Dev.SN ♥ developers
Sections
Dev.SN
An anonymous coward writes:
"An interesting article about the shift in open source from idealistic to pragmatic. The author compares the relative obscurity of FOSS software such as MediaGoblin and KDE's MakePlayLive co-op to commercial software. The article then goes on to discuss the split between FOSS's goal to provide freedom to users and to provide high-quality software. Also mentioned is the split between commercial and non-commercial FOSS."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
What Happened to the Vision in Open Source?
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 1000 moderator points
| 55 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: -1, Troll) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @04:38PM
Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
(Score: 4, Insightful) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:13PM
Nope. Reality happened. FOSS became popular and many people who do not care use Open in their business model. Some succeed, some hurt the movement in doing that.
Idealists has always been used, and hypocrites has always outnumbered the rest, and IT is going to float around two poles, free and controlled software. Free is what is aimed at making the user free, controlled is aimed at controlling the market/machine/user. So more than the license or the amount of money, the problem is the intention of the devs.
About carbon copying, pls. Most commercial software starts from ideas developed in university or stealing from each other. Where is the commercial software that was carbon copied in, say, the wiki?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:25PM
Amusing as that comment is, I don't really see a rebuttal here. Is FireFox chasing something a university developed or was it inspired by a popular web browser? Do the origins of that inspiring web browser make any difference to the claim of carbon copying? Nope.
It was called Bomis. But, hey, if you keep looking you'll eventually find an example or two. It will not help your point, though. You already exhausted your list of popular FOSS 'products' to come up with that one, it forced you to think outside the box to come up with an answer. That's proof enough of my point.
Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:49PM
bomis
Oh, terrible trolling, the precursor of wiki born an year later. I guess it was network lag.
Amusing as that comment is, I don't really see a rebuttal here.
It is not a rebuttal. It puts the theorem that close innovates, open copycats in the right perspective.
Is FireFox chasing something a university developed or was it inspired by a popular web browser?
You know what the NCSA in NCSA Mosaic means, right? Oh, forgot, you were trolling.
But, hey, if you keep looking you'll eventually find an example or two. It will not help your point, though. You already exhausted your list of popular FOSS 'products' to come up with that one, it forced you to think outside the box to come up with an answer. That's proof enough of my point.
I did not exhaust it, think rails or picolisp, I just think one counterexample is enough against a theory.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @06:12PM
Nope, look again.
No, it doesn't. It's just a vague generalization that, frankly, doesn't survive much ponderance when going through a list of popular software and its origins.
I see, so FireFox has been copying Mosaic this whole time and in no way was motivated by a certain other browser out there. Right.
Then you do not understand the theory. Think about what FOSS's biggest accomplishments are and what their histories were. Think about the most common complaints about popular FOSS applications. Both of those lists are very different from similar lists of commercial counterparts. You cannot one-example it away because it's the direct result of the practicalities that the FOSS philosophy brings to the table. It's not something I invented so I could 'troll' on a sleepy website.
Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 23 2014, @07:39PM
> Nope, look again.
Links? Mine are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki [wikipedia.org] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomis [wikipedia.org]
> so FireFox has been copying Mosaic this whole time
The concept, sure. Copying is transitive. Sure it had also to compete for features and web interoperability with commercial browsers. Which still proves you wrong when commercial browsers had to do exactly the same, see Adblock and crippled noscript imitations...)
> Then you do not understand the theory.
"FOSS falls on its face when it doesn't have something to carbon copy off of".
False, as proven. If your theory was different, you should have chosen different words. If you refer to GNU explicitly wanting to replace proprietary unix tools with free ones, then you are criticizing GNU and not FOSS, and you are essentially saying that accomplishing their mission was a failure because they did it in the right way.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @08:48PM
You're right, I made a boo boo here. When I read the Bomis page earlier I got the part where they said it was a predecessor to Nupedia and Wikipedia, I didn't go far enough down to read the WikiWikiWeb bit. That's my bad and will concede that point.
Oh, please. "They had to keep copying to keep up, but not really because commercial browsers copy to keep up."
Nope. One of your colleagues in this thread, however, has made a little head-way on that. Not enough, but some. He understood what I said just fine.
Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:18PM
Make it "They had to keep copying to keep up, but commercial browsers copy to keep up themselves" so we have an instance of innovative FOSS that succeeds so that others need to copy its features.
(Score: 1) by Tork on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:45PM
Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Monday March 24 2014, @07:41AM
You tell me. Go ahead and explain why commercial software is innovative, apart the need to do things differently for the sake of differentiating from the competition, whether the user likes it or not.
