8 ms·

A lot of free software is free as in piano

152 points by PretzelFisch 6y ago

quercusa 6y ago
Sturgeon's Law suggests we should be surprised if this were not the case.
- chrispeel 6y ago
  "Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage that states that "ninety percent of everything is crap." The adage was coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic. The adage was inspired by Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality, and science fiction was thus no different in that regard from other art." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
tyingq 6y ago
One improvement* over the "old days" is that there are fewer popular platforms now. There used to be a lot of otherwise good free software that was very painful to compile on a platform other than what the author had access to. Getting something written on a SunOS box to compile on, say, AIX, was often a chore. * Yes, other aspects of this aren't improvements.
jfhnchjnxse 6y ago
The author of this tweet is really making fun of indie gratis software, which is pretty rude, since that software is hard to use because the authors don't have many resources and are volunteers. Is Firefox hard to use? Does the author struggle to use Twitter, built on libre software as a base? Is the Android kernel free as in piano? Twitter people are stupid
- praptak 6y ago
  "Free as the marginal cost of producing a copy of software once enough people and companies invested their resources into making it usable". To be fair the tweet didn't say all free software is like this.
- 542458 6y ago
  I don’t think the tweet author is trying to make a point about crown-jewel FOSS like Firefox, Blender, etc.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Somewhat humorously, Firefox is free like swag. You get it for free, but you get bugged constantly about all the other great things Mozilla is doing.
  - gnabgib 6y ago
    I don't think this is fair. Other than after some updates FF opens a new tab talking about new features, I haven't seen much. Do we have different settings?
    - falcolas 6y ago
      Pocket, the VPN, the now-defunct send, etc. Not to mention regular emails from having an account to sync between browsers.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    I'd rather be pushed uniform information about what a company is up to, than have specific information about me pulled into a surveillance database. Neither one is good, but at least the generic push leaves me alone the rest of the time.
- iso1210 6y ago
  > Twitter people are stupid Some are, some aren't. Sometimes stupid people make non-stupid posts. Sometimes non-stupid people make stupid posts. This one clearly is a stupid post.
- xboxnolifes 6y ago
  Twitter people aren't stupid. The stupid people are those who care a little too much about what 1 person on twitter has to say about some topic.
praptak 6y ago
"Free as in herpes" - basically everything preinstalled by hardware vendors.
Zambyte 6y ago
This is a great analogy. Unfortunately the person has a cynical view on it. Another view on the same analogy: the work of one person in a public space can benefit many of those around them. Be it a piano, or Free Software.
CarVac 6y ago
Speaking as someone who tries not to make my open-source software "free as in piano" and also got a free piano, my free piano is insanely fun. I've learned to tune it, I lubed the keypins to reduce friction, I stuck a shim in the soundboard where it was buzzing… And it emits music when I play it.
altitudinous 6y ago
Well, I think this is true. Many devs are slaving over high quality software that is technically fine and a real achievement but nobody truly loves the niche except for them. I think the real talent is in writing software that other folk are inspired by and actually want. Too much focus on the technical side of things, not enough focus on the human side of things. But then, it is important to be true to yourself, if you love that software, then you love it. Depends on your reason for working on it, whether your profit is your own enjoyment or the enjoyment by others.
benjohnson 6y ago
>>is free as in piano Ok then. Just use your mouse to click though InstallWizard.exe until the talking paperclip tells you to stop.
ttt0 6y ago
I don't get it. I use free software and I'm more than happy with it. Am I supposed to not be happy with it or what?
draw_down 6y ago
Good thing the software usually has a forum attached where volunteers try to help others without recompense. You can go on there and yell at them about how they’re not working hard enough for you (in their free time from their job that actually pays their bills). How dare they not put the effort in to make the software understandable and perfectly easily usable to you, personally, because you are so super duper special??
scoutt 6y ago
> Everyone knows you won't. I think the most important thing is that you can, if you want.
