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"It doesn't have to come together with an open development process, necessarily." I think the amount people agree with this varies wildly. There are plenty of

"It doesn't have to come together with an open development process, necessarily." I think the amount people agree with this varies wildly. There are plenty of people who consider it an attractive nuisance if it doesn't. You don't have to look very hard in hacker news threads to find google/MS/etc getting blamed for occupying a space by doing this. I really don't think you want to push the ethical angle - vscode was definitely not open sourced for ethical reasons as part of some grand altruistic gesture and to push forward a great ethos. I was told that directly by the people who started it and made those decisions. That isn't a statement that it was a secret evil scheme (it certainly wasn't), but those were just ancillary benefits, not the main goal. I will leave alone the fact that your argument does not seem to have convinced MS in a number of places where there is no perceivable user benefit (see, e.g., the C++ extension) and it runs directly contrary to your claims, since you want to speak in a non-official capacity :) Bottom line: I think this is a fairly simplistic view of the tradeoffs. I'm certainly not exactly elucidating it in huge detail, but that's because i'm surprised people want to believe these are fairly simple issues amenable to a few paragraphs of analysis.

int_19h 8y ago
To clarify, my point isn't "open source good, closed source bad", nor that things get open sourced primarily for ethical reasons. With copyleft, the basic principle wrt code reuse and sharing is "take what you need, contribute back the value added", and it is encoded in the license itself. With non-copyleft licenses like MIT, the only thing that's encoded is "take what you need" - but I would argue that there's also an implied "... contribute back what you can", that is broadly respected in practice, and is an important part of what makes the model sustainable. I remember what the industry was like when the biggest bar to shipping open source in for-profit environments was the default attitude of "why even bother?", and in practice that meant a lot less of it all around, even where not having the code made life much more difficult for others. This attitude took a lot of collective time and effort across the entire industry to change, in many cases by individual employees inside those FOSS-hostile environments actively working towards that goal for altruistic reasons. In the end, I think we're all better off for it - individual devs and companies alike - and should strive to maintain those gains, and the culture that enables them. Arguing for closed source by default is contrary to that, in my opinion. Closed source itself is not.
- DannyBee 8y ago
  "Arguing for closed source by default is contrary to that, in my opinion." I didn't, and never have ;) It's mostly the opposite, which is that i usually am the person telling people to open source things by default. Here, there turn out to be IMHO good reasons not to open source it at the start (it will be eventually). The counter argument of "Google makes billions and they can certainly afford to do X" always seems to be a bit silly to me, since companies are made of people and not money, not to mention that most things companies open source will not be driving revenue in any meaningful way (again, some does, but it's the minority of open source for most companies). Open source is more of a development methodology than a sane economic model. I've also changed over the years. After watching open source try to create a lot of products, these days i would definitely rather see good products than open source ones. Those things are 100% not mutually exclusive by any means, and in an ideal state you don't have to prioritize or choose between them. However it does mean that when i have to prioritize my choices, i'd rather have people concentrate on making good stuff than open source stuff. To start. In the end, i'd like it all to be open source :) Others are different for sure.

int_19h 8y ago

To clarify, my point isn't "open source good, closed source bad", nor that things get open sourced primarily for ethical reasons. With copyleft, the basic principle wrt code reuse and sharing is "take what you need, contribute back the value added", and it is encoded in the license itself. With non-copyleft licenses like MIT, the only thing that's encoded is "take what you need" - but I would argue that there's also an implied "... contribute back what you can", that is broadly respected in practice, and is an important part of what makes the model sustainable. I remember what the industry was like when the biggest bar to shipping open source in for-profit environments was the default attitude of "why even bother?", and in practice that meant a lot less of it all around, even where not having the code made life much more difficult for others. This attitude took a lot of collective time and effort across the entire industry to change, in many cases by individual employees inside those FOSS-hostile environments actively working towards that goal for altruistic reasons. In the end, I think we're all better off for it - individual devs and companies alike - and should strive to maintain those gains, and the culture that enables them. Arguing for closed source by default is contrary to that, in my opinion. Closed source itself is not.

DannyBee 8y ago
"Arguing for closed source by default is contrary to that, in my opinion." I didn't, and never have ;) It's mostly the opposite, which is that i usually am the person telling people to open source things by default. Here, there turn out to be IMHO good reasons not to open source it at the start (it will be eventually). The counter argument of "Google makes billions and they can certainly afford to do X" always seems to be a bit silly to me, since companies are made of people and not money, not to mention that most things companies open source will not be driving revenue in any meaningful way (again, some does, but it's the minority of open source for most companies). Open source is more of a development methodology than a sane economic model. I've also changed over the years. After watching open source try to create a lot of products, these days i would definitely rather see good products than open source ones. Those things are 100% not mutually exclusive by any means, and in an ideal state you don't have to prioritize or choose between them. However it does mean that when i have to prioritize my choices, i'd rather have people concentrate on making good stuff than open source stuff. To start. In the end, i'd like it all to be open source :) Others are different for sure.