A lot of free software is free as in piano
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That their work is done in public and in front of the world should not give us extra ammunition to put their efforts down.
There are countless closed source packages that are arcane and hard to deal with - we just don't see them so there not able to be criticized.
Generosity shouldn't be sneered on, I agree, but we also have to recognize that the audience for our code is significantly broader than it was in the days of the Free Software movement. It all stated as a movement to empower end-users but it seems that end-users sometimes don't always feel empowered by it.
End users who don't feel empowered by freedom aren't entitled to free labor. They should realize that at least they have the option to control the software they use by hiring someone to fix/alter it or learning enough to do it themselves, which is impossible for proprietary software.
Yes, Free and Open Source software can sometimes be difficult to build and set up. This differs from closed-source software only in that closed-source software denies you the ability to build the software yourself. There are still plenty of ways for closed-source software to be difficult to set up.
I don't think anyone is claiming that Firefox, for instance, is difficult to set up.
The tweet misses the point. The choice is not between "hacky, janky free software" and "well-made, professional free software". It's between "hacky, janky free software" and "paid software".
Don't like FOSS? Pay.
That doesn't sound right. If you need a feature to be added to a typical proprietary software product, and you aren't a billion dollar company, you're pretty much out of luck.
With Free and Open Source software, you have a good chance at being able to pay to have the feature developed, perhaps even in-house.
If you did want to control the future of information flowing from person to person, I can think of no higher threat than free software.
Givin that premise, I would expect to see a lot more opposition to free software if large governent and large business intrest decide to consolidate their power and think that open communication is a hindrance.
> The whole Github/MIT licence scene simply did not exist back in the days, it was either closed source or GPL.
BSD-licensed software, and probably also MIT-licensed and whatever non-copyleft licenses there are, has been a thing for a long time. I distinctly remember seeing discussions and opinions regarding copyleft vs non-copyleft open source in the early 2000's. Aside from BSDs themselves, there have been all kinds of non-copyleft licensed software all along.
It might be that more liberal (i.e. non-copyleft) licenses have been gaining more popularity and that the emphasis has moved from GPL to non-copyleft licensing. It might also be that's partially driven by the dominance Google et al. have on tech culture. But as a whole I'm not sure that hate (if it exists) towards GPL-oriented culture follows from that.
As a stab in the dark, it could also be that there's a new generation of people for whom the older days of the GNU project and the free software movement sound somehow archaic or "not modern" now, or there could be some other kind of a cultural shift. People don't always embrace newer trends because of some kind of a clear economical or other direct motive.
Economic interests of the current powers that be might of course be one of those things that affect cultural changes, but I wouldn't necessarily buy it that it's the only reason.
There was also very recently a high-profile issue involving it and a ruby gem used by Rails that caused a lot of headaches for a lot of people, so it's top of mind for many.
I hadn’t heard of this, I assume you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26566925?
Lots of random BS on the internet is getting lots of hatred because the entire world has a metric fuckton of stress on its plate and access to a global platform called "social media" with which to try to vent about it as the only thing they know how to do to get through the damn day.
* Global pandemic and uptick in open source contributions
* Elastic/Amazon
* RMS
GPL's often a point of debate due to the virality of the license. AGPL is significantly more problematic due to the risks that it poses to corporations.[0]
IMO, overall this is a net positive, there's a lot more debate on long-term sustainability for open source, and a significant push for more corporate backing.
Like, if I were a woodworker, and made free chairs... you would be right in complaining if it was full of splinters, if it required you to buy hardware and drills, if it was uneven and clunky. It's a shit chair. There's no dishonor in acknowledging what it is. I would not expect a pat on the back just because I made it free.
Open source software is rarely "here's a free chair, that also doesn't have splinters." It's far more often "Here are some free blanks for a chair I made. It's not totally finished, so you'll probably need to do some work on it yourself. But the joints are easy to dis/re-assemble, so feel free to examine it all and modify or replace them to meet your needs. Also, don't sue me."
In that context, it's much more understandable, not because anyone's wrong per se, but because fundamentally the expectations are mismatched.
It seems unfair to complain that you're getting rough products when you're snatching them off the factory floor -- or out of the design room.
To me in this general form it is a valid observation, not an attack. Especially since quite a bit of published open code chooses that perspective intentionally: Feel free to use it however you see fit, but it was written because the author wanted it to do a specific thing for them and it's on you to make it useful for you. Which is still massively better than if they hadn't published it, but not for every audience, and that's totally fine. It's just something to be aware of. And understandably the messaging around this is mixed, because different authors and communities have different views on this.
And a street piano you could own... arguably better than merely renting one.
I don't know why this would be a "problem" though. This year I got a free snowblower. it had all the parts, but it didn't work. After much reading, disassembly, and other mess, I got it to work and now I have a snowblower.