leoedin 6y ago
Not every open source project is polished. Fair enough - that's evident. However, that doesn't mean it's not useful. Sometimes a snippet from an abandoned project on GitHub is exactly what you need.
abakker 6y ago
I assume this is just meant as an observation, not a criticism. I've certainly experienced this with some free software for various purposes, where you wade through 3000 forum posts to get it to run and someone chimes in, "oh, it only works if you install in in X directory...". Sure it sucked to read 3000 forum posts and google things for 2 hours, but, once it worked, it worked. I don't know why this would be a "problem" though. This year I got a free snowblower. it had all the parts, but it didn't work. After much reading, disassembly, and other mess, I got it to work and now I have a snowblower. To me, commercial software is often about ergonomics and immediacy - if I can pay to have it now, with no work, great. But, free software can be about capturing marginal value below the market clearing price. If I need to put in some time and effort but I don't need to spend any currency, then great! I've succeeded at getting a job done and exchanged time for cost. Seems reasonable, and it's nice to have the option. (obligatory hardware example: just look at youtube for the humongous number of things made with washing machine motors. Sure, they're inconvenient, but they are free and available. For a lot of people this trade is worth it.)
- D13Fd 6y ago
  For individuals, a lot of it comes down to how you value your time. The snowblower was not free, you just paid in time rather than money.
  - foxhop 6y ago
    There are other costs with not fixing it, but I get your point regarding time. That said the experience earned and the courage to take on bigger efforts is found through trying and spending time keeping other people's trash out of a landfill. This is true with software too otherwise we wouldn't have free and open source software. Right to repair for the win! https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed
  - iso1210 6y ago
    > For individuals, a lot of it comes down to how you value your time. That's why I use open source, I don't have the time to deal with crappy closed source programs
enriquto 6y ago
Then proprietary software must surely be a pianola (a player piano that plays automatically): it plays alone, but it is always the same song and you cannot change a note.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I really don’t get where this idea that proprietary software is inflexible comes from. We can’t simultaneously all be working at feature factories and making inflexible software. Sure, we’ve all had to experience the annoyance of working out the limitations of proprietary software we can’t patch but FAR FAR more common is working around the limitations of FOSS software that is infeasible to patch. You’re probably not going to patch some bug you found in your jdbc driver, tomcat, or nginx because it’s expensive to maintain. I’ve been really really happy with our paid software at & $company because I have a vendor I can pester to fix my bug or implement my feature.
  - mindslight 6y ago
    > We can’t simultaneously all be working at feature factories and making inflexible software Actually, yes we can. The key insight behind liberal economics is that central planners are incapable of understanding the demands at the edges. The same goes for software - the feature factories can only generate features imagined by centralized focus groups (or even worse, the business desires of the company itself), whereas desires of actual users are much more vibrant than that.
jihadjihad 6y ago
"The software is free if your time has no value"
- iso1210 6y ago
  The software is expensive and restricts your rights if your time have no value
082349872349872 6y ago
Better libre software that's free as in piano than gratis software that's free as in mattress?
benjohnson 6y ago
I have to admit that this quip pisses me off because open source developers have been so very generous to me. That their work is done in public and in front of the world should not give us extra ammunition to put their efforts down. There are countless closed source packages that are arcane and hard to deal with - we just don't see them so there not able to be criticized.
- throwaway823882 6y ago
  I write open source software. If it was difficult for people to use, I would not get pissed off that people pointed this out. Like, if I were a woodworker, and made free chairs... you would be right in complaining if it was full of splinters, if it required you to buy hardware and drills, if it was uneven and clunky. It's a shit chair. There's no dishonor in acknowledging what it is. I would not expect a pat on the back just because I made it free.
  - qchris 6y ago
    I'm some ways, I get your analogy, but I think you're making an assumption that it doesn't support. Open source software is rarely "here's a free chair, that also doesn't have splinters." It's far more often "Here are some free blanks for a chair I made. It's not totally finished, so you'll probably need to do some work on it yourself. But the joints are easy to dis/re-assemble, so feel free to examine it all and modify or replace them to meet your needs. Also, don't sue me." In that context, it's much more understandable, not because anyone's wrong per se, but because fundamentally the expectations are mismatched.
