41–50 of 259 posts
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…
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…
Open source is most certainly broken, and not just due to the various financial, freedom and security issues these two articles focus on. My biggest peeve: documentation is often minimal (e.g. API docs only) or filled with useless toy examples that are effectively just rephrasing of API docs. The entire underpinning of free and open source software is silly: software in this context isn't an academic pursuit producin…
It seems like both sides of this supposed debate are saying precisely the same thing, with one side ("how dare we suggest anything is wrong wth open source") taking umbrage for no apparent reason. The premise of "both" arguments is that open source maintainers are being exploited.
I publish all my hobby projects on GitHub. I have zero expectation to ever get paid for it, even though I know some big companies have used libraries I've written. I am not sure I even want to get paid, as that would increase my accountability a lot!
Do I feel exploited?? Not at all. No one asked me to do it. I do it because I like contributing my knowledge and I hope it will benefit someone doing good work some time... even if most beneficiaries are indeed greed, for-profit organizations. I also use heaps of "free" products by these same greedy companies... my website is hosted entirely free (with HTTPS and everything) by Netlify... I also have several project websites on GitHub Pages (free), run my CI on GitHub , TravisCI and, AppVeyor and CircleCI (all completely free), write some code on IntelliJ (Jetbrains), emacs (ok, this one is not from big co.) and VSCode (big bad MSFT) which are all totally free to use.
My browser is also completely free, thanks to Mozilla!
Sure, they use lots and lots of OSS, but without those, these products might never have existed as the cost to create them from scratch or by paying every single OSS library for use would have been prohibitive.
So, I agree with OP, OSS is working just fine.
In many ways FOSS is thriving and on the cutting edge, and in others (especially project maintenance) it seems to be struggling.
But let's at least recognize some of the good actors in that space.
I think that there's a great deal of "brokenness" in the way that the software development community works, in general. Because OS is so ubiquitous, and because, as the author mentions, so many people make money on it, we think of OS as the problem.
I think the general quality level of software is catastrophically bad, in many instances. This is because people rush to do "big things," and they aren't actually ready to manage these "big things."
One example is overengineered design. This is something that we're all guilty of. Indeed, today, I am in the process of completely rewriting a view controller that I designed, that has that whole "Lucy and the Chocolate Factory"[0] thing going for it. The only solution was to take off, and nuke it from orbit.
When I create an overengineered design, it becomes brittle, and difficult to maintain or extend. What triggered my rewriting this, was because I needed to modify the way that the layout was done, and found it to be a complete bitch to figure out.
Fortunately, I am very experienced, and also wrote the original (messy) code. It would be another matter, entirely, if it was a "black box" dependency. I probably would have avoided modifying the layout, which would have resulted in a much lower quality of UX for my app.
The problem is Free as in Beer and Free as in Speech are related. The issue is not $1 downloads so much at is the overhead, pain and issues that come along with it. It's hard to manage and control downloads, usage, and the legal issue might be that any hint of licensing problem makes it 'no go' from a corporate perspective. So the gap between 'Free Beer and Speech' and 50-cent Beer and Speech is enormous.
Free as in freedom always necessarily denotes free as in beer as well. It's not an accident or side effect.
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…
If you want to allow audits but don't care about Open Source, just do a source available / shared source license like tarsnap.
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.
Its probably time for the next generation of open source licensing to make the code not usable for profit making purposes, thus ensuring open source is either funded by the companies that use it or forms its own separate community away from corporations.
How do you practically inforce these licenses? At aquision time in a big code audit? Independent review with mandatory certificates for businesses over a certain gross profit? What are the current ways we catch lisence breach? So many questions... I know that I hate, HATE, thinking about lisences, to the point I typically don't include one, or use some nebulous beer-ware hack. How does a new set of licenses help me?
This would be UNLICENSED or NONE then. Unlicensed software can’t be used for too many things, since it’s encumbered by copyright restrictions. (The author’s right to create copies is, in the U.S. at least, implicit, meaning that the simple act of creating a work is enough to have the “copyright” for it.)
There is The Unlicense [1] that explicitly transfers copyright to the Public Domain.