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Open source does not imply open community

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Re: Open source does not imply open community

#31

Post by jraph »

BrandonM wrote: post #29
JimDabell wrote: post #25

Open source is not merely a license choice. It is a reformulation of free software to make it more attractive to businesses. The entire point behind open source is that it is more effective for businesses to develop software collaboratively with the public than it is to do it in private. So yes, open source does imply open community. If you want to dump code onto the public with a permissive license but not develop t…

When you talk about the point or purpose of open source, what are you referring to? I think of Stallman, print drivers, and users owning their work, so your assertions about the point of open source ring false to me.

OP says open source is a reformulation of free software.

Stallman created free software and is distinctly against open source, which is more or less free software but without the philosophy, the concern for user rights [1]. Associating RMS and his printer with the purpose of open source would somewhat be a mistake / a faux pas (but would be nailing it for the purpose of free software!).

The purpose of free software is user freedom (and not the cooperative development). The original purpose of open source is selling the idea of free software to the corporate world by making it less scary to them, by trying to remove its political part. [I suspect the people who created open source might have been sensitive to the user freedom aspect and wanted to convince corporate to do free software for this reason but thought that hiding this part was a good strategy [2, 3]. I personally think this was a fatal mistake: nowadays, although the infrastructure is mostly open source (and has been succeeding in this regard), end user facing software is still mostly proprietary exactly because software companies don't think they ought to do free software.]

I don't think the cooperative development part is in the purpose of open source. In any case, the open source definition and the free software definition don't concern themselves with this and are purely about what you can do with the code.

Of course open source development models are intimately bound to open source and free software but and were one of the things sold to corporate as more efficient.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Perens#cite_note-18

[3] "It's Time to Talk About Free Software Again" http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1999/debian-devel-19990...

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#32

Post by JimDabell »

BrandonM wrote: post #29
JimDabell wrote: post #25

Open source is not merely a license choice. It is a reformulation of free software to make it more attractive to businesses. The entire point behind open source is that it is more effective for businesses to develop software collaboratively with the public than it is to do it in private. So yes, open source does imply open community. If you want to dump code onto the public with a permissive license but not develop t…

When you talk about the point or purpose of open source, what are you referring to? I think of Stallman, print drivers, and users owning their work, so your assertions about the point of open source ring false to me.

You’re getting open source and free software mixed up. As I said, Open Source was a reformulation of Free Software to make it more business-friendly. Free Software is fundamentally a moral stance (it is wrong to prevent sharing); Open Source is fundamentally a pragmatic stance (building software is better when it is publicly collaborative).

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#33

Post by GaryBluto »

> No "community". No politics. No Code of Conduct. No pull requests or issues. No wiki. No core team.

Sounds like paradise. I feel there are too many "communities" these days that exist to the detriment to the project at hand. I'd even go as far to say that I cannot think of a single time a "community" has aided an open source project in any way.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#34

Post by opan »

I thought this was going to be about the widespread issue of free software projects trying to make you use Discord to discuss or report things. There was a week or two where I saw people expressing interest in moving to other things, but that already seems to have died down. I assume they all gave up and went back to Discord after all.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#35

Post by locknitpicker »

GaryBluto wrote: post #33

> No "community". No politics. No Code of Conduct. No pull requests or issues. No wiki. No core team. Sounds like paradise. I feel there are too many "communities" these days that exist to the detriment to the project at hand. I'd even go as far to say that I cannot think of a single time a "community" has aided an open source project in any way.

> Sounds like paradise.

It sounds like paradise if you are not open to accepting any contribution or even feedback to fix even egregious problems with the project.

That's fine if your goal is to maximize control at the expense of quality. But for that I wonder if FLOSS is what you are actually looking for.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#36

Post by GaryBluto »

locknitpicker wrote: post #35
GaryBluto wrote: post #33

> No "community". No politics. No Code of Conduct. No pull requests or issues. No wiki. No core team. Sounds like paradise. I feel there are too many "communities" these days that exist to the detriment to the project at hand. I'd even go as far to say that I cannot think of a single time a "community" has aided an open source project in any way.

