Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Open source” is broken

christine.website

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 357 posts

Re: “Open source” is broken

#191

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

threatofrain wrote: post #183
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is entitled to money. There's nothing broken about that. If you want to make money it would be a good idea to make a business plan. This attitude totally ignores how hard it is to actually run a software tooling business and collect when you have a free/community offering. Take the Obsidian note app, for example. It's technically free until you start using it for revenue-generating, work-related activity per…

I'm not sure that many people are using Obsidian for work, specifically because Obsidian does not have collaboration or any kind of "team" concept. It truly is a knowledge-for-one app.

Obsidian is largely associated with the "Zettlekasten" philosophy, which is inherently individualistic and doesn't ever encourage collaborative use since the entire idea is based around a personal knowledge base, not a community knowledge base.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#192

Post by cgriswald »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #162
charcircuit wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is entitled to money. There's nothing broken about that. If you want to make money it would be a good idea to make a business plan. Making and maintaining a piece of software and giving it away for free isn't a great business plan, or at best it's an incomplete one.

> No one is entitled to money. There's nothing broken about that. If you want to make money it would be a good idea to make a business plan. This attitude totally ignores how hard it is to actually run a software tooling business and collect when you have a free/community offering. Take the Obsidian note app, for example. It's technically free until you start using it for revenue-generating, work-related activity per…

Selling software is hard. No one is guaranteed to be successful at it. Obsidian decided to go the free-for-personal-use route presumably because they thought it was the best route for them. They didn't get nothing for that: they got early growth of the user base, beta testers, community built plugins and themes, voluntary user-to-user support, and free advertising.

I'm not sure what the alternative is here. Is it forbidding free software?

Re: “Open source” is broken

#193

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

rovr138 wrote: post #188
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is entitled to money. There's nothing broken about that. If you want to make money it would be a good idea to make a business plan. This attitude totally ignores how hard it is to actually run a software tooling business and collect when you have a free/community offering. Take the Obsidian note app, for example. It's technically free until you start using it for revenue-generating, work-related activity per…

Or just use the honor system in combination with a liability standpoint. They might loose out on smaller companies that abuse it, but teams and people in larger companies that use it will pay. If I want to use something, I can pay for it and submit it to get reimbursed or if it's a bigger purchase, I use a company card. I don't have to worry about putting the company in liability and that's something that's understoo…

> Another example, how does Jetbrain make sure that the people paying for their software via personal licenses aren't getting money for it from their companies?

This is a great example, perhaps companies like Jetbrains just assume that a certain percentage of their user base uses their product out of license and they just deal with it, which undermines the original argument. Software inherently wants to be free, but we as a community agree upon the proper way to compensate those make OSS because we're taught that the exchange of money for goods should always happen upfront and there is no other way to conceptualize alternatives, which I disagree with.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#195

Post by xena »

danShumway wrote: post #178

This is a good article, and 99% of this article I agree with. I'm going to quibble at something very small, not because I think the author is guilty or anything or because they're doing something wrong, but because this is a general pattern I've been seeing over and over again in multiple takes from multiple people: it feels weird to me to have a criticism of corporate behavior where corporations don't know how to en…

Author of the post here, can you please turn this comment into a blogpost? It is lovely and I love it.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#196

Post by linuxhansl »

No it isn't. Not at all. The author is mixing systems of project governance with monetary incentives.

Open source is a system is project governance and maintenance, whether engineers are paid for working on those is a completely orthogonal question.

The log4j vulnerability is a perfect example. Software has bugs. Open source is no exception. But instead of this being hidden inside some corporate closed code we all now about it, and a fix was already out when the story.

I do (strongly) agree with the Author on the fact that "freeloading" open source software does not work. In the end to some extent you get what you pay for.

