The aftermath of “No, 'Open Source' does not mean 'Includes Free Support'”
raccoon.onyxbits.de
raccoon.onyxbits.de
If I were doing it, I would probably have a 'bug dropbox' but I haven't run a one-person open-source project and met reality head-on.
I read his other articles, and loved this quote:
Back in the day, multitasking on Windows meant: being able to crash two programs simultaneously.
Back in the day I was in a 4-lane BBS and someone came on to brag about getting Windows (they managed to get a leaked beta or something, about a month before retail). After a few minutes of their bragging falling on deaf ears they said “I could be playing Doom right now [while talking to you in a separate window]!”
I thought that was the most nonsense ability to brag about because clearly you couldn’t actually focus on both and to drive home the point I said “Yeah, but would you be winning?”
Fair play: I was a bit of a jerk at the time
This is ideologically good, but I wonder if it is really sustainable. The culture that feels entitled to free support definitely needs to be rejected however.
I have unpubished every open-source package I put out there (small as they were) because of the incessant demands from people who were not paying me to do whatever they demanded of me. It was demeaning and demoralizing.
In the 80s/90s, I would have just tossed a tar-ball over the wall and say "good luck - feel free to use it, if it suites your needs), but in the age of github, all sorts of folk show up demanding that I do this that or the other, with no offer of payment. My response was: "Look! You have the source code. Do what you want to it to make it fit your needs better. You can even do a pull request.". They didn't want to do that - they just wanted me to work for them for free. I opted out of the entire situation by unpublishing all of my previously published works.
* None of the packages were significant. One was a Flask-based SaaS-in-a-Box thing with home screens, user accounts, log-in (auth), payments and various utilities. The other was an early Pixar-era ray-tracer (renderer) that was slow, but very extensible and capable of making pretty pictures of landscapes and other things like caustics.
And secondly: whether successfully doing so ever consistently answers that why.
We might not have this problem if people had to build from source. But not needing to build from source is a fine thing and worth some pain.
> Can source without support really be considered free?
Yes, of course. With FLOSS, you don't need support from the software provider, because you're free to get that support from anywhere or do it yourself. With proprietary software, there's a monopoly on support since you're not free to study, share, modify and execute the code for any purpose.
The second never after next never. Give or take a few nevers.
Obviously open source with a suitable license but without support is free as in freedom. If you can take the code, modify it, and redistribute it, then it's free software.
It's only free as in beer if you're time isn't worth anything.