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I'm not real keen on the Church of FOSS. Don't get me wrong, I love a great many FOSS projects; but my entire life does not need to be constructed of such. Pos

I'm not real keen on the Church of FOSS. Don't get me wrong, I love a great many FOSS projects; but my entire life does not need to be constructed of such. Posts like this smack of dogma and fanaticism to me, and engender mistrust of whatever projects the person in question is a part of. After all, if they're that dogmatic about one thing, then what's to say they aren't dogmatic about other things?

habitue 11y ago
The reason the dogma of Free Software exists is because often in day to day decisions it's easy not to think about the long-term effects. Right now, you have a neat chat tool. Maybe in 10 years, you have a problem where Slack has a monopoly on all project chats, and abuses that power. Today, you can look and see "Hey, Slack is a cool company. They get it. This isn't Microsoft of the 90's. They aren't going to abuse this power, they just want to make an amazing chat tool that improves all of our lives." (This is probably true) So it seems like it's ok to use Slack. The idea is that maybe this power corrupts eventually. Or maybe Slack as an entity may not always be run by people who get it. Maybe it's broken up into parts, or becomes a hollow shell as a holding company (cough Yahoo). Without an open platform and free source code, users are unable to move away. The dogma is a rule that brings the potential long-term consequences to you when you're deciding what to do now. It gives you a twinge "Hmm, that feels dirty because it's proprietary. I'll keep looking". That way you don't have to imagine how Slack gets from Cool Company to Abusive Monopoly, you can just make an easy choice based on how you feel.
- bovermyer 11y ago
  I generally make my choices based on a balance of time/monetary cost, feature set, user experience, service integrity (e.g., SLAs for proprietary software, or difficulty of maintenance for self-hosted/OSS), and ease of migration in the event of abandonment. The choice I ultimately make is not always, or even often, open source. There is no blanket "always choose this" guiding rule for me.
cyphar 11y ago
You may not care about your freedom. But that doesn't mean that people who care about their freedom and others' freedom are dogmatic.

habitue 11y ago

The reason the dogma of Free Software exists is because often in day to day decisions it's easy not to think about the long-term effects. Right now, you have a neat chat tool. Maybe in 10 years, you have a problem where Slack has a monopoly on all project chats, and abuses that power. Today, you can look and see "Hey, Slack is a cool company. They get it. This isn't Microsoft of the 90's. They aren't going to abuse this power, they just want to make an amazing chat tool that improves all of our lives." (This is probably true) So it seems like it's ok to use Slack. The idea is that maybe this power corrupts eventually. Or maybe Slack as an entity may not always be run by people who get it. Maybe it's broken up into parts, or becomes a hollow shell as a holding company (cough Yahoo). Without an open platform and free source code, users are unable to move away. The dogma is a rule that brings the potential long-term consequences to you when you're deciding what to do now. It gives you a twinge "Hmm, that feels dirty because it's proprietary. I'll keep looking". That way you don't have to imagine how Slack gets from Cool Company to Abusive Monopoly, you can just make an easy choice based on how you feel.

bovermyer 11y ago
I generally make my choices based on a balance of time/monetary cost, feature set, user experience, service integrity (e.g., SLAs for proprietary software, or difficulty of maintenance for self-hosted/OSS), and ease of migration in the event of abandonment. The choice I ultimately make is not always, or even often, open source. There is no blanket "always choose this" guiding rule for me.

cyphar 11y ago

You may not care about your freedom. But that doesn't mean that people who care about their freedom and others' freedom are dogmatic.