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“Open source” is broken

christine.website

51–60 of 357 posts

Re: “Open source” is broken

#51
Open source is not "broken" - it's working exactly as designed, where anybody can obtain the software for no cost, and compensation for work done is voluntary.

If you want guaranteed compensation for your work, work for a company or require payment for your software. Releasing it as free software and then complaining when you don't get the donations you wanted is just being entitled.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#52

Open source users are the welfare queens of our times. As long as open source software exists, these lazy degenerates with no skin in the game will feel entitled to keep demanding more and more. Open source software needs to die.

I know what you want to say, but "welfare queens" is really a bad way to phrase it.

> The "welfare queen" stereotype is driven by the false and racist beliefs that places the blame of the circumstances of poor black single mothers as the result of their own individual issues, bringing forward racial tropes such as their promiscuity, lack of structure and morals, and avoidance of work. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

Re: “Open source” is broken

#53
post #50

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…

Copyleft wouldn't help here. You don't need to do anything if you just use the code as-is.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#54
> If log4j2 is responsible for your company's success, you have a moral obligation to donate to the person who creates this library thanklessly.

I doubt there are many companies that this is true for, if any

yes, log4j is good, but there's a dozen other logging libraries for Java that do 99% of what people will use log4j for

and the same is true for Alpine

Re: “Open source” is broken

#55
post #43

> 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.

> hundreds of thousands of project have "log4j" in their dependency list

That's on them. They can migrate to wyldfire-fixed-log4j if they want, or to whatever other fork they want, or they can keep using the old busted shit. It's up to them, there's no problem here.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#56
The other side is that if a large company like Google had to pay the maintainers, they would’ve rather done this themselves, and the rest of us wouldn’t have access to a free piece of code that’s literally good enough to be the backbone of the internet.

I don’t want the maintainers to work for free. But I don’t know if we at large would benefit from the alternative.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#57
post #16
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.

Because the corporate purchasing system works so well....

Re: “Open source” is broken

#58
post #25

Open source isn't broken. The software will continue to get built regardless of funding levels, clearly. But when vulnerabilities like this are found, no one -- especially corporate users -- gets to complain. Any complainers should be immediately told to fund the software they use, or shut their entitled mouths. Open source is fine. The culture of companies -- nearly all of them, including the one I work for -- that…

I've never run into an issue with open source that couldn't be solved by throwing a trivial amount of money at it. Relicensing, bug fixes, feature requests.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#59
post #54

> If log4j2 is responsible for your company's success, you have a moral obligation to donate to the person who creates this library thanklessly. I doubt there are many companies that this is true for, if any yes, log4j is good, but there's a dozen other logging libraries for Java that do 99% of what people will use log4j for and the same is true for Alpine

And rebuilding your entire company's ecosystem to switch logging libraries is practically free.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#60
> If log4j2 is responsible for your company's success, you have a moral obligation to donate to the person who creates this library thanklessly.

This is false. Free software is given away by those who produce it. When you receive a gift, no moral or ethical obligation is created.

This idea that you can do things with free software that are contrary to the spirit (such as create a profitable company around it and not pay the original author) is a false one. It is free as in beer, too.

You don't owe anyone anything when you receive a gift freely given.

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