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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 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.