    - visiblink 6y ago
      I would take issue with "far more often." I guess that's true if you're searching out software on Github or the equivalent. If you're installing packages from your distribution's repository, there are tens of thousands of finished free software products (inasmuch as any software, open or proprietary, is ever finished).
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
This made me laugh, but if you think about it most non-free software is like an expensive player piano. Just as difficult to move, but it only plays music approved by the manufacturer, and requires special tools to tune that they only sell to approved partners.
- chociej 6y ago
  That's a great point. I get a lot of additional value from FOSS because it's not dead set on roping me into some proprietary lock-in scenario. It far outweighs any inconvenience I experience.
- hsitz 6y ago
  Yes. Also, for a person with the requisite piano tuning/repair skills, a free piano can be a great thing. And this person can identify which free pianos are great things and which are likely to be unsalvageable. For someone who has no clue about pianos, or on how to work on pianos, not so much. A lot of open source software is intended to be used by developers, or, in other words, by someone who knows what they're doing. Not all, of course. There's plenty of open source stuff out there targeted at end users, or at admin-types, non-developers. Much of it is excellent. (In fact, much of it "runs the internet".) Much is not, or is really in a semi-developed state where it needs to be improved by actual developers. None of this is anything new. You need to be aware of how "ready for use" the open source project you choose is. By the very nature of how open source works, projects are available "in the wild" when they aren't really ready for general use.
rjsw 6y ago
But I am a piano tuner/mover.
eitland 6y ago
Maybe yes, and it is also free like in free puppy, but guess what: The expensive puppets needs house training as well and they bite too and more worrying their previous owner refuses to agree that he has sold it - and he bites. My qualifications: I've installed and supported Oracle databases for customers for years and I frequently wished they were Postgres. Also more expensive pianos generally won't play automatically either and if they did you'd probably pay for them to stop sooner or later. Software setup and installation is in many ways an art. Sometimes done on site with the customers watching, other times meticulously crafted as install and getting started wizards or whatever.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  I don't think most developers have ever administered proprietary software so they don't really "get it". A developer mindset sees having source access as about developing the software. For an administrator, though, having source access is the difference between fumbling in the dark and looking like a fool (or paying vendor tech support to act like a fool for you) versus being able to look at the code and understand what's happening when documentation doesn't agree with reality, etc. Many of us are forced to integrate proprietary software. We have to live with the compiled artifacts we're given (for "support" reasons, because license agreements say we can't reverse-engineer/decompile, because we want our Customers to have systems that aren't one-offs that can be supported by the "next guy", etc). When I'm stuck fighting with proprietary software and unable to see the inner workings I find myself pining for free/open-source software.
bombcar 6y ago
It seems this tweet is about someone trying to hand off maintenance of a free software project.
jcpst 6y ago
Say I do accept this analogy. For some people, getting a free piano would be life-changing. Composers, Song Writers, aspiring musicians... Some people would look at a free piano as “that would be nice to have because it’s free”. Clunky free software that needs TLC, but is valuable may still be worth it to the people who care. So you can make this comparison, but I don’t like the attitude.
- sheriff 6y ago
  And yet the reality is that there is no shortage of free pianos listed on my local Craigslist that no one has picked up yet.
approxim8ion 6y ago
How ungrateful does one have to be when they want a piano, are given one for free but don't want to take the bare minimum effort of moving it into their house?
