My philosophy (albeit it might not be shared by many) is that if you are going to do a job, either do it well and all the way through or don't do it. I see many half-assed (for the lack of a better term) open source jobs where the developers do not respond to criticism and feedback in other words than "you should be grateful we did X and Y after all", with an air of arrogance and saintliness for even doing anything. I would analogize it with me going to a charity and giving them my food leftovers and getting mad when they do not like it.
“Open source” is not broken
111–120 of 259 posts
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#112I recently looked into open sourcing Homechart ( https://homechart.app ). It's free to use already (for self hosting), but some users wanted it to be open source (almost entirely for auditing purposes, but I doubt they'd even read the code). I don't want anyone using it for commercial purposes, and I found a few licenses that would prevent this-- namely Commons Clause, but at the end of the day I didn't see a benefit…
When you say "Audit" do you mean in terms of security?
I was a penetration tester for a while and it was quite common for my clients to have customers who requested a security audit of their product. We would conduct the assessment and provide them with a letter that basically says we did an audit and we found x number of crit/high/med/low issues and then did a retest to verify that client fixed x number of crit/high/med/low issues. Might be worth a shot!
I know Mozilla has also done some similar stuff, but they normally release the entirety of the report. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/files/2021/08/FVP-02-repor...
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
It becomes murky when you don’t actually ship software and use it as a service in the backend. GPL is from the olden days when you actually distributed your software. Now it’s only the front end and that ships as source still because wasm and the rest haven’t taken over yet.
AGPL then. It extends the meaning of "distribute", but is still FSF/OSI-approved
AGPL is super scary for corporations, as it's not clear where the boundaries are and no one wants to go to court to find out. GPL is relatively straight forward: as long as you don't link to it, make sources including any changes available to your users.
AGPL is like, okay maybe everything needs to be released. And when you are also using proprietary third party software it becomes a real hairy mess.
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#114>Whose fault is it then? I believe that it is the society’s fault, the system’s fault, no matter how abstract or vague that sounds.
C'mon, man! Your argument is that its all society's fault, and FOSS isn't broken! That's the weakest argument I've ever heard for keeping it!
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#115>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the univer…
Ubi won't touch tech salaries.
People don't need to maximize income. I volunteer because I have enough and money isn't the only objective.
Open source doesn't need to pay faang salaries to exist.
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#116>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the univer…
> Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities.
Well... BSD unix was. Unix itself was Bell Labs, the original TCP/IP spec was done by DARPA contractors (mostly BBN). HTTP was CERN but the breakthrough "browser" product was venture funded. GNU was a private organization, though RMS's office was provided by MIT for years and years. Linux obviously was an established community effort long before anyone with deep pockets showed up. Post-90's "corporate" open source has emerged basically everywhere, with Google and Intel being big early players (Facebook and Microsoft have been late to the game but done very well for themselves too).
I think if anything what this proves is that "Open Source" is going to pop up basically anywhere it's allowed to, and that any pronouncements about where it "really" came from are probably not informative.
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#117Open source is most certainly broken, and not just due to the various financial, freedom and security issues these two articles focus on. My biggest peeve: documentation is often minimal (e.g. API docs only) or filled with useless toy examples that are effectively just rephrasing of API docs. The entire underpinning of free and open source software is silly: software in this context isn't an academic pursuit producin…
This implies that the issue is due to being open source. The majority of closed source software, especially in house software, has minimal or nonexistent documentation. If there is any, it was likely done once at the start of the project and never updated since.
I've been a consultant for over 10 years. I always make sure to ask for access to any documentation for systems I'll be working on. I think I've gotten significant (out of date) documentation maybe once. This isn't an issue stemming from being open source.
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#118>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the univer…
Ubi won't touch tech salaries. People don't need to maximize income. I volunteer because I have enough and money isn't the only objective. Open source doesn't need to pay faang salaries to exist.
There are a lot of people who are very good at coding who don't care for high salaries. Despite mainstream pop being the most profitable, many musicians pursue niche genres.
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#119In general, society has problems with monetization of valuable things. It's not only the case with FOSS, it's also holds true with science and a long term not quarterly counted products development. Sadly vile entertainment and advertising is perfectly monetized.
Re: “Open source” is not broken
#120>If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; I guess I just vehemently disagree. Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities. The only reason it was sustainable was because it was professors being paid by the univer…
> Nearly all of the early open-source software that made the internet possible was produced in universities.
Yes, and released with the BSD license, then copied.