111–120 of 171 posts
There's a cost to open sourcing software. I like that the OP pointed that there was software that was sub-licensed and needed to be excised. Netscape took close to a year to open source their browser as Firefox using every significant company resource.
He should have always been (trying to be) aware of all the licenses he was using from the start. You can't just use any code you find on the net and staple it into your project.
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The number of leading and insulting questions here lead me to believe you simply didn't read the post. Go back and take the 15 minutes to actually read it. You'll find most of it answered. And feel free to spend a modicum of effort looking me up to determine to what degree I care about stars on GitHub.
That took some restraint. You are a nice human being for not responding to that comment like it deserved. I wish I could comment the way I would respond, but I am at work now...Good luck to you.
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Absolutely. To be crystal clear, I am discussing whether the technical & intellectual work produced as part of your (as commonly understood by the layperson) property and business, ought (as a duty) to be furnished by the creator/owner under some license to the broader world in some sense (whether by specific request or generalized publishing). I argue that, generally, if said piece of property has no other encumbran…
Part of the purpose of my post was to paint a realistic picture of this process. I suspect much of what I ran into isn't an aberration. Creating a tarball and distributing it is a gross oversimplification of the process in many cases. And there's massive liability exposure in doing so. So, the question then becomes how much more do I owe society? Am I obligated to spend 40 hours to clean up the code? Should I pay for…
Let me pose a hypothetical example - Suppose your company produced the World's Shiniest Algorithm (WSA), allowing our total software energy use to drop below 10% of what it currently does.
And, then, because your company is led by a scientist who can not run a business, it completely implodes. The WSA is now out to lunch. What is the moral duty relating to the WSA? Should it have been published/open sourced?
On the flip side, what of the company with the World's Worst Algorithm, allowing your fine company to rank size of navel lint. This also implodes (for obvious reasons). What is the moral duty relating to the WWA? Should it have been published/open sourced?
My perspective is largely informed by seeing a lot of published papers referencing really awesome software long ago that essentially went into the garbage can due to commercial reasons. I don't think that it was a net win for society that that happened.
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Some people value an open source product more than a proprietary one. Although in this case, the OP couldn't get enough funding to release it as open source.
If someone won't pay for a closed product, and won't pay to open it up, they don't value it at all.
There might be no/little value in the product but some probability of value in the source. For example, for a competitor there is possibly a lot of value in seeing the approaches the software took, the problems the developers ran into, etc. Key word: Possibly.
I'd personally just ask to interview the startup owner for 10 hours at say $200/hr but I know some people aren't great at extracting value from a face to face chat.
Open source… the dumpster of the startup world.
While this comment is poorly expressed, I would guess that the majority of Open Source projects atrophy very quickly. Would be interesting to see how many Github projects have regular monthly updates after 12 months, 24 months, etc.
Is it possible that you failed at commercialization, and now you can't bear the thought that open sourcing your creation might lead to zero stars and forks on Github? Is it possible that the "bombardment of questions" you claim was nothing more than a handful, maybe in the half-dozen or so range, of people who wanted to offer you emotional support because that is free for them to do while paying you for a product the…
At the end of the day, I didn't want to waste away on a slow-but-steady company. I wanted to lighten my load so I didn't need another hand surgery. I wanted to spend more time with 1.5 year old child. And I wanted to work with smart people learning new stuff.
But, by all means, take a single sentence intentionally devoid of context and continue to extrapolate.
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No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes from the reuse of its own previous work.
You're not rebutting my argument; you're merely saying that the "entitlement" isn't in this case negative. You've confounded a positive argument with a normative one. Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED. I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason…
There is a real problem with the perceived value of software. The public sees Google giving everything away, not understanding the underlying business model, and assumes all software has little or no value. Software is not made of physical materials, so why should it be compensated? The public sees Apple apps for 99¢, so shouldn't all software be priced like that? I recently dealt with a customer demanding a free upg…
+1 :)
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No, it's not. Some of us actually believe that the advance of humanity comes from the reuse of its own previous work.
You're not rebutting my argument; you're merely saying that the "entitlement" isn't in this case negative. You've confounded a positive argument with a normative one. Either way: it clearly is entitlement. Someone writes something, conjuring something new out of thin air. An unrelated person believes they have a moral claim to that thing. QED. I do happen to think this entitlement is negative, if for no other reason…