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“Open source” is not broken

nadh.in

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Re: “Open source” is not broken

#221

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

wutbrodo wrote: post #146
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already…

Do you know any developers consistently working just 10 hours a week, by their choice? (honest question…this sounds kinda appealing!)

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#222

Post by DarylZero »

wutbrodo wrote: post #146
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This still doesn't make UBI relevant to this discussion. It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there. Eng already have access to the levels of income that UBI would provide, with plenty of time left over to dedicate to open source, and yet this path is relatively untrodden. Plenty of engineers (myself included) already…

> It's already fairly trivial for a talented SWE to make UBI-level income working 10 hours a week by picking up software contracts here and there

I wish that were true...

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#223

Post by DarylZero »

hutzlibu wrote: post #174
c-smile wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That citation appears as irrelevant completely to the topic. 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 hardwa…

"That citation appears as irrelevant completely to the topic." The point was, that marxism as a theory is only a plan - and that plan did not really worked out in reality so far. And if you want to paint the USSR in a golden FOSS picture, well I would suggest talking with people who actually lived there and were not in a privileged party position. And it would be news to me, that the USSR published their tank, aircra…

>marxism as a theory is only a plan

It's not a plan. Marx specifically avoided any such planning and explained why. Marxism is a theory about capitalism. It's not a plan at all.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#224

Post by atq2119 »

orblivion wrote: post #214
atq2119 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is establishing a market for this kind of insurance policy. That can only happen if companies are made liable. That needs to happen at some point, though it's not clear how to do it without getting unpleasant unintended side effects.

Companies already don't like to deal with this stuff right? However much liability already exists, they're already having a bad day trying to patch all this stuff. So maybe they'd want to know they'll get compensated for the resources spent on that.

Good point. A more difficult sale for sure, but perhaps somebody should try and let us know how it went? :)

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#225

Post by pjmlp »

ajross wrote: post #219
pjmlp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX was only free beer because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it initially, the lawsuit against BSD and forbidding the Lion's commentary came rather fast as soon as they were allowed to take commercial advantage of their research work.

Sure sure, but my point was really that all nitpicking aside, Open Source is everywhere. Given the opportunity, engineers everywhere will share their work with others and build on that shared work to do more stuff, then share it. An argument from a frame of "Open Source only succeeded because ..." just seems obviously wrong to me. If not ITS then Unix. If not BSD then Linux. If not Mosaic then Chrome. If not gcc then…

Linux only evolved beyond a hobby project, because IBM, Oracle, Compaq, Sun decided to cut down costs on their own UNIX (thus we are back again into corporations and their relation with FOSS), and yet many still have to reverse engineer hardware capabilities despite the big names involved in it.

clang is the more recent example, it is becoming visible how it is lagging behind other compilers in C++20 support, not everything is landing upstream as it used to.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#226

Post by hutzlibu »

DarylZero wrote: post #223
hutzlibu wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That citation appears as irrelevant completely to the topic." The point was, that marxism as a theory is only a plan - and that plan did not really worked out in reality so far. And if you want to paint the USSR in a golden FOSS picture, well I would suggest talking with people who actually lived there and were not in a privileged party position. And it would be news to me, that the USSR published their tank, aircra…

>marxism as a theory is only a plan It's not a plan. Marx specifically avoided any such planning and explained why. Marxism is a theory about capitalism. It's not a plan at all.

"Marx specifically avoided any such planning and explained why."

Where did he say so?

Because marxism as I know it, surely is and has a plan. A plan to completely reshape society and economy. Dictatorship of the proletariat ... until the state of real communism is achieved.

Can it be, you only heard of the capital, but not the communist Manifest?

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#227

Post by atq2119 »

jbirer wrote: post #111

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.…

The corresponding analogy to your comment is going to the charity that gives out food and getting mad at them because you don't like the food. If you don't like it, just leave or don't go there in the first place. Certainly don't harass the volunteers.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#228

Post by raxxorrax »

haukem wrote: post #74
commandlinefan wrote: post #4

> boast of their “innovation” and “growth” without … contributing … from corporations that don’t bat an eye at donating billions to (often dubious) “social” organizations - often ones that criticize them anyway.

The legal and fiance constructs of many open source projects are pretty badly organized. This makes it hard for accounts at big cooperation to handle them. Many open source projects are also pretty bad at marketing to non developers and do not have an aggressive founding campaign. Some “social” organizations are much better at this and have very good people taking care of marketing and accounting to people who contro…

If they manage accounting and marketing hat might make sense. Many projects are probably looking forward to such forms of free contribution.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#229

Post by raxxorrax »

orblivion wrote: post #75

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…

That would create an even more parasitic security industry than we already have.

As many have said that the only defense against data extraction of personal information is to not collect them. I think this collection has to become more expensive than the benefits to marketing and advertising. Insurance might help here, but I expect premiums to be high if risk is adequately and realistically assessed.

Against exploits like the log4j thing... the library is popular and was used for years. In open source and commercial software alike. I doubt any audit would have found the problem. Most probably didn't expect it in such a library in the first place and would have started review with the more arcane dependencies. The only benefit of other components is probably security through obscurity. But what would you insure against here? Against exploits in software in general? I don't think that would improve software security in the long run.

Re: “Open source” is not broken

#230

Post by raxxorrax »

darksaints wrote: post #172
twelvechairs wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In rebuttal I'll paraphrase a little from Paul Ramsey (maintainer of 20-year open source project PostGIS)[0] His basic view is that Open Source is the dominant model today, but tension comes as very little of the value produced comes back to the community that creates this value. He argues this will always be 'the bare minimum' by virtue of economics, but that if something important slows down too much someone will p…

This personally rings true for me. My company is getting literally billions of dollars worth of value from a couple of applications (one of which I created and maintain) built upon the foundation of Postgres and PostGIS. And we benefit immensely from active development of it: PostGIS version 3.1 released a new more efficient overlay algorithm which probably saves us $5k a year in compute costs alone , and untold thou…

Too true. If you are a dev, ask yourself how large your budget is to distribute for projects that are among your business critical core dependencies, but are developed externally under free software licences. I am not blaming you if you don't even know the word budget.

Of course the best business strategy under current rules would be to let other companies pay here. That would net you a competitive advantage. Perhaps GPL was right in the end and companies need to be forced to either contribute or pay for commercial alternatives. Maybe some would learn how expensive software really is and that it requires constant investment of maintenance as most other products do as well.

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