5 ms·

I do not understand people with allergy to non OSS. Compare that to any google service which barely releases the clients as open source, and the clients usuall

I do not understand people with allergy to non OSS. Compare that to any google service which barely releases the clients as open source, and the clients usually are so complex that may need quite long time to get any professional developer productive in such complex code bases. Also being tied to a controlled protocol, set of libraries, cloud infrastructure which does actually keep your data is in fact the actual evil that Free Software wanted to save us. At the end it is just corporations fighting for their users and giving free candy (OSS Clients) so they get some traction. I do not expect that to change and I do not thing companies should either keep their servers OSS just for the sake of keeping OSS folks happy. I am more concerned about law compliance and companies respecting my rights, and providing good user support when necessary. Also the next freedom battle should be to accept any system to plug in to any other "cloud" provider service (as much as we do with electricity, phone, etc) and in this regard Microsoft is way ahead of Google and Apple yet still far from an utopian free interexchangeable stack.

fsflover 6y ago
> I am more concerned about law compliance and companies respecting my rights What about rights to study, modify, share the software? Yes, sometimes they are important: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
- nudpiedo 6y ago
  These aren't rights under any legal system but concessions given by a license (or privileges if you prefer this term). Actually the OSS movement and FS won the battle long ago: we are flooded with millions of OSS projects and the largest problem we have it is not anymore closed protocols or lack of knowledge anymore. And I do not think it is reasonable to expect every single project from every single company to be open source just for the sake of it. I think these privileges you mention are very important but if I am honest with you I do not think we have the moral right to demand companies to release all of their IP and code, specially if it is running in their servers and just because we stablish a customer-vendor relationship. It would feel crazy to demand such lack of privacy in other professional relations.
skohan 6y ago
I think the point of an article like this is to make developers aware that the "OSS" tool they are using is not as open as they think it is. As a developer, you might choose to invest in truly OSS workflows which don't involve proprietary MS technologies, and you might not be aware that you're not doing that by choosing VSCode.
- shaan7 6y ago
  Exactly. I always knew about VSCodium but was lazy. This article (thank you!) made me stop procrastinating. I have replaced VSCode with VSCodium now.
d4rti 6y ago
Your comment neatly alludes to the difference between the Open Source philosophies and the Free Software philosophy, and the biggest point of difference is "freedom for whom?" wherein OSS is about freedom for developers and FSF is about freedom for users. Most users don't actually fall in either camp, and largely care about free as in beer (gratis), or possibly free as in doesn't require complex purchasing processes that require signoff or approvals.
- nudpiedo 6y ago
  Having worked in large corporations and now wishing to bootstrap my own projects here my two cents on how I see things currently in the OSS/FS: I see the current state of FS as a way to cooperate between organizations in an almost transparent way and at the same time protect themselves from competitors by making the entry barrier to the market higher to little players as they would need to be remarkably stronger than the current free offering. Sure, everyone wins by having more accessible free knowledge and products everywhere, but now these markets have quite high entry bar for anyone who doesn't have enough capital to be in a market which cannot sustain smaller players. Somehow `massive` OSS defeats the competitiveness of capitalism and that is something which wasn't expected when FS was originally formulated. Also a project which appears to be free but it is extremely lobbied and flooded with milions of many companies and contains incredibly large amounts of financing and development time is not accessible to most of the users anymore as these are overpowered by corporations.
  - neutronicus 6y ago
    Oh, I think there might have been some expectation on Stallman's part of doing injury to capitalism.
    - tremon 6y ago
      No, expressly not, except maybe to the (strictly American) capitalist conception that monopolies are a good thing. When you take the original capitalist idea that says monopolies should be avoided because they distort the free market, Free Software is actually very capitalist: it removes the stranglehold that the original manufacturer has on the software after initial sale, thereby ensuring that market power doesn't concentrate in one entity.
shaan7 6y ago
> I do not understand people with allergy to non OSS. Maybe this will help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24047877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24047877 `I don't think it says "Software not open-source is bad". But more something like "It is marketed as open source but it is not".' > just for the sake of keeping OSS folks happy. Heh. Maybe it is just me but that sounds very condescending.
- nudpiedo 6y ago
  I agree with you if the optic is just that it is marketed as OSS but it is in fact not. I woudl still argue that this is the state of the art in nowadays OSS, like for example Mongo or other OSS projects which use OSS for marketing purposes and some key features are then later propetary or licensed differently
  - shaan7 6y ago
    > state of the art in nowadays OSS I agree with that, in fact it has been for quite a while. There are lots of OSS projects which have companies selling proprietary extensions for. For example, The Qt Company sells a proprietary plugin that automatically generates QML from Photoshop designs. Most people are fine with that because it is a very niche feature and not something that is the value proposition of the OSS project (Qt in this example). OTOH, the OP feels like LiveShare, Remote and Marketplace are VSCode's primary value proposition - in which case it is fair to object to it being marketed as OSS. (although I personally consider only Marketplace to qualify)
- naikrovek 6y ago
  Vscode is open source. You can clone it and build it. The binary you get from Microsoft is that open source stuff plus a small number of closed additions. Vscodium is some wrapper scripts to download vscode source, fix up a dev environment suitable for building vscode, and building it while rebranding it "vscodium".
dependenttypes 6y ago
> I do not understand people with allergy to non OSS. Because people do not want to go to jail/have to pay huge fines for improving a piece of software that they are using.
- nudpiedo 6y ago
  A bit simplistic way to see the whole situation, isn't it?