To me, commercial software is often about ergonomics and immediacy - if I can pay to have it now, with no work, great. But, free software can be about capturing marginal value below the market clearing price. If I need to put in some time and effort but I don't need to spend any currency, then great! I've succeeded at getting a job done and exchanged time for cost. Seems reasonable, and it's nice to have the option. (obligatory hardware example: just look at youtube for the humongous number of things made with washing machine motors. Sure, they're inconvenient, but they are free and available. For a lot of people this trade is worth it.)
Tons of extremely expensive licensed software, with expensive support contracts, and we still spent a ton of time and wrote a ton of Perl to punch them into a shape that worked on our very vanilla installs of Windows 7 enterprise. Contacting anyone's support was invariably an absolute fucking joke of an endeavor. We literally only ever did it when we were sick and tired of bashing our heads against their shitty software and wanted to shelf the project for a week or two to recover our sanity while their support "looked into it" and "escalated our ticket" or whatever.
My experience with whether software was more like Stripe or more like a piano sitting on the sidewalk is that it completely depends on the company's attitude. Either they care that people be able to actually use their software, or they don't. I've seen both huge corporate products and small free software projects that both clearly do not care much about whether someone can get their program working easily.
And I've also seen both paid software and free software that care immensely about getting you started and keeping you going.
I have never experienced frustration with free/open-source/source-available software like I have with proprietary software.
If I had a dollar for every damned time I was dealing with proprietary software and became frustrated that I just couldn't looked at the source code to figure out what the programmer meant... sigh
When I do contact support I end up taking to people who also don't have source code access. They might have better documentation and a more comprehensive knowledge base, but they're no more equipped to look at the code (and, arguably, probably less equipped to understand the code) than me.
Occasionally I find proprietary software whose accompanying documentation is sufficient to troubleshoot the really bizarre problems w/o source code access. Microsoft's protocol disclosures, created because of the EU anti-trust action, are a good example.
Having source code access and a modicum of reverse engineering and programming knowledge is a game changer for supporting software.
Of course this rarely happens. Developer/maintainer attitude is one factor, but it's not the only one.
I had similar problems with proprietary software and I most often ended up with the answer that the thing I want to do just cannot be done. Or sometimes with no answer at all.
I prefer having an option to look up the source code to see what it does, file a bug report or even fix the problem myself than receiving a response "you're an outlier, so we don't care about your problem and there is nothing you can do about it".
Want to write your own program that extends or interfaces with an open-source software package? It can probably be done with some amount of work, depending on documentation, forums, and readability of the (available!) source code.
Want to do the same with a proprietary software package? Buy the SDK for $X000, there aren't any forums, and the documentation that is basically eyes-only. Maybe a screen-scaper could work, but that would be unreliable and tie up a licensed terminal (not to mention probably violates the EULA!).
The snowblower was not free, you just paid in time rather than money.
That said the experience earned and the courage to take on bigger efforts is found through trying and spending time keeping other people's trash out of a landfill.
This is true with software too otherwise we wouldn't have free and open source software.
Right to repair for the win!
That's why I use open source, I don't have the time to deal with crappy closed source programs
If you don't have a snowblower, no amount of time spent on your own will allow you to get one - you have to get the physical parts from somewhere.
If you don't have a particular piece of software, you can often write it yourself, with some time, but without paying another person or needing to find a physical good.
As the difficulty of using a piece of software increases, the cost-benefit tradeoff tilts more toward "write it yourself".
As the difficulty of writing a piece of software (or coordinating the components thereof) increases, the tradeoff invariably tips back toward trying to make somebody else's software work.
Free pianos _are_ free - when I was broke and 22, it was the only way to get a piano. I had lots of other broke 22 year old friends with nothing to do, we hauled it up the steps and then I was playing piano!
If I were rich and busy, I wouldn't have bothered, but I wasn't.
I think this is an important counterpoint to the "FOSS solves all problems and is perfect" or "commercial software is always bad" attitude that some folk present.
I'm so thankful that any developer opens up their code, even when it's not perfect. I've often learned how to do something, borrowed a function, or learned what the right configuration option is from FOSS projects that I didn't even attempt to use wholesale.
It's worth noting that contributing, in whatever capacity, to OSS is similarly rewarding.
A lot of open source software is intended to be used by developers, or, in other words, by someone who knows what they're doing. Not all, of course. There's plenty of open source stuff out there targeted at end users, or at admin-types, non-developers. Much of it is excellent. (In fact, much of it "runs the internet".) Much is not, or is really in a semi-developed state where it needs to be improved by actual developers.
None of this is anything new. You need to be aware of how "ready for use" the open source project you choose is. By the very nature of how open source works, projects are available "in the wild" when they aren't really ready for general use.
My qualifications: I've installed and supported Oracle databases for customers for years and I frequently wished they were Postgres.
Also more expensive pianos generally won't play automatically either and if they did you'd probably pay for them to stop sooner or later.
Software setup and installation is in many ways an art. Sometimes done on site with the customers watching, other times meticulously crafted as install and getting started wizards or whatever.
