Frankly, this year has shown that what's remaining of Open Source will be used for license laundering, and at a great scale. If you don't have a community backing you, there's almost no incentive remaining to start new OSS projects.
We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
141–150 of 257 posts
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the same easy as falling out of a plane without a parachute. Gravity will do all the work but you'll not like what happens at the bottom.
Isn't it easier just not to board the plane, who really enjoys being at an airport?
> who really enjoys being at an airport?
Not every airport is a huge commercial building with hundreds of people (also, you wouldn’t visit one of those to parachute jump). Some are akin to cozy shacks without a lot of traffic where you’re in and out in no time.
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Idk I swapped to a Linux-only PC last April and have been steadily shifting over to open source software for basically everything in my life. I haven’t done everything, I doubt I ever will hit 100%, but well over half the stuff I use on a daily basis I have real control over now and can audit. Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer, I’m just kind of a tourist in that world, so if I can do it it’s clearly very achieva…
I'm doing exactly the same but you really don't have as much control as you may wish. I mean look at Freedesktop which is basically Redhat staff. The biggest Kernel contributor in SLOC a while back was MSFT. Gnome and Systemd is a fine example of how fucked up this can get.
I’m on bazzite which isn’t perfect but it’s lightyears ahead of windows.
You can always find bad examples. The good news is there’s still lots of good ones out there right now. No point in being defeatist about it, just do what you can
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#144> We are joined by Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler A lot of open source folks are going to be very skeptical, rightly so, of this group of players. > ... to find, fix, and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source softw…
My best understanding from reading this is a) where possible and b) where necessary. This is the Linux Foundation, so it must put OSS and community first, surely. People talk about contributing financially, but how and to what end? Most projects aren't set up to accept or utilise donations. That said, I would say we should be providing all OSS projects with significant access to AI in order to review their codebases…
Remember when google set up a whole project to find vulnerabilities but never sent any fix and unpaid developers were basically having to fix things that an entire team of people was hired to find… yeah maybe they could have just made an offer to some maintainers instead of burning them out?
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#145sponsored by: all the bad guys
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#146It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort. Projects are maintained by their maintainers and get very little from the community. Commercial open source gets even less from the community. The only real value generated is corporate supported projects sharing with corporate supported projects. The average person is happy because they can also use these projects but ultimately they do nothing with it. The only people benefiting is the corporations that use this to build their products.
I dont know if this is a good thing or not. On paper it seems fine but there is something that feels wrong about it and I dont know exactly what.
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a certain way, moving from "Free Software" to "Open Source" started this transition and it's not slowing down.
Imagine if the AGPL had become the default license for open source projects, as it was intended to when the service provider loophole in the GPL became apparent. The software industry would be unrecognizable. Instead, millions of developers now gift corporations their work by releasing everything under MIT or Apache, and those corporations take from that treasure trove what they want and give back what they want, whi…
I believe Open Source software sold developers the dream of "to be hired for what they have developed" and cash-in the effort they have spent as a future, stable employment.
Many die on the hill of "developing something required for free with permissive licenses for recognition which will help with their future endeavors", which is the same with other creative lines of work. As a result they are milked of their knowledge and forced to bear the burden of leading the project and handling the community while companies just use what's developed while quietly but strongly nudging the project's direction for their benefit.
If the developer gets rogue, the thing is forked and sometimes closed down with no downside to the company, but the community and the developer(s) are hung to dry, conveniently signaling other developers about what they might face if they disobey their overlords with iron fists in velvet gloves as a secondary effect.
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#148It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort. Projects are maintained by their maintainers and get very little from the community. Commercial open source gets even less from the community. The only real value generated is corporate supported projects sharing with corporate supported projects. The average person is happy because they…
There never was "a community". The vast majority of all open source software is written by people paid by some corporation to do so.
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#149It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort. Projects are maintained by their maintainers and get very little from the community. Commercial open source gets even less from the community. The only real value generated is corporate supported projects sharing with corporate supported projects. The average person is happy because they…
> It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort.
I would disagree with this, it's the same amount of community effort as it's always been. Big projects have big governance, and receive lots of patches. Smaller projects receive fewer patches. The community generally happens in Discord or IRC or on mailing lists, but it definitely exists.
The real threat to "community effort" are drive-by low-effort LLM-generated Pull requests that decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by a lot and make managing open source projects such a slog
Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together
#150It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort. Projects are maintained by their maintainers and get very little from the community. Commercial open source gets even less from the community. The only real value generated is corporate supported projects sharing with corporate supported projects. The average person is happy because they…
There never was "a community". The vast majority of all open source software is written by people paid by some corporation to do so.
Just because people are paid to participate doesn't mean there's not a community; those paid contributors still generally have to build trust and maintain etiquette among people outside of their organizational structure.