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We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

akrites.org

211–220 of 257 posts

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#211
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save others a search: > The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia) Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border". EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot jus…

> facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. if true, then choosing this name was a very bad decision. Imagine how Muslims would feel, demonizing them even more, before they were terrorists, now they are attacking open source and hence some organizations need akrites to defend from them. I really wish such organizations which try to demonize anyone, to fail miserably

That's who they had the border with, dude.

I wish malicious interpretations like yours would fail miserably. The word for the soldiers is about them, not who they fought.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#212
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of open source folks are going to be very skeptical, rightly so, of this group of players. You say this as if these players aren't members of "the open source folks". It's not an exclusive club.

I don't see how that was implied? Just because someone is part of the "club" doesn't mean many other "members" can't be skeptical of their role. In fact, it doesn't even seem difficult to simultaneously acknowledge and commend the valuable role they play, while also expressing concern over the influence they wield and how it might contrast with desires and goals of the wider community.

They are the wider community. Programmers working on behalf of corporate actors write open source code in the commons because their organizations have discovered competing on some parts of the stack isn't as viable as collaborating on parts of the stack.

I won't pretend to speak to specific numbers, but a huge amount of work and maintenance is from these programmers, or funded via the corporate actors which employ these programmers. Those actors are either on this list, or don't have a problem with this list.

What remains are the handful of truly independent contributors, which are a minority in terms of LoC (though they often have an outsized impact), and the peanut gallery.

Open source wasn't always this way, it would be a different discussion 30 years ago when independents were the only guys in town, but it is now.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> So, MS builds VSCode - doesn't even fork Atom to do so. Looks identical to it. They built it from scratch. Bigger. Slower. Someone needs to fix a memory leak here. Atom was famously slow. Even among people using it and championing it. VSCode totally wowed people not just because it was faster, but because it was essentially the first «real» Electron-app which proved Electron-apps could have near native performance.…

> Atom was famously slow

It's your linter

And Electron apps do not have near native performance lmao Not even close. And neither does VS Code haha. Definitely slow just like Atom.

You missed the point

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#214
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully understand that I may be completely wrong but I just dont see that a lot of effort comes from outside a projects core maintainers. Its always a core maintainer group usually paid by some company doing 95% of the work and the patches contributed are localizations, small bug fixes and weird edge cases. I'm not an open source maintainer so I could be completely off base here.

This perception comes from a high amount of trust required to take big submissions; If I know and trust the submitter, I'm more willing to accept a bigger patch. If you really want to contribute big changes to a project, it usually involves communicating with the core maintainers a lot, and essentially becoming one of them. Pion/webrtc is my favorite example of a project with a maintainer group who are employed by ma…

Thanks Woodrow :)

Accepting 'Big Changes' from people is VERY frustrating. These thoughts run through my head.

* Idea is usually good! Even if I don't understand it could help lots of others users.

* The contributor is very focused on just getting their feature in. The impact on the larger project isn't as much a concern.

* New contributors often don't have the grit to see it out. They will disappear before things are done. So I am left picking up the pieces (which is harder then doing it all myself)

----

What I try and remember is that their happiness/experience matters more then any code. I try to help the contributor learn/grow as much as possible and even see some career benefits out of it. Pion will cease to matter eventually, so I hope to help as many programmers with it as possible.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#215
post #93

This reads as centralization and control effort. It will only provide the power to control opensource to whoever Akrites is (with the major bigtech including Google). Thank you very much, but I remember what Google is doing with Android this September (closing third party installs using .apk).

This is my concern as well. If critical open source packages become dependent on these corporations for "secure" releases, does that enable them to force ID verification into packages, for example? Related, but most of the smart folk I know think Open Source AI means Anthropic and OpenAI are financially impossible. A lot of the companies signed onto this are heavily, heavily leveraged by those two, and have significant incentive to disrupt Open Source AI before all their customers get sticker shock. I've been waiting to see what their move would be, and this might be part of it.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to then contribute all your changes back. The Godot foundation picked MIT for a good reason. If your legal team says no GPL then no GPL. This has been standard practice for decades.

Just because you have to follow the legal team doesn't mean they're making good decisions for the business. The changes you make to a game engine are almost never the important part of your game's IP.

Depending on who you ask an GPL game engine can only produce GPL games.

I guess you could sell the game ready to play, and then upload its source code without needed assets somewhere else.

Most companies aren’t going to be ok with this.

I know when I write a project, I just MIT license it. If some of the code I wrote helps you get your job done, go for it.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> So, MS builds VSCode - doesn't even fork Atom to do so. Looks identical to it. They built it from scratch. Bigger. Slower. Someone needs to fix a memory leak here. Atom was famously slow. Even among people using it and championing it. VSCode totally wowed people not just because it was faster, but because it was essentially the first «real» Electron-app which proved Electron-apps could have near native performance.…

Also, big chunks of VSCode predated Atom. (The Monaco code editor was embedded inside IE10/11/Spartan Edge and parts of the Azure Portal and Azure Dev Ops.) Electron was the excuse to make it its own deliverable and not just only embedded inside other web projects. (Which is also why VSCode was not even a fork of Atom and easily beat Atom's performance at launch because it was already a battle hardened editor.)

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#219
There's a massive difference between "big open source" and "small open source". LF has been doing a great job at representing their member companies, each of which has a significant investment in big open source projects, most of which are well funded and staffed. Presumably there's some transitive support given to their dependencies too.

But then there is the very long tail of small open source projects, maintained by a single developer in their spare time, which collectively support the entire software ecosystem. And in every one of these announcements, there's rarely anything being done for this group.

Changing this wouldn't be difficult. AI based vulnerability scanning of projects could be opt-in, where reports are only sent to the security contact listed in the project. This would avoid the risk of malicious actors scanning open source projects with the tool, and avoid sending reports to those projects that don't want them, while supporting the OSS software that doesn't make the "critical" threshold in LFs current criteria.

Unfortunately that would also mean spending LF member funds on projects that may not directly benefit those LF members, so I'm not holding my breath.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#220
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely the death of any large chunk of PHP leaving the stage is cause for applause and boisterous shouts of joy?

Having coded back end projects in PHP, Perl, Python, and Node idk wtf folks who make comments like this are on about. Node took all of the worst aspects of JavaScript and spread them to back end development. Someone should have ended up on trial in the Hague for that particular crime against humanity and PHP is what you're grumbling about? Seriously?

I’ll grant you that there are good arguments in favor of your position. PHP, and then later JavaScript have both filled the world with more fragility and chaos than was necessary.
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