A developer mindset sees having source access as about developing the software. For an administrator, though, having source access is the difference between fumbling in the dark and looking like a fool (or paying vendor tech support to act like a fool for you) versus being able to look at the code and understand what's happening when documentation doesn't agree with reality, etc.
Many of us are forced to integrate proprietary software. We have to live with the compiled artifacts we're given (for "support" reasons, because license agreements say we can't reverse-engineer/decompile, because we want our Customers to have systems that aren't one-offs that can be supported by the "next guy", etc). When I'm stuck fighting with proprietary software and unable to see the inner workings I find myself pining for free/open-source software.
I've learned to tune it, I lubed the keypins to reduce friction, I stuck a shim in the soundboard where it was buzzing…
And it emits music when I play it.
Sure, we’ve all had to experience the annoyance of working out the limitations of proprietary software we can’t patch but FAR FAR more common is working around the limitations of FOSS software that is infeasible to patch. You’re probably not going to patch some bug you found in your jdbc driver, tomcat, or nginx because it’s expensive to maintain.
I’ve been really really happy with our paid software at & $company because I have a vendor I can pester to fix my bug or implement my feature.
Actually, yes we can. The key insight behind liberal economics is that central planners are incapable of understanding the demands at the edges. The same goes for software - the feature factories can only generate features imagined by centralized focus groups (or even worse, the business desires of the company itself), whereas desires of actual users are much more vibrant than that.
- There is light-weight software that is easy to understand and use: like piccolo or flute, rather than a piano.
- This light-weight software can be both proprietary and free (in beer and speech sense): there are expensive flutes, and there are free flutes.
- There is heavy-weight software that users wrestle with, like getting a piano up the stairs. Likewise, this can be proprietary and free (in both senses).
- In proprietary software, support contracts can be extra, or part of the deal. Just like if you buy a piano, you may have to arrange for your own moving (exactly like with a free piano) or the piano shop could arrange it for you, factored into the piano price or itemized separately.
If we don't take the viewpoint that free software is always like a free piano, but allow for free flutes, then we can repair the analogy. Otherwise it is just bigoted.
It is quite insulting, actually, because, for instance, free GNU/Linux, though a complex behemoth, is a lot more wieldy to ordinary end-users than proprietary Unix ever was. Many users report being more happy with a friendly GNU/Linux distro than with the proprietary OS they used previously.
During this time only 4 external parties have used it afaik:
1) Some CS class at an Indian University.
2) An Indian startup to share physical things freely.
3) A Japanese university doctorate study about analyzing concurrency!
4) A Minecraft map server.
To me this is mindblowing, here you have the simplest and most performant version of the most used protocol on Earth and nobody cares!
Nobody wants to learn!
So yes my app. server is 10x better than than Nginx for joint parallel tasks like a MMO server f.ex.
Try hot-deploying a project to Nginx without the live users having to login again.
You still don't care! :D
I'm just saying that nginx is good enough for most people, and they'd need to see massive improvements to their workflows to change.
I'm a web dev, and I've maintained multiple sites / APIs with nginx (ranging from ~millions of requests per day to virtually unused) and have never found a reason to look for a different webserver.
I've never had an issue with deployment requiring users to log out.
I can only assume you're referring to something in your MMO server use case?
Again - my intent was not to disparage. It was to say disrupting something that's "good enough" requires a massive improvement to the users' lives.
There used to be a lot of otherwise good free software that was very painful to compile on a platform other than what the author had access to. Getting something written on a SunOS box to compile on, say, AIX, was often a chore.
* Yes, other aspects of this aren't improvements.
I think the most important thing is that you can, if you want.
The word that comes to mind is entitled..
I have a secure computing environment I can trust, a plethora of online nyms isolated into different VMs and IPs, my phone surveils me as little as possible, private email, tv/movies play easily and immediately, local music in good quality that plays out of nice speakers but can controlled by any handy device, conversations with friends that aren't being analyzed by surveillance companies, very little advertising exposure, secure non-cloud backups, security cameras that only I can view, etc.
But all of this took work to set up, and takes occasional ongoing maintenance. I certainly don't fault everyone whose primary focus is not computing for not expending the effort to be as Free. If we want Free solutions to succeed for larger adoption, it behooves us to recognize this barrier and improve the situation.
Some people would look at a free piano as “that would be nice to have because it’s free”.
Clunky free software that needs TLC, but is valuable may still be worth it to the people who care.
So you can make this comparison, but I don’t like the attitude.
As opposed to the the people who buy a baby grand, then let it sit there hoping for a piano player to visit.
It is something that annoys me, for sure, but it's not unique to "free software".
Ok then. Just use your mouse to click though InstallWizard.exe until the talking paperclip tells you to stop.
Is Firefox hard to use? Does the author struggle to use Twitter, built on libre software as a base? Is the Android kernel free as in piano?
Twitter people are stupid
Some are, some aren't. Sometimes stupid people make non-stupid posts. Sometimes non-stupid people make stupid posts.
This one clearly is a stupid post.
Not to mention regular emails from having an account to sync between browsers.
From that standpoint, Challenge Accepted.