fsflover 6y ago

> I am more concerned about law compliance and companies respecting my rights What about rights to study, modify, share the software? Yes, sometimes they are important: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

nudpiedo 6y ago
These aren't rights under any legal system but concessions given by a license (or privileges if you prefer this term). Actually the OSS movement and FS won the battle long ago: we are flooded with millions of OSS projects and the largest problem we have it is not anymore closed protocols or lack of knowledge anymore. And I do not think it is reasonable to expect every single project from every single company to be open source just for the sake of it. I think these privileges you mention are very important but if I am honest with you I do not think we have the moral right to demand companies to release all of their IP and code, specially if it is running in their servers and just because we stablish a customer-vendor relationship. It would feel crazy to demand such lack of privacy in other professional relations.

skohan 6y ago

I think the point of an article like this is to make developers aware that the "OSS" tool they are using is not as open as they think it is. As a developer, you might choose to invest in truly OSS workflows which don't involve proprietary MS technologies, and you might not be aware that you're not doing that by choosing VSCode.

shaan7 6y ago
Exactly. I always knew about VSCodium but was lazy. This article (thank you!) made me stop procrastinating. I have replaced VSCode with VSCodium now.

d4rti 6y ago

Your comment neatly alludes to the difference between the Open Source philosophies and the Free Software philosophy, and the biggest point of difference is "freedom for whom?" wherein OSS is about freedom for developers and FSF is about freedom for users. Most users don't actually fall in either camp, and largely care about free as in beer (gratis), or possibly free as in doesn't require complex purchasing processes that require signoff or approvals.

nudpiedo 6y ago
Having worked in large corporations and now wishing to bootstrap my own projects here my two cents on how I see things currently in the OSS/FS: I see the current state of FS as a way to cooperate between organizations in an almost transparent way and at the same time protect themselves from competitors by making the entry barrier to the market higher to little players as they would need to be remarkably stronger than the current free offering. Sure, everyone wins by having more accessible free knowledge and products everywhere, but now these markets have quite high entry bar for anyone who doesn't have enough capital to be in a market which cannot sustain smaller players. Somehow `massive` OSS defeats the competitiveness of capitalism and that is something which wasn't expected when FS was originally formulated. Also a project which appears to be free but it is extremely lobbied and flooded with milions of many companies and contains incredibly large amounts of financing and development time is not accessible to most of the users anymore as these are overpowered by corporations.
- neutronicus 6y ago
  Oh, I think there might have been some expectation on Stallman's part of doing injury to capitalism.
  - tremon 6y ago
    No, expressly not, except maybe to the (strictly American) capitalist conception that monopolies are a good thing. When you take the original capitalist idea that says monopolies should be avoided because they distort the free market, Free Software is actually very capitalist: it removes the stranglehold that the original manufacturer has on the software after initial sale, thereby ensuring that market power doesn't concentrate in one entity.

shaan7 6y ago

> I do not understand people with allergy to non OSS. Maybe this will help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24047877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24047877 `I don't think it says "Software not open-source is bad". But more something like "It is marketed as open source but it is not".' > just for the sake of keeping OSS folks happy. Heh. Maybe it is just me but that sounds very condescending.

nudpiedo 6y ago
I agree with you if the optic is just that it is marketed as OSS but it is in fact not. I woudl still argue that this is the state of the art in nowadays OSS, like for example Mongo or other OSS projects which use OSS for marketing purposes and some key features are then later propetary or licensed differently
- shaan7 6y ago
  > state of the art in nowadays OSS I agree with that, in fact it has been for quite a while. There are lots of OSS projects which have companies selling proprietary extensions for. For example, The Qt Company sells a proprietary plugin that automatically generates QML from Photoshop designs. Most people are fine with that because it is a very niche feature and not something that is the value proposition of the OSS project (Qt in this example). OTOH, the OP feels like LiveShare, Remote and Marketplace are VSCode's primary value proposition - in which case it is fair to object to it being marketed as OSS. (although I personally consider only Marketplace to qualify)
naikrovek 6y ago
Vscode is open source. You can clone it and build it. The binary you get from Microsoft is that open source stuff plus a small number of closed additions. Vscodium is some wrapper scripts to download vscode source, fix up a dev environment suitable for building vscode, and building it while rebranding it "vscodium".

dependenttypes 6y ago

> I do not understand people with allergy to non OSS. Because people do not want to go to jail/have to pay huge fines for improving a piece of software that they are using.

nudpiedo 6y ago
A bit simplistic way to see the whole situation, isn't it?