Another opinion about how it’s OK for mega-corps to reap the benefits of opensource without contributing back and how we should just suck it up because of principles.
I understand he’s a big contributor to ansible and other IaC, and most (all?) of his stuff is opensource. It’s cool that he has the money to sustain himself and that he can stick to his principles with the money he has, but IMO either he lacks empathy or understanding for those in a place trying to make a living from opensource or in his opinion companies just can’t be trusted with opensource if they have a CLA.
He’s entitled to his opinions, but I don’t share them.
I don’t really understand the connection between the blog post and your comment. Could you expand on the connection between his stance against CLAs and your paraphrase about mega-corps and how we should “suck it up because of principles”?
It’s the freeloading part of his post.
From a company’s perspective, if they want CLAs or if they want to use an anti-open-source license, they do not care about your freedoms. They’re protecting revenue streams. They’ll often talk about freeloaders, whether it’s Amazon building a competing hosted solution, or some startup that found a way to monetize support.
But in the end, even if you have GPL code and you charge people to get it, it’s not truly free as in freedom, if the company restricts how you can use, modify, and share the code.
[…]
Freeloaders are part of open source—whether they’re running homelab or a competing business.
I agree, I don’t like CLAs, but the handwaving of the distinction between freeloaders is what gets me. There’s quite a big difference between somebody running your opensource service in private and not making any money from it vs a business actively competing against you with your own code, creating support tickets, and not contributing back code (or minimally at best).
The argument is basically one of principle. “It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s wrong”.
“It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s wrong”.
I think it’s more “It’s not libre / free as in freedom so it’s not open source, don’t pretend it is”.
The “wrong” part would be derived from claiming its something that it isn’t to gain some advantage. I’m this case community contributions.
There’s not a handwaving distinction between open source and not, there are pretty clear guidelines.
I guess I read his point more as being that it’s effectively impossible for a license or CLA to distinguish “good” freeloaders from “bad” freeloaders, so it was inevitable that businesses would start doing license “rug-pulls” like the examples he gives.
What many open source softwares do is write 5 lines of code, use autocode generators to convert 5 lines to 1000 lines and then automate code to have 200 commits in git repo with different datetimes. Basically, it is shown to the outside world that software is very complex.
We should all shift to Suckless
I request lemmy dev to add a feature to sort by downvotes. I think that would be most useful to everyone.
This is not even the topic of discussion. (Disclaimer: The rest of the discussion here is tangential to the original post.)
While I have no qualms with you using Suckless. As a person who has used suckless tools (dwm, st, tabbed, etc) for 2 years straight in the past. There are simply more performative and easy to work with tools and programs. I spent a few weeks worth of time in total over the 2 years trying to configure dwm alone to match with my workflow, applying and maintaining over 40 patches from the website along with some of my own written patches. When I switched to awesomewm, I easily reproduced my design in a single day and extended it further w/o much effort. Sure, the codebase is much bigger, but it is a fair trade for me if it reduces the time I need for configuration as a user while giving me the same performance.
I had, more or less, the same experience if I talk about st which I later replaced with Alacritty. The socket mode also helps me save RAM space when using Alacritty as I tend to have multiple terminal emulator instances open.
The stock distributions of suckless tools are always unusable unless you patch them to hell at which point they are definitely going to stop being suckless unless you really want to brainstorm and spend more time on it. (Read the Suckless Principles.) You can argue that criticizing Suckless Tools is in essence criticizing yourself because they are intended as canvases to paint on by the user. For me, it’s just a waste of time and I would rather go for a program that is less hassle to configure & maintain.
Honorable Mention: Suckless Devs endorse Neo-Nazis in their team.
The elitist group that thinks C99 is the best programming language?
This is not the craziest conspiracy theory I’ve read today, but it’s definitely top 3.
It’s always been possible for these companies to pull the proverbial license rug from under the community’s feet. It was just a matter of time before they did it.
Point is, you can’t trust one powerful entity, especially not when money is involved.
It’s not really a rug-pull in the usual sense though - of “all of a sudden you cannot use this product anymore”
You can still use it up to the commit where they changed the license. And then people just make a fork from there and the community moves away from the initial project to the fork
