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posted by martyb on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-proprietary-closed-openness dept.

Seven Stages of Open Software

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.

  1. Publicly visible source code: We uploaded our code to GitHub
  2. Licensed for reuse: And let people use it for free
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. Multi-institution engagement: So much so that no single institution or individual has control over the project
  7. 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: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday March 28 2020, @11:14PM (3 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Saturday March 28 2020, @11:14PM (#976765) Journal

    >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.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @12:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @12:28AM (#976781)

    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.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 29 2020, @06:23PM (#976985)

    i like systemd just fine from a high level user perspective. it makes my life easier.