151–160 of 259 posts
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Or host it on gitlab, which lets you entirely disable forking, merge requests, and the issue tracker
> disable forking That seems mean?
Re the author of "open source is broken": The irony of bashing open source on a websiate using systems/code/infra containing thousands of open source lines of code which I am sure he hasn't paid for... has probably escaped his attention. Honestly, I am not sure why there is an argument anymore. Let people write or use free or proprietary software as they see fit. You all know the pros, you all know the cons, make a d…
The author would be accused of having no standing to criticize open source if they didn't use it. There is no viable move with the mindset you display here.
Eg
- Post on twitter/facebook - pay for a proprietary stack - pay for an open source stack (donate) - print stuff and hand them out in person (half joking, but you get the point i hope)
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As the author of that article, I am starting to prefer they/them pronouns. It would be nice if you could update your comment to refer to me correctly, however this is not a demand. There is a lot more happening behind the scenes than you know of, I make a tiny fraction of my donations public knowledge.
That's why I default to they/them unless I have some indication otherwise. One time a dude went off on me for it, and I broke his brain by suggesting pronouns in his bio would have saved him a public freakout. I always found the prescription to default to masculine terms as a default gender neutral awfully suspicious even before I knew I was nonbinary.
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Writing documentation is boring, adding new features is more fun to do. Someone working on open source to have fun is more likely to invest their time in more features instead of better documentation. Here companies or users like you could step in and contribute better documentation or pay the original authors to improve the documentation.
Why on earth would I labor for free on someone’s vanity project, no matter what utility it provides otherwise? And why would a company pay a person who has already shown he or she does not value their own labor in that way?
You see where the problem is, right? I'll give you a hint, it's not the developer...
The most obvious sign that "Open source" is broken is that everyone uses that term and not Free Software.
This (IMO, weird) debate seems to be around all kinds of open source projects.
The most obvious sign that "Open source" is broken is that everyone uses that term and not Free Software.
"Free" software began when RMS wanted to fix his printer and got locked out by Xerox. "Open" software was an attempt to woo business to use free software but (arguably) threw the baby out with the bathwater by eliminating the "virality" of the GPL et. al., which was kind of the whole point (of "Free" ethos.)
The whole Free vs. Open issue is effectively moot anyway since everybody uses proprietary closed systems. Even the FOSS folks use GitHub.
>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 esta…
A half baked idea, curious what people think: Would it be possible to create an insurance policy against these major FOSS vulnerabilities? The insurance company would then require audits of your tech stack, and fund security research. This is analogous to what car insurance companies already do. And then companies who are not insured are viewed as suspect, etc etc. There's apparently a misalignment of incentives beca…
car insurance companies hires actuaries that correlate driving speed to payout and adjust rates accordingly. if you think that software quality and risk can be so easily quantified then you clearly dont have your hands in software.
If it's something harder to predict, is there a way you could put error bars around it? Granted premiums could get high as a result.
FOSS is the victim in a way, but that means it must defend itself. OSI needs to get off their asses and acknowledge the problem and work with the community to develop licenses that limit SaaSification and other forms of appropriation in a way that is compatible with the principles of open source and lacks the optics (FUD) problems of the GPL approach. I’m not holding my breath since the OSI is funded almost entirely…
> OSI needs to get off their asses and acknowledge the problem and work with the community to develop licenses that limit SaaSification and other forms of appropriation in a way that is compatible with the principles of open source and lacks the optics (FUD) problems of the GPL approach. I'm confused about what you want here. The GPL does not deal with SaaSification; for that you need the AGPL. But what problem do yo…
That said, I believe SSPL is an overkill, and what's needed for a less known SaaS product is a legally enforceable revenue-sharing mechanism - so it can benefit from being listed on popular platforms.
> Then why is it that millions of FOSS developers, despite knowing that their work may be consumed by for-profit corporations for nothing in return Well, that in itself is already some kind of return. Widespread use - even in a commercial setting - means widespread interest in your work and possibly in you. That might not directly translate into $$$ in the bank, but it is quite useful psychologically, technologically…