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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

The author spends most of the article harping on the fact that most open source projects don't have any collaborators. The vast majority of software, open source or not, is completely irrelevant. Any conclusion drawn by talking about irrelevant software is also irrelevant.

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I don't know why you were voted down, because yours is the most relevant point about this article.

It doesn't matter that 90,95,99,whatever% of sourceforge projects are dead audio mixers that not even the original developers are using. Those projects can be ignored. They don't take up physical space, and we're not running out of internet. Just ignore them.

What matters is the quality of the actively developed free software. Any study on the quality of FOSS should start and end with actively used and developed software and ignore those that have been selected out of the software pool, because that is the process of FOSS development.

absolutely agree. It seems as if the author is saying all open source, versus the small set of proprietary software.

I know I have lots of 'open source' half finished projects, which I may or may not be using, and it doesn't really matter to me if someone else wants to take the code and continue it, or fork it or what have you.

I certainly prefer for my web server an open source stack. That's not to say there is anything wrong with proprietary alternatives, but I worked for a very large company that transitioned from proprietary software to open source, precisely for the 'open source' credo (it's stable, tested, more secure etc) as well as its gigantic cost savings annually.

I think proprietary software has a place, but I would like to see the author argue when and what those cases are instead of just talking shit on free software. Perhaps desktop applications for MacOSX and Windows is such a case...

It isn't irrelevant if you're a proponent of open source (but not necessarily free) software, and want to argue its main advantage is better software through collaboration. That argument is challenged by the large amount of "irrelevant" and inferior open source software, because it suggests that better quality software isn't always a consequence of going open source.

Free software advocates don't have to fight that particular battle, since software freedom for them is the end, and not a means.

That's a terrible strawman though. By being open source the quality could be improved by anyone at any time. That software could be proprietary and it would be equally poor and irrelevant.

It could be, but it often isn't. One could imagine someone arguing against open source software, saying there isn't enough interest or talent to maintain all of the open source projects in existence. I think the article we're commenting on was written in response to that argument.

I agree with you about proprietary software, but that model is rarely attacked in the way open source and free software is.

Well if someone came to me with such an argument I would say it's silly to judge open source software by the long tail of least-successful projects. I mean no one chooses anything by focusing on the worst representatives of a category. People aren't evaluating the least-maintained open-source software any more than they are evaluating all the dead and gone software to be found in bargain basement bins.

There's plenty of great free, open-source, and proprietary software out there, and many interesting debates to be had about the merits of competing packages. If some pointy-hair insisted on an obtuse argument about how all the crap projects on SourceForge are diluting the power of open source, I would get another job and let him replace me with someone with a higher tolerance for incompetence.

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.

The more important metric is to measure is how good the top 10% (of each) is.

But I don't think that is a correct reading of his argument. His argument is that each one of those dead, undeveloped projects adds value to the free software world, even though they may have no positive impact on the open source world.

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