Personally I am lucky enough to be paid to work (in part) on open source software.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#197

Post by bsedlm »

c-smile wrote: post #158
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…

> Which is very difficult / nigh impossible for closed source. Closed source does not mean that the customer has no access to it. In case of my Sciter, for example, customers are getting access to SVN server with sources. Some of them are sending patches with fixes and features. Sciter's [1] core customers are antivirus vendors - highly professional, dedicated and disciplined teams that know very well what they are d…

similarly, free software (in RMS's sense) does not mean you cannot charge for it. however this has practical considerations which are still open problems

Re: “Open source” is broken

#198

Post by justsaying9 »

esarbe wrote: post #52
derekjdanserl wrote: post #38

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…

You seem to be unaware that there is a large and ever-expanding segment of 'society', in the US and UK at least, composed of people of all races and even social status (ghetto trash up to 'middle class' and beyond), both men and women, whose seeming sole objective in life is to have as many kids as possible and sign up for as many government checks as they can, so that they can 'live' exclusively off the backs of working people in society while contributing absolutely nothing of value themselves--not even to the actual welfare of their own children, who in the majority of cases 'grow up' to become equally unproductive leeches themselves, having learned by example from their own riffraff 'parents.'

In the UK, one such group are known as 'chavs.' It isn't a term of endearment.

Given the ignorance evident in your post, I wouldn't be at all surprised to receive a heated reply from you, calling me names and attempting to argue this inarguable fact, which is clear and obviously factual to anyone who has spent any time at all living out here in the real world aka 'flyover country.' Have you ever even been to jail?

Welfare queens come in all shapes, forms, and sizes these days. Some of the worst offenders are large corporations, though the largest by far are governments, of course.

The world is full of leeches who want something for nothing. Like for example these wealthy entities who in some cases make billions of dollars off the backs of open source developers, while the devs themselves may be on the brink of starvation, eating out of dumpsters and living in their car.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#199

Post by rovr138 »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #193
rovr138 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just use the honor system in combination with a liability standpoint. They might loose out on smaller companies that abuse it, but teams and people in larger companies that use it will pay. If I want to use something, I can pay for it and submit it to get reimbursed or if it's a bigger purchase, I use a company card. I don't have to worry about putting the company in liability and that's something that's understoo…

> Another example, how does Jetbrain make sure that the people paying for their software via personal licenses aren't getting money for it from their companies? This is a great example, perhaps companies like Jetbrains just assume that a certain percentage of their user base uses their product out of license and they just deal with it, which undermines the original argument. Software inherently wants to be free, but…

> This is a great example, perhaps companies like Jetbrains just assume that a certain percentage of their user base uses their product out of license and they just deal with it

Of course. The same thing that happens with piracy.

How much of Adobe, MS and software from other big companies is pirated every year? I've also heard the argument that if they went strict and went against all of them, no one will be familiar with their products and would levitate to something else.

When I was in uni, the majority of people with Adobe programs on their laptops just had it pirated. Now, when they go into industry, if they need to manipulate an image and all they know is Photoshop, guess what they'll ask for?

Same thing here IMO. Jetbrains makes some of their products free with some functionality removed. When the people go into their jobs and if they need that, they'll spend the money.

Same with Obsidian. If you use it and find it useful, when you go to work, you'll make the business case that it could be useful to do the work in an efficient matter. That will also sell others into using it.

Re: “Open source” is broken

#200

Post by kristjansson »

zaarn wrote: post #176
the_af wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does because now I pull in a dependency How would proprietary software make this better? You wouldn't even have anything to pull in! Is your argument "having the source code and the legal rights to fix this bug even when nobody else wants to or even can fix it is not good enough because not everyone will use my fix"? Because good luck with proprietary software then!

My argument is not closed source. My argument is that "just fork it" does not magically fix all problems. Closed source makes this worse but "fork it" is no answer either. I believe I made this very clear on my very first comment.

Right … open source doesn’t guarantee an absence of problems, only that, in the worst case, a user can repair a problem herself. As you note, that’s strictly preferable to closed source, where a problem with a dependency is not guaranteed to be fixable by the user. Isn’t that enough?
Post reply on HN