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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."
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What Happened to the Vision in Open Source?
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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: 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.