> Sounds like paradise. It sounds like paradise if you are not open to accepting any contribution or even feedback to fix even egregious problems with the project. That's fine if your goal is to maximize control at the expense of quality. But for that I wonder if FLOSS is what you are actually looking for.

molticrystal's suggestion of politely e-mailing contributions would work.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#37

Post by tap-snap-or-nap »

GaryBluto wrote: post #33

> No "community". No politics. No Code of Conduct. No pull requests or issues. No wiki. No core team. Sounds like paradise. I feel there are too many "communities" these days that exist to the detriment to the project at hand. I'd even go as far to say that I cannot think of a single time a "community" has aided an open source project in any way.

until Jia Tan comes for a rescue.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#38

Post by locknitpicker »

rvz wrote: post #15

I am out of ideas on this one. The problem here is "open source" is seen as free support and working for "the community" for free and since the code is out there, no-one needs to pay the maintainers. (which is false) Some mention GitHub sponsors as the solution, however it is a power-law system and benefits the very early participants or already famous developers to make a meaningful amount of income. But it is now a…

> The problem here is "open source" is seen as free support and working for "the community" for free and since the code is out there, no-one needs to pay the maintainers. (which is false)

I don't think this is true at all. FLOSS just means you are free to download a project, use it, and distribute it. There is absolutely no promise or expectation from the public of maintenance, nor is there absolutely no promise or expectation of monetary compensation from contributors.

The sole promise is "here's the code, have fun".

Heck, there isn't even any expectation that end-users contribute anything back to the project.

If you are a developer and have an expectation of receiving any monetary compensation, you should rethink your licenses. If you are an end-user and have any expectation of receiving maintenance work then you should reach out to whoever you seek to handle said maintenance and sort out business arrangements. In fact, that's exactly how it works. See for example how corporations pay maintainers to contribute and be involved in FLOSS projects. For extreme cases, see how a group of companies were quick to fork Redis to Valkey the moment that Redis tried to strong-arm it's way out of a FLOSS project. They had no problem amassing a set of maintainers in their payroll to take care of the code.

I'm perplexed by this expectation of FLOSS guaranteeing salaries to random maintainers who stick around and don't want to deal with the public. There are a few nasty stereotypes emerging from that assumption. Perhaps those nurturing these expectations should check the actual licenses to verify exactly what they cover and ensure.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#39

Post by locknitpicker »

ValdikSS wrote: post #17
rvz wrote: post #15

I am out of ideas on this one. The problem here is "open source" is seen as free support and working for "the community" for free and since the code is out there, no-one needs to pay the maintainers. (which is false) Some mention GitHub sponsors as the solution, however it is a power-law system and benefits the very early participants or already famous developers to make a meaningful amount of income. But it is now a…

The article recalls people that open-source software is not necessary created for the community, but rather by the author, for the author oftentimes. The "support" is not only the maintenance burden which (sometimes) could be solved for money. It's also the features that the original author just don't find useful at all, but others may want to have. If I don't have Mac, never used it and don't plan to buy it, why wou…

> The article recalls people that open-source software is not necessary created for the community, but rather by the author, for the author oftentimes.

Exactly. A FLOSS license essentially states "I put together this cool thing, please take a look and pass around."

When I published FLOSS projects of my own, my motivation was to share with the world something that was useful to me and that I enjoyed doing, in case it was of any use to anyone. Once I discovered a small FLOSS project of mine was used by a big name commercial software suite and I was tremendously surprised for finding out by googling it, and found it extremely funny. And that was it. Is this so outlandish?

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#40

Post by qingcharles »

opan wrote: post #34

I thought this was going to be about the widespread issue of free software projects trying to make you use Discord to discuss or report things. There was a week or two where I saw people expressing interest in moving to other things, but that already seems to have died down. I assume they all gave up and went back to Discord after all.

Every open source project I look at right now uses Discord, to my chagrin. Discord isn't totally awful, but it's ephemeral and requires a huge bloated web app.
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