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Open source does not imply open community

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Re: Open source does not imply open community

#71

Post by em-bee »

JimDabell wrote: post #32
BrandonM wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

that's an interesting point. how important was user participation in the development of software for RMS? he wanted to be able to share his modifications with anyone. presumably that includes upstream. so even if not said explicitly, i'd argue that collaboration was implied.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#72

Post by Levitz »

saagarjha wrote: post #46
Levitz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Better faith CoC people talk about freedom of association vs freedom of speech - if a platform doesn't like their oppponents, isn't it fine to ban them? Sure, but the problem here is far more insidious. By latching into delicate and, at times, controversial issues, CoC may hold a project hostage and threaten character assassination. Imagine that for some bizarre reason, CoC establishes that issues are only to be tal…

And your argument is that the CoC that does the Monday thing is better, or what?

"Better" in the sense that it doesn't risk the problems the other does. My intention with that example was to make it clear I don't have a problem with people doing whatever, regardless of me liking it or not.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#73

Post by em-bee »

ValdikSS wrote: post #16

- FOSS applications don't have to be distributed publicly — that's only the common social expectation - FOSS does not imply that the code should be available for non-customers. The developer decides who is the customer. - FOSS is *encouraged* to be sold for money, *you can sell others' software, even if it's originally free of charge* (see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html) - Open-source licensed with no…

Open-source licensed with non-free license is still open-source, although non-FOSS

nope. there are only a few licenses approved by OSI that are not also considered Free Software. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html look at the long list of GPL incompatible Free Software licenses.

btw "open source that is non-FOSS" makes no sense because FOSS literally means Free and Open Source Software"

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#74

Post by throwawaypath »

engeljohnb wrote: post #56
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…

Why is everyone in this thread ignoring the fact that the world already had this debate 30 years ago, so the OSI published a document clearly specifying what is and isn't Open Source? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition It doesn't say anything about collaborative development.

[flagged]

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#75

Post by ekianjo »

maleldil wrote: post #63
ekianjo wrote: post #28

> There's now a chat group. People with no patience are angry and now you have to babysit them, have your own one-on-ones. There's a "community" now that you're responsible for. You never signed up for this of course YOU signed up for this. There is no well kept secret that this is going on. It should be a surprise for no one.

I don't understand. Is your argument that because these expectations exist, anyone working on open-source has to abide by them automatically?

> anyone working on open-source has to abide by them automatically?

If you dont want to abide by these standards, keep your code for yourself, I guess?

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#76

Post by evanelias »

JimDabell wrote: post #32
BrandonM wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Considering that Free Software predates Open Source, and many popular OSI-approved licenses also predate Open Source, how can you justify your core claim upthread:

> The people that see open source code and assume that it is being developed collaboratively are not being unreasonable – that’s the purpose of the open source movement. If that’s an inaccurate assumption for your software, then that’s fine – but it’s you that is breaking social norms, not them.

It sounds like you think anyone who selects an OSI-approved license, and makes the code publicly available, is somehow explicitly opting-in to the Open Source movement, and users should "reasonably" expect collaborative development as the default. Is that accurate? Because it seems completely nonsensical to me, especially considering the licenses predate the movement.

When you come across a random project using an OSI-approved license, there's no way to know the developers' motivations for selecting that license, if they haven't explicitly stated it. Your default seems to be an assumption that they're opting in to the "open source movement" and all of the social norms that you wrap up in that, but your assumption can be completely wrong, and that doesn't mean the developers are "breaking social norms" of a movement that they never subscribed to in the first place!

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#77

Post by evanelias »

engeljohnb wrote: post #69
JimDabell wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm saying that the claims made by the OP are true, and there's nothing anyone can possibly say about the bigger movement that can contradict those claims, because the movement, and what it is, and what it's like, are all not relevant. Which claims? “Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community” is what I am responding to and I think it’s very obvious how the intent and social norms of the Open Source movement are rel…

EDIT: Okay fine, I see it your way. Open source may often imply open community. I'll stop trying to argue that it doesn't. Instead, I posit that open source should not imply open community, even if that's what the originators of the movement intended. I'm leaving my first draft of this comment below because there's a couple of points I just can't help but be a pedant over. > Opening the code is a good thing and there…

> open source should not imply open community, even if that's what the originators of the movement intended.

I'd take this a step further and say the intention of the originators of the movement is somewhat irrelevant, because that movement essentially retconned a bunch of pre-existing licenses and concepts.

Consider the MIT license, which is OSI-approved but substantially predates the "open source movement" (as do many other popular OSI-approved licenses). This license was created not to foster collaboration, but rather simply to avoid legal overhead for software that wasn't expected to have much financial value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#History

Nowadays, because this license meets the OSD and is OSI-approved, people like GP come across any MIT licensed project and inherently assume the developers are part of the "open source movement" and should follow its social contract. Frankly, that's just BS and we should call it out accordingly: license choice alone does not logically imply anything about following a social movement.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#78

Post by xantronix »

NordStreamYacht wrote: post #3

The CoC crowd are there to only instigate trouble.

At face value, CoCs are a way for open source project leaders to decide who gets to interact with the project. You can't have freedom of association while also demanding to participate in someone else's project on your terms when said terms contradict the wishes of the project leadership.

If I were to guess, the author may have intended "you don't need a performative Code of Conduct" to mean, if you're a small project and you just want to share with the world with the option of including contributions from outsiders in the future, you don't need to have a CoC right out the gate until there are situations that have already been encountered. No need to wrack your brain on purely hypothetical problems.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#79

Post by maleldil »

ekianjo wrote: post #75
maleldil wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. Is your argument that because these expectations exist, anyone working on open-source has to abide by them automatically?

> anyone working on open-source has to abide by them automatically? If you dont want to abide by these standards, keep your code for yourself, I guess?

What if I just want to make my code available for other people to use and modify however they want, but don't want to run a project? People can fork it themselves if they're not satisfied with it.

Re: Open source does not imply open community

#80

Post by iamnothere »

engeljohnb wrote: post #70
em-bee wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only if you already have the source, the GPL also guarantees that you can get the source even if you don't have it.

I guess that's a pretty good point I never thought about. I've never come across software released under a permissive license that didn't either come with the source code, or host it somewhere convenient like github.

Real world examples would often be embedded devices powered by open source that don’t distribute any code, preventing users from maintaining or modifying the devices.

Of course, vendors will often do this with GPLed code too, and lawsuits are relatively few and far between. (Many thanks to SFC/SFLC for putting scarce resources towards this when possible.)

Because of this, although I appreciate the open-endedness of the MIT/BSD licenses for end user software, I do prefer the GPL for anything that may become infrastructure.

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