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The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

blog.hiri.com

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Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#241

Post by ekianjo »

dpower wrote: post #95
ekianjo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux users who understand where Linux come from (don't bag Linux users under a single umbrella, there's a wide variety of them) have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few) or seen the effect of "bad proprietary apps" (Chrome systematically trying to spy on you, software with backdoors, etc... that it's going to be a difficult case to come a…

>have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few) And here lies the main point - they believe that many users will simply reject their proprietary software on principle. If the community was seen to embrace proprietary, which is what I'm calling for in the article, they might just support Linux. Also worth noting that the largest contributor to t…

A Linux distro is far from being limited to the kernel so your reference to Microsoft is kind of meaningless here.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#242

Post by kgwxd »

mcguire wrote: post #107
kgwxd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the software is open then anyone can fork it, make it easier, more flexible, better in any way. So your support fee better be low enough that no one is motivated to do that instead of paying for support, and also hope no one ever does it just because they can and dont care about money.

Could you name some products where this had happened?

JDK maybe?

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#243

Post by eesmith »

erikbye wrote: post #232
dpower wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I was pretty clear in the article - I absolutely support FOSS. The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software. It's not a zero sum game - FOSS vs Proprietary. Rather they can support each other.

> Super! So we should Open Source Hiri tomorrow. And I would love to. But there is a serious problem with this argument. If we do Open Source Hiri, there is nothing to stop someone from forking it and selling it for less /offering it for free. We die. Sorry, but it seems you don't know the landscape at all if this is truly your honest opinion. Open source companies making a profit and not being forked to death is not…

I tried making a living selling free software. It failed to provide revenue close to covering the stress I ended up dealing with.

I'm very much interested to know about these profit-making OSS projects.

How many of them are profitable enough that they are able to pay their developers $80K/year, which is the median salary for software developers in the US?

From what I can tell, the majority of them are "profitable" in the sense that someone else pays for developer costs. For example, when Guido van Rossum was at Google, Google paid for him to work 50% on Python development. The other core developers seems to be in similar situations. How many of them are paid by the Python Software Foundation?

The Django Software Foundation is profitable. It doesn't pay for any developers.

The Sage project didn't get a full time developer until 2016, and then only because of an EU grant.

Project Jupyter funds their developers. Their Form 990 schedule O for 2016 says they had $665,619 in contract labor. They could do this because they had $2M in grants.

These are for widely used projects.

Then there are the profitable OSS organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which has operational control over Kubernetes. It charges high membership fees. I think it's best to interpret this as a way for Google, Amazon, and others to reduce their costs and prevent competition by commoditizing hosting. (See https://changelog.com/podcast/300 ).

MySQL made money from shaking the big scary GPL at people who didn't want to pay for Oracle. Some of the companies who dual-license under the AGPL use a similar tactic.

So, which profit-making OSS projects are you thinking of?

How many of them have the ability to pay 3 full-time developers (that seems to be the number of people at Hiri)?

How big was their developer/user community before it was able to pay for 3 developers?

I can research the last two questions - I just want names.

But if you don't know the answers, then perhaps your views of how projects with 100K+ users work might not scale down to projects with only 5K users. Yet 5K users willing to pay $100/year is enough to fund three developers full-time.

See also https://caddy.community/t/the-realities-of-being-a-foss-main... , which talks about some of the 'bad' and 'ugly' realities of being a F/OSS maintainer. And yes, I face some of those problem (like entitlement) in running my F/OSS project.

Note that that link is an example where the F/OSS project development was not sustainable as-is.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#244

Post by dpower »

type0 wrote: post #221
throw2016 wrote: post #47

It's hypocritical for people to continue to benefit from foss and complain about 'fundamentalists'. Without that level of commitment no one would have used Linux and all the early immature and amateurish efforts, there are people here who know what a horror some of the efforts were to use and the long journey to today. Would any of the practical minded folks use any of that? That part of the journey could only be mad…

This seem to be the case, the author don't understand that FOSS is usually built by the communities of people that share the same fundamental values (he can call them fundamentalists for all he wants) but it doesn't make his arguments correct. When he complains that FOSS community doesn't embrace the proprietary software - how exactly does he imagine this to be done, no one dictates what software we should use so thi…

I make an important distinction in the article. The FOSS community is not one 'type' of person. There are plenty in the FOSS community who use proprietary software. I have yet to hear a compelling argument on this thread for using FOSS software exclusively.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#245

Post by dpower »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #28

>I believe the Linux community should embrace proprietary software with open arms. It would enable many more users to adopt Linux as their daily driver. Depending on your source, Linux accounts for somewhere between 0.5–3% of desktop users. It’s simply not having the impact it could. If you are passionate about Linux/Open Source software, it’s time to think of the ecosystem as a whole and embrace proprietary software…

>However, I'd rather not have the Linux community "embrace proprietary software with open arms", thank you very much.

Why? What possible harm could it do?

>Why are you defending yourself and exactly what against? I didn't write the article as a defence. I wrote it as food for thought. I would like to see Linux usage increase. I believe those that reject proprietary software outright are preventing this from happening. A vocal minority give the impression that proprietary software is not welcome. This has not been our experience.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#246

Post by dpower »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #146
watwut wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.) Refuting arguments is not an attack. The article does not read like attack. It is civil and non inflammatory and non insulting. 2.) Those people vocally disagreed with his previous article, him following up defending amd explaining his stance is how discussion work. 3.) Why not? 4.) Why do you want him to be silent and that group to hAve monopoly on discourse?

I saw the Reddit thread and couldn't find any particularly 'fundamentalist' views in it, not to say that a fundamentalist belief in user freedom is wrong.

Author here. It's not just one thread. And not just Reddit.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#247

Post by dpower »

enriquto wrote: post #103
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't eat at restaurants then?

> So you don't eat at restaurants then? Yes I do. I was talking about selling packaged food, but still, restaurants make a good example also. They will always tell you if one of their recipe contains a particular ingredient (of which you might be allergic), and whether there are vegan options. Many restaurants even write the complete list of ingredients on each item in the menu! Even then, except for very complex sau…

> They will always tell you if one of their recipe contains a particular ingredient (of which you might be allergic), and whether there are vegan options.

I authored the article. People ask us about our software all the time. We answer their questions. We have a post on our views on privacy, how we collect and use data etc. We give people the option to opt-out of data collection. Our email list is strictly opt-in. It seems that you are fine trusting the people that provide your food, but not your software.

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