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The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

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Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#91

Post by dpower »

ekianjo wrote: post #16
dpower wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this particular blog post. Curious to see how this is received by the tech community.

I think you fail to see the usefulness of fundamentalists. They help keep some kind of balance in the overall system, by pulling some of the practices towards one end. If no FOSS fundamentalists existed, we may be living in a very different software world right now. A number of extremely useful POSIX tools were the products of such ideologies. I think one of the "better" approaches if you cannot survive with a "suppo…

Interesting point, but I think it's a fallacy. Taking this line of argument and applying it to the social sphere - you would be arguing that there is a place for nazi's in this world (I'm just making a point - not saying you support nazis!)

Totally agree with your "good citizen" argument though. Something we should consider.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#93

Post by bjpbakker »

dpower wrote: post #87
enriquto wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where do morals come into play here? I want to be able to check whether the software does anything harmful for me, and to be able to fix it and adapt it to my needs. Proprietary software effectively curtails the possibility of doing that. Say I am allergic to nuts. Fortunately, when I buy some processed food I can check easily whether it has nuts or not. Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put…

> Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put nuts in their products Sure, this would be morally wrong (and also illegal). But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false. Quite insulting to those of us that do work on proprietary software.

So please tell us honestly. Do you include _any_ kind of monitoring in your software to track your user's actions, errors, etc?

You have to at least understand that (some) people have a trust issue with proprietary software, since too many vendors (including Canonical btw) ship with monitoring included.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#94

Post by maeln »

dpower wrote: post #79
maeln wrote: post #69

The complains about FOSS fundamentalists coming from proprietary software dev' (which I am) always seems a bit hypocritical to me. The reason is, you probably use a lot of FOSS software that were made possible only because a lot of people dedicated time and effort to it. Your servers probably run Linux, if not, the services that you use everyday probably do. Your compiler/language is probably FOSS too, if not, the so…

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.

I am not saying that you do :) . It is more about the critics of FOSS fundamentalists. As obnoxious as some can be (often the one who contribute the less), we should still respect that without the effort of some fundamentalist to spread FOSS, we may not be able to work like we do today.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#95

Post by dpower »

ekianjo wrote: post #32
dpower wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key point is this: If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux. Simple as that really. As a proprietary app, we have encountered quite a bit of resistance from Linux users, usually berating us for not being open source. I think that's short sighted. We need more pragmatists.

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 the Linux kernel is... Microsoft.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#96

Post by phkahler »

dpower wrote: post #79
maeln wrote: post #69

The complains about FOSS fundamentalists coming from proprietary software dev' (which I am) always seems a bit hypocritical to me. The reason is, you probably use a lot of FOSS software that were made possible only because a lot of people dedicated time and effort to it. Your servers probably run Linux, if not, the services that you use everyday probably do. Your compiler/language is probably FOSS too, if not, the so…

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.

>> I absolutely support FOSS. The point of the article was to debunk some of the perceived "evils" of proprietary software.

I took it as a complaint about FOSS fundamentalists. There has always been tension between FLOSS and proprietary, and I didn't feel you added anything of value to that discussion.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#97

Post by seba_dos1 »

keiferski wrote: post #40
throwaway4799 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free labor is distinct from free software and it is misleading to conflate the two. Plenty of people are paid to work on free software, and I'm not talking about Red Hat or SUSE either. See: 90% of the Linux kernel contributors. As for musicians, plenty of them share their music (or flps, or whatever) all the time. Soundcloud, bandcamp, jamendo, magnatune, soulseek... the list goes on.

1. Right, but I guess I was talking more about the ecosystem itself. If there were no jobs paying people to work on open-source software, would there be as much work done on free software in general? 2. True, but charging money for your music doesn’t get nearly the same negative reaction that paid software often gets.

There's nothing wrong with paid software. I'm happy to pay as long as it's free.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#98

Post by dpower »

starbeast wrote: post #66
dpower wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key point is this: If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux. Simple as that really. As a proprietary app, we have encountered quite a bit of resistance from Linux users, usually berating us for not being open source. I think that's short sighted. We need more pragmatists.

>If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux. Microsoft uses Linux on something like 60% of their own cloud servers, presumably because they find it more profitable to do so than to use the software they wrote themselves. One thing you have possibly missed is that the people you think are fundamentalists rather than pragmatists, are for the most part being fundamentalist about pragma…

To be absolutely clear, and I've made this point several times in the article - I am not dismissing the open source community.

I am dismissing those that reject proprietary software on principle.

I also made it clear that we would open source our software if we could find a business model that would work for us.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#99

Post by floss_fulltimer »

dpower wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this particular blog post. Curious to see how this is received by the tech community.

Disclaimer: I've been working full time on various large FLOSS projects for many years and I contribute to other ones in my spare time.

You start with "I salute you. I’m a fan" and then call a lot of people "fundamentalist", then "You have made a choice based on an ideology", "blind to the realities of the world you live in".

Then "But like most utopian views, it’s naive", "It’s a pipe dream", and finally "Like all fundamentalists, they simply ignore some inconvenient truths".

Then you ramble through justifications of your business model (and quite a few logical fallacies).

For being a fan, you express your support in a strange way.

Now excuse me while I go back to writing software as a gift to whoever wants to use it.

Re: The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

#100

Post by enriquto »

dpower wrote: post #87
enriquto wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where do morals come into play here? I want to be able to check whether the software does anything harmful for me, and to be able to fix it and adapt it to my needs. Proprietary software effectively curtails the possibility of doing that. Say I am allergic to nuts. Fortunately, when I buy some processed food I can check easily whether it has nuts or not. Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put…

> Now imagine living in a world where food makers sneakily put nuts in their products Sure, this would be morally wrong (and also illegal). But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false. Quite insulting to those of us that do work on proprietary software.

> But you are basically saying that everyone is putting peanuts in their software, which is simply false.

An easy way to prove that is indeed publishing your code and letting the users compile it themselves. You can still hide your peanuts, but if somebody finds them, you'll have a hard time proving it was not there.

I see no difference between the two cases. As per your suggestion, it would seem reasonable to make proprietary software illegal after all.

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