there was no maintainer, a fork would not fix things.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#44

Post by derekjdanserl »

wyldfire wrote: post #26

> I simply do not want to be in a situation where my software that I develop as a passion project on the side is holding people's companies together. People love to hate on Richard Stallman but he was really clear about the motivation for Free Software (which is not the same as Open Source but shares some tenets). What companies do with the source is their thing. They get all of the benefits and all of the responsibi…

That doesn’t change the fact that open source users are the welfare queens of our times. As long as open source software exists, lazy degenerates with no skin in the game will feel entitled to keep demanding more and more. That’s why open source software needs to die.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#45

Post by tommek4077 »

fivelessminutes wrote: post #4
Juliate wrote: post #2

It's not "Open Source" (making code public and free to use and modify) that's broken. It's how people rely on it without any consideration about the sourcing of it. It's not that it's free to pick and to use. It's that some/most people too often associate "it's free" to be equivalent to "I don't need to care about it, like, at all". It's that some/most people don't understand that, whatever they take, they become dep…

Yes 'free' means 'the little people work on that'. There's no real way to secure finegrained node.js or python etc deps, since you have no clue if the original author who signs his sources should be trusted, or was malicious from the start and just biding his time, let alone everyone who contributed to every package. What would help is independent audits and where needed help with hardening like fuzzing and asan / va…

Those audits are your duty. We've did this in programming a long time until recently the JavaScript craze took over.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#47

Post by esarbe »

wyldfire wrote: post #36

I see lots of sentiment in this thread that amounts to "I didn't know you were going to get rich off of my work." That's anathema to Open Source. How do I know? Check "The Open Source Way" [1]. If you feel uncompensated, use a license that prevents commercial use. [1] https://opensource.com/open-source-way

I get the feeling that you misunderstand the gist of the article.

The gist of the article is not "I didn't know you were going to get rich off of my work (and I'm pissed off by that)". The premise is - in my reading -

"Don't point the finger at me for writing bad software in my own free time, when you didn't even consider contributing to it and don't try to shift the blame when you have to face the consequences of your own cheap behavior".

At least that's my interpretation.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#49

Post by senko »

jrpt wrote: post #16
hooande wrote: post #6

Someone should write a package that goes through your existing codebase to see which open source projects you make the most use of (however that is measured). Then a company could run it once a year, say around tax write off time, and build a list to donate to I would have happily given to log4j, but I didn't know that they were in need. Someone has to make it easy to keep track of this because it's never going to be…

Stuff like that already exists. Companies barely donate. In my opinion, more packages should require licensing fees from companies.

I like opening the code I write. I don't plan on having two customers paying me $5/mo each for my super obscure piece of code.

Are we really going to blame log4j2 authors who, for all we know, don't care if someone else is using their project?

Re: “Open source” is broken

#50

Post by rakoo »

This is a point I've been pondering about recently, especially since the attacks against Free Software and RMS.

I've been convinced of the inherent good that openly available software is, both for users and developers, and for society at large. I want to continue contributing to the common goods. But I am also fully aware that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, and all other platforms exploiting users' privacy and controlling so much of our digital lives could rise to power that easily because they had a trove of open source software to build on, software for which there is no counterparts needed. That is what the MIT, Apache, BSD licenses and friends allow you to do.

That is why my opinion now is that if you want your work to be open, you should not make it open source "only" but fully Libre. Use a copyleft license. If other developers don't want to pay you in money, at least their production should become a common so that the entirety of society can benefit. Don't give FB more power to turn elections in the direction they want; make it so that someone else can _only_ build a platform where users, and as such people, remain those in power.

Open Source Software benefits those in power, and unfortunately it is not us who hold this position.

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