161–170 of 259 posts
> FOSS is free as in freedom and not free as in beer (cost). Actually, and critically, it is both! You can't have free as in freedom without being free as in beer first.
I 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…
What I would recommend if you release an executable using native code. You should look into distributing debugging symbols. The private symbols contain function names, sometimes variable names, and all library calls, but not the source code. This means auditing is extremely easy, but stealing it is a bit hard. It also lets them run your stuff under a debugger extremely easy or make patches through instrumentation.
>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…
This. OSS is broken, but I'd even go so far and say that most of software is, because money is often an after thought.
>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…
For some types of software, we really do not want students doing it, for free or otherwise. There are whole classes of software, like database engines, that are non-obvious and require many years of real-world domain experience before it is plausible that someone will design a competent, scalable architecture and implementation. If open source is going to run critical infrastructure, we don't want naive and inefficie…
Of course as with all things the situation is more nuanced than this. Since you mention database engines we should keep in mind that without Stonebraker and 39 of his students[1] there would be no Postgres. Yet without incentives and many years of contributions from professionals (and students who would become professionals) we would not have PostgreSQL. A healthy system has a place for contributors of all levels of experience.
1- https://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2020.html#September_21_...
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GPL will for the most part only mean nobody will use it. There are only very few cases in which GPL is ideal.
What? Linux, gcc?
I think GPL with it's focus on 'can't be used in commercial' is deeply limiting.
I think the 'You have to make public variations of this module but it can be used for anything and linked to closed source statically or dynamically' ... is more ideal for those kinds of things, which is kind of pragmatically the case. But still.
It would also be nice if courts could make rulings on verbiage or licences instead of waiting for trials because that legal cloud is a big overhang for the entire world.
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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.
I usually do they/them nowadays, but habbit is hard one to break and i cant edit the comment atm. I hope the author understands that my pronouns don't bare any judgemental meaning
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> the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. Essentially honest FOSS will be available when we evolve to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"[1] type of society. Human race is clearly on asymptotical track to that. But not yet. [1] (C) 1875, Karl Marx.
Moltke seems more credible than Marx: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” http://connect2amc.com/118-strategic-planning-moltke-the-eld...
If you want more relevant citation then this: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" (C) Lao Tzu
For that matter I would say that first major step to real FOSS was made in 1917. But it was too early and shouldn't that brutally enforced. Evolution is the only reasonable way to get anywhere in such complex systems.
Relevant fact: all hardware and software in USSR was Open Source. Any non-trivial product must be and was accompanied by full schematics. Software sources must be printed out, etc. By law.
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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 want good documentation from an (ostensibly hypothetical) piece of open source software that you use. But you will neither pay for nor contribute better documentation. You see where the problem is, right? I'll give you a hint, it's not the developer...
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> the only way I can foresee open source working in the way the purists want is if there is a universal basic income. Essentially honest FOSS will be available when we evolve to "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"[1] type of society. Human race is clearly on asymptotical track to that. But not yet. [1] (C) 1875, Karl Marx.
Moltke seems more credible than Marx: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.” http://connect2amc.com/118-strategic-planning-moltke-the-eld...
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Except they're mostly not. While it's not hard to find exceptions most of the maintainers and other coder associated with major open source projects are being paid by companies to do so.
This really depends on the project. Many people just do it in their spare time and have a normal software engineer or similar role working on proprietary software using open source. Some are still at university and studying. Some are contracting and probably also get some new customers thorough their open source work. I do not have real data, but I assume that more than 50% of the effort invested in open source is no…
However, in the case of the Linux kernel just about 8% were unpaid as of five years ago. https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/
I assume that projects like Kubernetes and OpenStack are similar.
Obviously many smaller projects are largely developed by people on their own time. I expect this also applies languages and things like that which aren't largely corporate efforts like Go and Rust are.