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This is one of those articles that reminds you why we should prefer the term 'free software'. > First, a conclusion from the 2015 Future of Open Source surve
by Jedd 10y ago
This is one of those articles that reminds you why we should prefer the term 'free software'.
> First, a conclusion from the 2015 Future of Open Source survey:
> “Seventy-eight percent of respondents said their companies run
> part or all of its operations on OSS and 66 percent said their
> company creates software for customers built on open source. This
> statistic has nearly doubled since 2010.”
The 2015 survey on this website was responded to by 1500 people. (0.0000002% of the population)
They don't provide numbers for the 2010 response set.
> Second, Nadia Eghbal, who is doing really great research into
> the economics of open source, calculated that “open source was
> worth at least $143M of Instagram’s $1B acquisition.”
Likely wrong, but my feeling is most HN readers aren't thinking Instagram valuation is the best way to judge the value of free software.
> I think there are a few reasons for this Cambrian explosion of
> open source usage:
>
> 1. Open source is free to use, which means a company can spend money
> on people (aka innovation) instead of software licenses.
Everything I've read in the past 15 years suggests that free software's value proposition isn't founded on capex (in fact it's probably misleading to look at these numbers)
> 2. There are now a critical mass of reliable open source
> components, which accelerates your product’s time to market.
Assertions without evidence. Plus a lot of us probably have thought a critical mass was achieved a long time ago.
> 3. Open source produces quantitatively better software.
Assertions without evidence, despite popularity of opinion.
> 4. Near and dear to me personally, open source permits
> companies to collaborate on common problems without
> complicated business agreements.
In my experience some of the most exhaustingly complicated licence discussions have been around the various free (or similar) licences on various lumps of code. At least with non-free licenced code you know nearly precisely where you stand.
> "Open source" now means two things.
>
> Clearly, there’s the official definition, a permissive
> license which grants certain freedoms to the end user.
Clearly? No citation provided. Worse yet, 'open source' was clearly a rebellion by esr against the idea of emphasising the freedoms to the end user.
Eric's related rant at http://www.catb.org/esr/open-source.html http://www.catb.org/esr/open-source.html is often provided ... but read it critically and you realise there's very little of substance there, other than negating the extant 'free software' position, and a call to authority fallacy.
> But when people use "open source" today, they’re probably
> referring to building and collaborating in public. In fact,
> they may not care about the license at all — over 80% of
> projects on Github don’t have an explicit license.
80% of github projects don't include a licence ... qed ... 'open source' equates to building and collaborating in public?
> Why are so many people involved in open source? Well, for
> all of the business reasons covered before. I also think it’s
> joyful to get to work with people of a variety of cultures
> and backgrounds. Additionally, open source has given me a
> sense of permanence to my career, where the job I’ve taken
> from year to year has not.
I'm empathetic, but this sounds like a plea for help.
More importantly it precludes the more common, and nuanced, reasons that people generally provide for why they spend so much time and energy contributing to the free software movement.
The rest of the post feels a bit facebooky, with lots of 3-8 word pithy aphorisms encoded in a 1024x576 pixel image.
- zerohp 10y ago> over 80% of projects on Github don’t have an explicit license. I wish more people understood that this is a bad thing. These projects are ones that every business should fear more than the GPL3. Copyright is the default in the US, not public domain. Without a license you have no right to redistribute it, or to distribute works derived from it.
- Jedd 10y agoI concur, and the biggest challenge I see, in this case, is the regional one you cite. Happily it's relatively easy to resolve for 99% (a number I just made up) of these 80% of github projects that lack licences -- by either opening an issue, or emailing the author, and seeking clarification. In defence of these unnamed persons, I suspect that if you're about to work with a project that hasn't fielded this type of query previously (and resolved it within their repo) then you're in some troublingly unchartered waters on at least two fronts.
- justinlardinois 10y ago80% of the projects on GitHub don't have an explicit license, but how many of those are actually useful, mature pieces of software that a business would want to use in production? I would guess that a large portion of these projects are just personal projects that have little value to anyone other than their author.
- Thiez 10y ago> I wish more people understood that this is a bad thing. Why is it a bad thing? If you represent a business you are free to either refrain from using the project, or send a message to the author(s) and request they add a license. Perhaps the author has no intent to allow others to use their code, and they are merely using github as a convenient place to host their code. Like you said, nobody is allowed to use their code without a license, so why bother to use a private repository? It might be a bad thing if the author actually put their code online with the intent of having random businesses use it, but it's a bit presumptuous to call it a bad thing in general.
- dragonwriter 10y ago