(Score: 1) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @12:03PM
Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @12:33PM
The answer was, FF is a web browser, browsing protocols are added/tweaked all the time. Let's see slackware and systemd, for a fitting example.
(Score: 1) by Tork on Monday March 24 2014, @01:09PM
Slashdolt logic: 1600 x 1200 > 1920 x 1200
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Pav on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:48PM
Software should be "done" already, and we should be moving on to GPLed business models etc... We should be looking for ways to sack those overpaid CEOs and take control of our lives instead of just our software, but all of a sudden BSD licenses became popular again and software freedom is going backwards. Was it the influence of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field? How is GPL3 being better for computing and society even controversial? There are so many weasel words, but I've spent long enough in the industry understand them for what they are.
BSD is better for cooperation and standardisation? Utter bollocks - look up the Unix Wars [wikipedia.org] - GPLed Linux won because of code closing, divergence and legal wrangling among BSD derivatives, and this was despite Linux being new and inferior at the time. I wish I had links to certain old Usenet discussions - the geek generation before me hashed this out during my student days - but Linux coming from nowhere to become the defacto standard says it all really. The BSD TCP/IP stack is lauded as proof of the licenses value, perhaps because pointing to the OS would show how ongoing cooperation was undermined. Even so, history [wikipedia.org] doesn't remember the BSD stack as being particularly central. They also tell us that using the BSD license is more altruistic - of course they would. We're being sold the losing... ahem, I mean the "altruistic" side of a prisoners delemma [wikipedia.org] - defectors prosper and scum rises to the top. Yes, successful projects are licensed under BSD, and cooperation is possible when it's in everyones interest, but a community will often be undermined when a closed fork starts smelling profitable. The greybeard Unix War veterans know this, and I daresay desktop BSD users recently learned after their community was mostly cannibalised by Apple - many Slashdoters/Soylenters know a BSD-desktop refugee or two I'm sure.
Open Source "winning" (rather than Free Software) reminds me of winning the Cold War: yes we won... but somehow "we" doesn't include most of us. Slashdot was a powerful place once - we were even newsworthy as a community. People with belief in their own power even seem to interact differently. RMS warned us : we either control our technology or are controlled by it - and (surprise) he was right. Our feeble complaints after the Snowden revelations drove that home - it's our code that is the backbone of this stuff, and yet the decisionmakers at Google, Apple, even Microsoft (with their Linux Skype infrastructure) have all the power after we let them embrace/extend our work. Those companies will take action, complain or collaborate with the NSA as they see fit with no input from us. We don't need to be powerless (and Soylent is a small demonstration of this). Muscular and modern licenses (eg. GPL3) seem to encourage loud bitching from certain quarters, but I'd rather that than being quietly disempowered in Unix Wars - The Empire Strikes Back. The stakes are even higher this time.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday March 23 2014, @05:44PM
"you cannot generate hype with it any more"
And that's good. The projects referenced are boring, trying to do a good job of filling a very small niche in a hyper competitive marketplace with many entrenched interchangeable commodity solutions. If all they have going for them is trying to use FOSS as a source of hype, maybe they should stop.
We tried this in the 90s when Debian had about 100 mp3 players all slightly different. "mymp3player is an ambitious new player with skin support, made with all organic soy ingredients, and it saves the whales every time you run it". It was pointless, but didn't really hurt anything.
Whatever is the new hotness in 2024, I guarantee they'll be 100 sorta-clone projects of it in FOSS land, and thats OK. Its a constant of the ecosystem. Its healthy, basically.
There is interesting FOSS stuff, but the TLDR of the original article claiming Sturgeons Law applies to FOSS isn't all that insightful. If I didn't feel 90% of FOSS was garbage, I'd be worried I don't know about the entire market.
(Score: 2, Informative) by c0lo on Sunday March 23 2014, @06:33PM
(so full of shit)
Hibernate [wikipedia.org] - born from the itches a "commercial product" was creating, finished by reshaping an industry proposed standard (EJB).
Inversion of control [wikipedia.org] - base on the shortcomings of the software architectural practices of the time, first formalized [martinfowler.com] by Martin Fowlers, most of the IoC containers during the history and nowadays [codehaus.org] are Open Source (I personally have troubles in finding one that is strictly commercial).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @06:42PM
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:42PM
Speak for yourself... indeed, highly dependent on the individual needs... But be aware that the lack of something is in no relation with the usefulness and social impact of whatever else does exists.
