But if you step back, you realize it could only be thus.
False. A lot of valuable free software is completely developed by volunteers. Take Vim for example.
This is the kind of deductions that do not derive from logic or observation, but from cultural bias.
Yes, open source is different. […] especially as licensed under a permissive license like Apache 2.0, there’s always the option for a new developer or vendor to barge in and upset that balance.
This is hilarous.
Linux is under a strong copyleft and still there are so many corporates working on it that Linus can mock them.
The issue of communities in Open Source has a simpler explaination.
It’s just a valuable marketing tool: a group of individuals with one common interest is not a community.
For me the value of open source does not hinge on the number of people developing the majority of the core software. There are two major advantages that hold whether it is all done by one person, or by a thousand.
Transparency: I can download the source, I can link it to my debugger, I can find out what is going on and why something is not working, and I can design workarounds with a complete knowledge of the underlying cause.
Error correction: I can simply push a patch for the issue I found. A lot of closed source proprietary software does not even have a way of reliably reporting bugs, and even those that do often have bugs that are decades old with a few users posting despondently every year or so asking if any progress was made. I may be only a minor contributor on some repositories with 2 or 3 commits, but for me those commits are crucial, and they would not exist in a closed source model.
Many “large”/“successful” open source projects also directed by not-for-profits (rarely charities like the Free Software Foundation or Software Freedom Conservancy, more often business interest groups like the Node or Linux Foundations), and rare is the corporate-directed project that doesn’t also require a CLA or copyright assignment so that the third-party code is controlled by the corporation or its business interest group.
As TFA says, we have a bazaar, but it’s in the grounds of the cathedral and you need a permit from the deacon to set up your stall.
I grew up in the 1990s; the days of FSF and GNU and Linux. We had pretty different expectations of open source back then. I think the landscape has changed significantly. I wrote a post about this a while back:
Someone should explain the author that most open source software is actually commercial.
The myth, indeed, is that open source is the same as free software. It’s not. It’s just a marketing tool.
False. A lot of valuable free software is completely developed by volunteers. Take Vim for example.
This is the kind of deductions that do not derive from logic or observation, but from cultural bias.
This is hilarous.
Linux is under a strong copyleft and still there are so many corporates working on it that Linus can mock them.
The issue of communities in Open Source has a simpler explaination.
It’s just a valuable marketing tool: a group of individuals with one common interest is not a community.
For me the value of open source does not hinge on the number of people developing the majority of the core software. There are two major advantages that hold whether it is all done by one person, or by a thousand.
Transparency: I can download the source, I can link it to my debugger, I can find out what is going on and why something is not working, and I can design workarounds with a complete knowledge of the underlying cause.
Error correction: I can simply push a patch for the issue I found. A lot of closed source proprietary software does not even have a way of reliably reporting bugs, and even those that do often have bugs that are decades old with a few users posting despondently every year or so asking if any progress was made. I may be only a minor contributor on some repositories with 2 or 3 commits, but for me those commits are crucial, and they would not exist in a closed source model.
Many “large”/“successful” open source projects also directed by not-for-profits (rarely charities like the Free Software Foundation or Software Freedom Conservancy, more often business interest groups like the Node or Linux Foundations), and rare is the corporate-directed project that doesn’t also require a CLA or copyright assignment so that the third-party code is controlled by the corporation or its business interest group.
As TFA says, we have a bazaar, but it’s in the grounds of the cathedral and you need a permit from the deacon to set up your stall.
I grew up in the 1990s; the days of FSF and GNU and Linux. We had pretty different expectations of open source back then. I think the landscape has changed significantly. I wrote a post about this a while back:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source-in-community-and-enterprise-software/