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Comment by anbardoi | Hacker News Reader

I understand the sentiment for this article, but I disagree with the part about using open source mainly to avoid paying for software.

I use open source because I like having the ability to learn how it works. If I can't know how a program works, I can't have control over it. It is not my tool, I am its user.

I also just like learning how technology works in general, and non-free software is generally difficult to share the source code looking from the perspective of a company. Also in my experience, open source software is generally a more fun experience when using it. It gives me a sense of freedom in an increasingly restrictive world.

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That's great for you, but its the reason that vast swathes of corporate folks use OSS, and they are terrible citizens of it as well.

You know, I often wonder if I'll ever receive an encouraging or somewhat kind response on this forum. That's probably a lot to ask from the internet in general. But could you elaborate on what reason you mean? You mean learning how the software works, or just because it's free?

You said the reason you're using open source isn't because you don't want to pay for software.

He's saying the reason corporations use open source IS that they don't want to pay for software, as OP said.

This is what I am saying, no hate on people doing the right thing but most of the corporations love that they can take and give nothing back, its their highest ideal.

Ahhh okay makes sense. Yeah its truly grotesque. But money is a different kind of game. They see OSS as low hanging fruit. Idk if licenses like GPL would keep them at bay, but I think it might be an avenue more OSS developers should go down

If this were indeed the average attitude, there wouldn't be this big of an outcry with regards to the move from fully open-source to source-available licenses (Mongo/ELK/Hashicorp/etc.)

wrong: source-available means you can look but you can't incorporate/change/copy-paste/get-inspired-by. "look at this wheel, learn but don't make your own". It's a travesty.

Is that really how source-available works? I mean whos stopping me from screenshotting and using tesseract or some other OCR tool to get the actual no-bullshit source code

Don't you ever get inspired by reading good books? You can learn new tricks and apply them elsewhere, and it's much easier than actually contributing to a big open-source project.

i use (and write) open source because i enjoy the feeling of participating in a combined gift economy and shared commons people are working to improve. i do agree that the OP experienced the worst aspects of the culture, though, and don't blame them for turning their backs on it.

i also don't blame anyone for taking their own, mostly individually maintained and developed, project from open to closed for whatever reason. if the commons finds the project valuable enough someone else can always come along to fill the gap later, though it is sad to think about all the work that went into the original project.

That would be what's usually called "source available + documented" rather than open source

For me, they're both included. I have no qualms with paying for good software if I have the ability to learn how it works and customize it to my liking. What I absolutely loathe, is closed-source that is useful to me, but with obviously lazy design elements that I dont get to customize.

That is, if "source-available" means that I can adjust the code to what I want it to be. If not, then it is not what I want.

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