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Comment by throwawayaway12 | Hacker News Reader

I think you have pretty much proved his point.

>I realise it's hard for FOSS advocates to understand this, because it's a fundamental flaw with the FOSS philosophy. The benefits are "obvious" to crusaders, but the objective reality is that large swathes of FOSS are full of casual or hobby code that barely works, has gaping security vulns, and/or is nowhere close to being robust enough for production.

>And the solution then is to not use FOSS, because then you don't have to take the internals on trust?

I think the point is to realize FOSS is not a utopia and has tradeoffs like everything else.

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> I think the point is to realize FOSS is not a utopia and has tradeoffs like everything else.

But that wasn't what this thread was about. The statement that I was responding to above was this:

>> or exclude FOSS when working commercially.

I.e., that there isn't a tradeoff, but that the solution to shortcomings of some FOSS that aren't unique to FOSS in any way is to not use FOSS at all.

And that was then defended using equally nonsensical logic.

So, noone here is claiming that FOSS is utopia. But people are implying that proprietary software is. Which I am asking people to justify. So far, nobody did.

No, I think what people are implying is that commercial licensing of software solves the trust/responsibility aspect of software. With proprietary software, there are legal remedies to malfeasance.

In which case that is still both obviously nonsense and irrelevant on two counts.

It's irrelevant because this was about FOSS vs. closed source, not about commercial licencing vs. noncommercial licencing. Even if commercial licencing were the solution, that says nothing about whether the commercial licence should be FOSS or closed source.

And it is also irrelevant because there are broadly the same legal remedies to malfeasance in all cases. If you are breaking the law, you are sill breaking the law if you are publishing your source code, and you are still breaking the law if your are doing it non-commercially.

And in so far as you mean liability for defects rather than malfeasance, it is obviously nonsense that there are any generally applicable effective legal remedies against terrible proprietary code if you look at the real-world quality of products in the market. You might be able to put together a contract that helps with that, but (a) that is far from the norm and (b) is obviously still irrelevant to whether the code should be open or closed.

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