I found myself completely satisfied with Open/Libre office (and I don't care if previously there was MSOffice, WordPerfect or ClarisWorks) and I'm in no need for video editing software
However, I can't imagine my life as "complete" as it is right now without the "slashcode" being open source, able to be forked and used as an escape route from under the overlords of a certain green feta site.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @11:04PM
still don't have a good office suite
I guess "good"is relative.
I wish I had a buck for every time M$Office failed to open a MICROS~1-format document and the solution was to use OpenOfffice/LibreOffice to open that item and re-save it.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:49PM
Somebody remind me, what does the non-FOSS world have that is comparable to the Mint Software Center [netupd8.com] (or any package manager)?
They've had decades. Surely they have a competitive app.
Warning: If somebody mentions something that only updates the OS and not the apps, he is going to get a Bzzzzzzt.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:56PM
Somebody remind me: What does the non-FOSS world have that is comparable to the Mint Software Center [netupd8.com] (or any package manager)?
They've had decades. Surely they have a competitive app.
Warning: If somebody mentions something that only does OS updates and won't find/download/install/update/uninstall[1] the apps, he is going to get a Bzzzzzzt.
[1] Did Windoze uninstallers ever get to the point that they don't leave turds everywhere?
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @06:58PM
[citation needed]
Many computer functions were not patented. Copy & Paste for example among many others. If IP had interfered with the development of early computers as much as it eventually did with other industries, like pharmaceuticals, advancement would have been as slow as it is in the pharmaceutical industry. There is little to no evidence that IP advances technology. Most of the evidence shows the opposite.
Firefox came up with the many new ideas that Internet explorer stole (the find tab vs a find popup window). Not to mention that (I believe it was) Windows 2000 supposedly stole source code from a linux distro but never gave it credit just because Microsoft could never get their code right (though that's said to be a myth since it's hard to prove but from what I hear the code acts exactly the same and was likely stolen).
I even noticed my Microbiology textbook has stolen images from Wikipedia (they're cropped in the textbook) and the book doesn't give credit (it's the same exact image).
Fact is proprietary software has had a long history of outright stealing free and open source software and not even giving credit and one of the biggest problems that free and open source developers have had is enforcing the license against proprietary software that wants to steal it.
Much of the difficulties open source software faces is proprietary hardware that make it illegal for open source software developers to reverse engineer them and use certain functions or to build new hardware with certain capabilities. Not that the proprietary developers came up with anything innovative just that they have stupid obvious patents that the patent office rubber stamps preventing anyone from creating a decent competing product only because they waste their money hiring a team of lawyers to acquire every patent imaginable and start using it to troll (instead of using that money to innovate). Patents only get in the way of innovation and hinder it for personal gain. Abolish patents.
(Score: 1) by bugamn on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:17PM
This is just a small point in your commentary, but are you sure that your textbook got their images from Wikipedia and not the reverse? Or maybe both got it from a common source?
Also, what kind of textbook is that that doesn't give a source for its images?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:41PM
Usually the only time you see the source cited is because it was required by copyright.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @10:01PM
Required or not, if my book stole the image without citing it this still helps demonstrate my point, that it is IP defenders that are the thieves and not the other way around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 23 2014, @09:52PM
My book doesn't cite any sources and it is cropped in my book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_talk:Gram_stain_ 01.jpg [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Monday March 24 2014, @02:35AM
If you want to claim a copyright you should start being non-anonymous and engage on the same talk page.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @03:39AM
It's not my copyright, it's Wikipedias. and it was stolen by my book. and I don't have to be non-anonymous to call the textbook companies out on it. They stole it, IP extremist hypocrite thieves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @03:42AM
Not everyone has the resources of a big corporation to enforce IP. It's mostly the big corporations that have these sorts of resources to go after the little guy but whoever put that image up on Wikipedia is far less likely to have the resources to go after the IP extremist thieves that steal their work without attribution. Yet the big corporations wrongfully accuse everyone else of 'stealing'. Only when others do it I suppose. The hypocrites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24 2014, @04:13AM
(by the find tab I previously meant the ctrl+f feature where a tab comes up vs a popup window coming up. That wast stolen from firefox). Another stolen feature is the search engine box on the top right. Another stolen feature is tabs. All this came out in Firefox first and was later stolen by Internet explorer. Not to mention many of the command features in the DOS command prompt were designed to look a lot more like Linux in later versions of Windows.
It's perfectly fine for IP extremists to freeload and steal off the FOS community with no attribution whatsoever but don't anyone dare copy an idea from an IP extremist or else they will nail you to a cross and claim that they are the victims always being stolen from. I'm sick of the hypocrisy. If you don't want anyone copying your ideas at the very least be original and ensure that what you build isn't copied from anyone else.