3 ms·
I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience
by codr7 7y ago
I don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the preferred solution are few and far between.
More important in my mind is that open source software is strictly higher quality from a technical perspective. Because it's not prostitution most of the time, it's passion and wider perspectives such as sharing knowledge. And a higher quality foundation means better software, because whatever commercial cruft someone adds on top it will still work better.
I recently reinstalled a laptop that was running Windows 10 with Kubuntu for a non-technical friend, which is not an excellent example but still applies since Canonical is semi-commercial. And it's a total win, because Windows is simply crap from the bottom up.
Android is another example, as is macOS.
- kiba 7y agoI don't really buy into the political debate. The arguments for open source as applied to non-technical users don't really work as advertised from my experience. Sure, you could potentially find someone to maintain it if the version you depend on goes bottom up. But the contexts where that's the preferred solution are few and far between. People don't certainly exercised their right to modify the source code as often as their usage. It's certainly an important right, but less often than the right to use the software as the user see fit. Arguably freedom zero is much more important in a world in which every business and companies are trying to nickel and dime you as an eternal income stream.
- ken 7y agoI'm not sure what these are examples of. Is Android "open-source"? Is macOS? I tried to compile Android from source this year, and spent weeks reading about it, finding distributions and tools to help, downloading packages, verifying signatures, and eventually running an enormous build command. I was ultimately unsuccessful. No matter what I fixed, there was something else that didn't work. Everything had the classic open-source excuses: it's being fixed soon, that's the wrong branch, you need to upgrade your tools, the docs are out of date, ... Android today is not anything like Andy Rubin's "the definition of open" from 2010. As far as I can tell, it's basically SAAS for smartphones. A corporation gets the benefits of open-source, but users don't.
- codr7 7y agoThey are examples of successful software consisting of proprietary code and commercial polish on top of an open source foundation. Which was my point, that even if it's not all open, it still results in higher quality software overall. So we still win, even if it's not the total domination RMS keeps insisting on.