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posted by martyb on Sunday March 31 2019, @12:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the be-sure-to-FLOSS-twice-a-day dept.

https://fossforce.com/2019/03/foss-on-the-road-to-nowhere/

The FSF and Linux Foundation are not the only organizations that could assume the moral leadership of FOSS. practices the same ideals that existed in FOSS twenty years ago. Similarly, after years of inactivity, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been struggling recently to again be relevant. However, both have a long way to ago before they can speak for the majority of FOSS, assuming they would care to.

Maybe the loss of a single direction is a sign of the success of FOSS. Maybe shared ideals can only exist at a certain point in a movement's development, and to wish otherwise is only meaningless nostalgia. Yet, despite the success of FOSS, today it has only partly transformed technology and business, and much remains to do. Unless we decide to content ourselves with what has already been done, I think that a sense of meaning — of making a difference — is more useful than seeing FOSS as nothing more than a shorter time to market.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @01:51AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 31 2019, @01:51AM (#822565)

    Yes, it has traded its values. "We" had no reason to follow some trends in computing, yet "we" did. All those that things fuck up the user and developer hard, like interface fads or moving to the cloud or changing APIs at quick pace, are today strong among FOSS, when it should be against it.

    Gosh, I remember when GNOME started because there was no warranty about Qt future. Yet here we are, with stupid "we know better than you, eat this shit UI, same than the privative ones" 3.x version, and the "we will change the API constantly" GTK.

    Or maybe a good part of those that said they cared, were lying 20 years ago. OSS part probably was.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:23AM

    by DECbot (832) on Sunday March 31 2019, @02:23AM (#822581) Journal

    Speaking of OSS (Open Sound Server, not Open Source Software), OSSv4 seems to generally work better than pulseaudio. Too bad OSSv3 burned bridges with the FLOSS community and now we have to suffer shit for sound servers. We should have been more practical like the BSDs or forked OSSv2 and merged back when OSS was relicensed. Now there's only a hodgepodge of hacks for sound support and OSS is tangently supported as a second class citizen.
     
    I think you nailed it. FOSS doesn't have the resources to refactor code bases to keep pace with the tends and lately it's been too impatient to refine the current projects and then adversely impacted by cash rich hipster startups trying to profit from NIH syndrome.

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base