4 ms·

I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a cli

by tma-1 11y ago

I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a click of a button. I am a data scientist, and everyday I am amazed how powerful the anaconda distribution (and its over 150 included packages) is. Is there any industry on Earth that has anything like OSS?

bithush 11y ago
I have wondered this before as well. I can't think of any industry that is as open as FOSS. There is FOSS available for literally everything you could ever want or need[0]. FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible. I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc. [0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)
- mkane848 11y ago
  My Counter-Strike addiction would like a word with you. Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.
  - andrey_utkin 11y ago
    CS works just fine from Steam. On any Linux.
    - bubtubgub 11y ago
      Steam doesn't work on 'any Linux' without jumping through many many hoops for most distros.
      - d0lph 11y ago
        While this used to be the case, with Valve's steam machines they seem to have a native client now[0]. [0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux
        bubtubgub 11y ago
        This is still the case, they had a native client for a while, but it is 32-bit and only well supported on Ubuntu and very similar distros.
      - the_ancient 11y ago
        Which have you had problems with. I work Ubuntu Based, Fedora, and Arch have had no issues on these.
        bubtubgub 11y ago
        Gentoo to name one.
        andrey_utkin 11y ago
        I had zero issues installing Steam and CS on my Gentoo workstations (two of them). This was 2 years ago.
  - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
    I've been playing CS on Linux for about 15 years.
chopin 11y ago
Kind of: Take DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) for example which sets standards used in hardware (like normed screws or normed metal alloys). Albeit not free (as in free beer) it guarantees that I can buy eg. screws with guaranteed minimal properties from different vendors. I would see this at least somehow equivalent to open source software, which can be copied at minimal marginal cost and thus is easy to provide for free (as in free beer).
ashitlerferad 11y ago
Bioinformatics is close.
- liviu- 11y ago
  Could you please elaborate for those unfamiliar with their community?
  - dalke 11y ago
    It's tricky to pinpoint exactly when modern "bioinformatics" started. Some notable times are 1979 when the Los Alamos Sequence Database started, 1982 when that became GenBank, and certainly by 1990 when the Human Genome Project started. GenBank is "an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank ). Most journals now require that sequences be entered into GenBank before publication. I'll add a few historical observations. The early work at Los Alamos was on Sun machines running Sybase (1987, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase ). These are serious Unix fans, who quickly took to perl when it came out. I think some of the support for SybPerl came from bioinformatics; the SybPerl, OraPerl, and other *Perl systems helped create the extension system for perl5. (I am not able to verify that, though the author of SybPerl, Michael Peppler, consulted in the mid-1990s for "Research Genetics" http://www.peppler.org/resume.html http://www.peppler.org/resume.html .) Unix people in the early 1990s were serious perl fans. The most popular perl4 library for CGI programming was cgi-lib.pl, by Steven Brenner, a computational biologist/bioinformatics researcher. It was replaced in perl5 by CGI.pm, by Lincoln Stein, another bioinformatics researcher. This gives a hint that bioinformatics has not only a close connection to the technologies needed for the first dot-com era, but also that the field itself tends towards open resources. ("Tends towards" != "always". See point #3 of https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-bioinformatics-software/ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-bi... .)
- astazangasta 11y ago
  A subset of OSS - the R/Bioconductor community is full of free software fanatics, and anyway all academic software is necessarily, without thought, free software.

by tma-1 11y ago

bithush 11y ago

I have wondered this before as well. I can't think of any industry that is as open as FOSS. There is FOSS available for literally everything you could ever want or need[0]. FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible. I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc. [0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)

mkane848 11y ago
My Counter-Strike addiction would like a word with you. Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.
- andrey_utkin 11y ago
  CS works just fine from Steam. On any Linux.
  - bubtubgub 11y ago
    Steam doesn't work on 'any Linux' without jumping through many many hoops for most distros.
    - d0lph 11y ago
      While this used to be the case, with Valve's steam machines they seem to have a native client now[0]. [0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux
      - bubtubgub 11y ago
        This is still the case, they had a native client for a while, but it is 32-bit and only well supported on Ubuntu and very similar distros.
    - the_ancient 11y ago
      Which have you had problems with. I work Ubuntu Based, Fedora, and Arch have had no issues on these.
      - bubtubgub 11y ago
        Gentoo to name one.
        andrey_utkin 11y ago
        I had zero issues installing Steam and CS on my Gentoo workstations (two of them). This was 2 years ago.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
  I've been playing CS on Linux for about 15 years.

chopin 11y ago

Kind of: Take DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) for example which sets standards used in hardware (like normed screws or normed metal alloys). Albeit not free (as in free beer) it guarantees that I can buy eg. screws with guaranteed minimal properties from different vendors. I would see this at least somehow equivalent to open source software, which can be copied at minimal marginal cost and thus is easy to provide for free (as in free beer).

ashitlerferad 11y ago

Bioinformatics is close.

liviu- 11y ago
Could you please elaborate for those unfamiliar with their community?
- dalke 11y ago
  It's tricky to pinpoint exactly when modern "bioinformatics" started. Some notable times are 1979 when the Los Alamos Sequence Database started, 1982 when that became GenBank, and certainly by 1990 when the Human Genome Project started. GenBank is "an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank ). Most journals now require that sequences be entered into GenBank before publication. I'll add a few historical observations. The early work at Los Alamos was on Sun machines running Sybase (1987, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase ). These are serious Unix fans, who quickly took to perl when it came out. I think some of the support for SybPerl came from bioinformatics; the SybPerl, OraPerl, and other *Perl systems helped create the extension system for perl5. (I am not able to verify that, though the author of SybPerl, Michael Peppler, consulted in the mid-1990s for "Research Genetics" http://www.peppler.org/resume.html http://www.peppler.org/resume.html .) Unix people in the early 1990s were serious perl fans. The most popular perl4 library for CGI programming was cgi-lib.pl, by Steven Brenner, a computational biologist/bioinformatics researcher. It was replaced in perl5 by CGI.pm, by Lincoln Stein, another bioinformatics researcher. This gives a hint that bioinformatics has not only a close connection to the technologies needed for the first dot-com era, but also that the field itself tends towards open resources. ("Tends towards" != "always". See point #3 of https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-bioinformatics-software/ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-bi... .)
astazangasta 11y ago
A subset of OSS - the R/Bioconductor community is full of free software fanatics, and anyway all academic software is necessarily, without thought, free software.