posted by
martyb
on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:45PM
from the what-about-proprietary-closed-openness dept.
from the what-about-proprietary-closed-openness dept.
This post lays out the different stages of openness in Open Source Software (OSS) and the benefits and costs of each.
[...] Is Linux as open as TensorFlow? How about my personal project? Is that the same? [ . . . . ]
To help give depth to this topic, this post structures opening software into a sequence of stages of openness.
- Publicly visible source code: We uploaded our code to GitHub
- Licensed for reuse: And let people use it for free
- Accepting contributions: And if they submit a patch, we'll take the time to look at it, and work with them to merge it in
- Open development: And when we work we'll make sure that all of our communication happens in the open as well, so that others can see what we're doing and why
- Open decision making: And that communication will be open to the public, so that everyone can weigh in, vote, and determine what happens to the project
- Multi-institution engagement: So much so that no single institution or individual has control over the project
- Retirement: So now we can retire, and know that the software will live on forever
To be clear, I'm not advocating that going deeper into this hierarchy is a good thing. Often it's more productive to stop somewhere around 3 to 5 [ . . . ]
What about code written merely to solve one person's problem or to amuse themself?
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:50PM (2 children)
4: open-closed development: we take your items and resell at 2k per server for 'support'.
5: open-closed part 2 the revenge: We also have items we make but only sell. You need them to use the open stuff correctly.
I have seen that one a few times now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:56PM
There is dump of garbage whereby you can collect your ordered online goods delivery. Collect please.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:28PM
Elastic Search? Where you got to pay for actual security, but who wants to use a database without security?
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:57PM
And how to keep away those advocating it going deeper into the... hierarchy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:59PM (4 children)
X + 0) Backlog of bugs hits ten thousand.
X + 1) Number of "Won't fix" bugs hits one thousand.
X + 2) A number of years pass and, though the software is still full of the unsolved bugs, fads and novelty features creep and abound.
X + 3) Project stalls horribly due to fights and loss of interest / real life changes.
X + 4) People still promote a dead piece of software. Although it was already dead.
How many "big ones" do you know in a equivalent situation? Allow me to start: Fucking LIBRE OFFICE. Damn, my wife took an IT course a few weeks ago and they had to use Writer to make SIMPLE documents, but not as simple as just a few sentences. Tables, marks, etc. I have never seen Libre Office (6.4, by the way) crash SO FUCKING MUCH and work so HORRIBLY BAD.
My wife works as a teacher and looks like they are going to get new computers. After the experience they are thinking about just paying Microsoft and getting fucking Microsoft Word.
We have reached a stage where it's not that people pay for Microsoft Office because they don't anything else, no. Nowadays people actually pay so as to not to have to endure the pain of using Libre Office! Fuck you lamers.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Saturday March 28 2020, @07:10PM
Closing because CAN'T REPLICATE: PEBKAC.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @08:01PM
while being totally incapable to handle it.
They cannot even keep the code they inherited working, yet pile up mountains of bells, whistles, and kitchen sinks in everything they touch.
Slow-motion trainwreck, C++ edition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @10:22PM
Surprised to hear issues with Writer. It's a little bit jank, but it's worked fine in my experience.
No horrible crashing, no file mangling, none of that. I did all my shit when I was at uni in it, worked just fine.
My personal least favorite fucking thing is Impress. It's so slow. Trying to get things done in it is like pulling teeth.
I've never seen Impress (or Draw) run well in my life on any computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:04PM
maybe they were using LO in Windows? i've haven't done that in years, but in a grown up's OS it works just fine.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @07:07PM (4 children)
5. Bully cishet white male developers until they are forced out of the project.
6. Take over the project.
7. Destroy the project.
8. Move on to the next project.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @07:25PM
Too bad Poettering isn't a cishet white male developer.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @08:07PM (2 children)
You sound whiny and butthurt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @08:12PM
till you are trained to like it
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2020, @08:22PM
Your whining is music to my ears.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday March 28 2020, @09:48PM
This is all well and good, but it's missing the point. All you need is 2, a FOSS license. After that, the project will be maintained with the right level of "openness" for the project. If a project needs more or less "openness", it can be forked by better caretakers. You can die at any point, anyone can fork your project or distribute patches if needed.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday March 28 2020, @11:14PM (3 children)
>Open decision making
This is either insane or propaganda for convincing gullible project owners to get pwned.
Open decision making with code is done through forking. That's already a threat, see the ffmpeg forked to libav and then libav decides to not do anything. See sidux splitting in aptosid and siduction, one dead one way less vital than sidux. But this is the price for freedom.
Open decision making means that your overworked penniless open source volunteers will be infiltrated by people who appear to have a lot of time. Because they are paid by the commercials or by the competition. Once in key roles they will troll, or implement bad decisions. Search the debian mailing list for do-ocracy. They forfeited the declared values of debian (the formerly universal operating system) and adopted systemd as the default because hey we have time to cater to whatever the borg systemd devs are planning or their shuffling of defaults but no we don't have time to keep maintaining init.d scripts. LOL sure sure.
Now the trolls will replies with praising systemd, which proves they are trolls, because its performance is irrelevant, the topic is how it got implemented.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @12:28AM
There also are the politician types, not necessarily driven by evil motives, who mire a project in policy and imagined non-technical issues that only they can solve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:23PM (1 child)
i like systemd just fine from a high level user perspective. it makes my life easier.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday March 30 2020, @03:35AM
QED
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday March 29 2020, @12:14AM (1 child)
The seven real stages of any kind of coding, OSS or not, are:
1. Shock: The utter surprise that there isn't a tool to do this already, or surprise that all the existing tools to do this suck.
2. Denial: A complete failure to recognize that you're either trying to solve a stupid problem, or are trying to solve it in a stupid way.
3. Anger: Why doesn't this code F**KING JUST WORK!!!
4. Bargaining: Believing that if you can fudge the heuristics just right, this might actually work.
5. Depression: This doesn't work. It's just yet another sucky tool that does nothing useful.
6. Testing: Well, if we carefully ignore all the problems in our acceptance testing, maybe QA won't notice the problems.
7. Acceptance: The tool gets adopted, even though it doesn't work properly, because the suits were taken in by the shiny graphics and marketing drivel.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @05:47PM
> 4. Bargaining: Believing that if you can fudge the heuristics just right, this might actually work.
Ha ha - very true! This is where many resources get spent in R&D. Nobody wants to call it like it is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @01:14AM
Retirement: So now we can retire, and know that the software will live on forever but we are homeless living on a diet of twigs and rain water because the meager donations to the project only covered 2 years.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:06AM (1 child)
0. upload to self-hosted, public Gitlab server
Microsoft could decide to close/restrict Github, so it's not the3 gold standard any more
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2020, @12:58PM
The use of Gitlab often makes me loose interest in a project, because it's not accessable without JS. Gitea and Gogs are better if you want that Github experience. Of couse a plain cgit is what I would prefer.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday March 29 2020, @02:13PM
Linux for instance.
This is the eighth stage, stage zero, the one we forgot to mention because someone thought it was obvious, see e.g. rms's fourth freedom - freedom zero.
0. Itch. Scratch. Code written. Hmm, what to do now...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @04:14PM
Having been maintainer of a project that went through all those stages, I recommend you invoice those institutions at phase #6 (become freelance, make an invoice for your work, get paid). Because for sure, #7 will happen.