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Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

blog.discourse.org

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Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misdirection is normal business practice. For example, Quadpay/Zipco recently made a change where instead of appraising your credit independently for each of their plans, they calculate a total amount you're allowed to have in flight at any given time, and share that across everything. In their FAQ, there is an entry for "Is my purchasing power going down?" and the answer is some bullshit like "Your purchasing power…

Related: I wish there was a TV show where they would ask simple yes/no questions to politicians and business leaders, but their mic would only be unmuted after they press a "yes" or "no" button. Answering a yes/no question with a "we're doing everything we can to ensure a smooth experience for our customers" is spindoctoring 101.

They’d just press whatever and then start their verbal reply with “yes and no”

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#52
Great piece. I thought the same of Cal's announcement; it basically boiled down to "we're willing to shift our entire business to a security-through-obscurity approach." It won't be long until systems are sophisticated enough that they can target an application over the course of a weekend, and try thousands of exploits across each possible endpoint you offer, to see what happens, regardless of whether or not your source code is public.

Anyone who's launched anything on the web -- anything at all -- and looked at the logs will see all sorts of endpoints being requested for /wp-admin/ or random WordPress plugins, even if their site has never, and will never, run WordPress. Imagine this at scale, with every possible attack method imaginable, blindly hitting everything on the web. That's where I think we're headed, and closed source won't fix that.

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#54
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be a mentality of every company building products :)

I guess open source makes you more accountable.

Also makes it harder to build a business around it.

With that combination no wonder most successful companies are closed source.

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#55

"over a decade ago, the repository has been licensed under GPLv2. And that’s not changing" Well - people can continue the GPLv2 fork anyway. So ultimately what Cal.com would do here does not matter; that's the beauty of GPL in general. It is a strict licence. I think GPLv2 was the better decision for the Linux kernel than, say, BSD/MIT. > That code is exposed to constant scrutiny from attackers, defenders, researcher…

> the claim that open source is automatically better than closed source, when it comes to security, is also strange. Remember xz utils backdoor? The XZ attack is an extremely rare event coming likely from a state actor, which actually proves that FLOSS is a big target not easy to attack without huge effort. It was also caught not least thanks to the open nature of the repository. Also, AFAIK it wasn't even a change i…

Yeah I found this comment to be weird. At least the XZ backdoor was found before it went live anywhere. How many companies were hit by the Solarwind supply chain attacks?

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#56
post #40

too bad. i wish they would go closedsource so that maybe everyone would stop using it. it's dogshit for countless reasons. including: - refuses to even load on browser engines older than 2 years. for a webforum that's absolutely appaling. there's a barebones non-JS version. but it only loads for individual threads (not the forum homepage or anything else), so they must be linked to directly (e.g from a websearch engi…

I hate most of all the information black hole that is discord. I am member of several communities, where difficult issues are being solved using complex new software releases, but if you do not sit and watch the stream for the specific things you want, forget about finding anything useful you want.

Discord is bottomless sea of the same question being asked over and over and over, and the original question poster never seeing their replies. If there was not a notification when your own messages are replied, Discord would be 100% worthless.

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#57
post #40

too bad. i wish they would go closedsource so that maybe everyone would stop using it. it's dogshit for countless reasons. including: - refuses to even load on browser engines older than 2 years. for a webforum that's absolutely appaling. there's a barebones non-JS version. but it only loads for individual threads (not the forum homepage or anything else), so they must be linked to directly (e.g from a websearch engi…

[deleted]

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#58
post #40

too bad. i wish they would go closedsource so that maybe everyone would stop using it. it's dogshit for countless reasons. including: - refuses to even load on browser engines older than 2 years. for a webforum that's absolutely appaling. there's a barebones non-JS version. but it only loads for individual threads (not the forum homepage or anything else), so they must be linked to directly (e.g from a websearch engi…

> must be the virtue signalling

I wish you folks could understand how clownish you sound.

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#59
> If your code is open source, your security team can scan it, your contributors can scan it, and independent researchers can scan it too.

Literally! If everyone can access the same system as Claude's Mythos, one solution is to have more people trying to identify your issue before the hackers have the chance to do it.

Re: Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source

#60
post #40

too bad. i wish they would go closedsource so that maybe everyone would stop using it. it's dogshit for countless reasons. including: - refuses to even load on browser engines older than 2 years. for a webforum that's absolutely appaling. there's a barebones non-JS version. but it only loads for individual threads (not the forum homepage or anything else), so they must be linked to directly (e.g from a websearch engi…

I'm not sure where this heat comes from, but what constitutes a "good" forum in your opinion? I would love to check it out.
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