- ponow 6y ago
  Yeah, just like looking the gift horse in the mouth. Entitlement is so ugly.
clarge1120 6y ago
After reading the rest of the quote, I agree. It's an apt quote and a challenge to FOSS founders to bring make their software better. From that standpoint, Challenge Accepted.
bullen 6y ago
For 10 years I have been working on this open-source HTTP app. server. During this time only 4 external parties have used it afaik: 1) Some CS class at an Indian University. 2) An Indian startup to share physical things freely. 3) A Japanese university doctorate study about analyzing concurrency! 4) A Minecraft map server. To me this is mindblowing, here you have the simplest and most performant version of the most used protocol on Earth and nobody cares! Nobody wants to learn!
- NateEag 6y ago
  Simplest and most performant would need to be an order of magnitude improvement on nginx for anyone to care.
  - bullen 6y ago
    Nginx was single-threaded until recently... now it uses separate processes for multi-threading. So yes my app. server is 10x better than than Nginx for joint parallel tasks like a MMO server f.ex. Try hot-deploying a project to Nginx without the live users having to login again. You still don't care! :D
    - NateEag 6y ago
      I'm not saying you aren't doing good work, or that it's not worth doing. I'm just saying that nginx is good enough for most people, and they'd need to see massive improvements to their workflows to change. I'm a web dev, and I've maintained multiple sites / APIs with nginx (ranging from ~millions of requests per day to virtually unused) and have never found a reason to look for a different webserver. I've never had an issue with deployment requiring users to log out. I can only assume you're referring to something in your MMO server use case? Again - my intent was not to disparage. It was to say disrupting something that's "good enough" requires a massive improvement to the users' lives.
thih9 6y ago
I wish this submission pointed to a longer article instead of two tweets; especially since it's opinionated and addresses a complex topic. I feel like I'm missing the real world context and that I'm seeing only a part of the author's point.
kazinator 6y ago
This isn't such a great analogy (in the way it is presented) because ... - There is light-weight software that is easy to understand and use: like piccolo or flute, rather than a piano. - This light-weight software can be both proprietary and free (in beer and speech sense): there are expensive flutes, and there are free flutes. - There is heavy-weight software that users wrestle with, like getting a piano up the stairs. Likewise, this can be proprietary and free (in both senses). - In proprietary software, support contracts can be extra, or part of the deal. Just like if you buy a piano, you may have to arrange for your own moving (exactly like with a free piano) or the piano shop could arrange it for you, factored into the piano price or itemized separately. If we don't take the viewpoint that free software is always like a free piano, but allow for free flutes, then we can repair the analogy. Otherwise it is just bigoted. It is quite insulting, actually, because, for instance, free GNU/Linux, though a complex behemoth, is a lot more wieldy to ordinary end-users than proprietary Unix ever was. Many users report being more happy with a friendly GNU/Linux distro than with the proprietary OS they used previously.
onikolas7 6y ago
So on top of the free piano, they also want a free piano delivery service, free piano tuning and maintenance, and free piano lessons? The word that comes to mind is entitled..
jrockway 6y ago
All software has a learning curve. I have never bought paid software that instantly solved my problems with no configuration or learning. I think the time cost is intrinsic in all software, it's just that free software doesn't have a dollar cost. It is something that annoys me, for sure, but it's not unique to "free software".
hospadar 6y ago
As a person who has acquired several "free" pianos, I personally love this analogy and in no way view it as a criticism. Free pianos _are_ free - when I was broke and 22, it was the only way to get a piano. I had lots of other broke 22 year old friends with nothing to do, we hauled it up the steps and then I was playing piano! If I were rich and busy, I wouldn't have bothered, but I wasn't. I think this is an important counterpoint to the "FOSS solves all problems and is perfect" or "commercial software is always bad" attitude that some folk present. I'm so thankful that any developer opens up their code, even when it's not perfect. I've often learned how to do something, borrowed a function, or learned what the right configuration option is from FOSS projects that I didn't even attempt to use wholesale.
- rch 6y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. I'll take the the time to learn and use open source software over navigating a corporate hierarchy looking for budget to buy something any day. It's worth noting that contributing, in whatever capacity, to OSS is similarly rewarding.
SergeAx 6y ago
Tell that to users, authors and contributors of Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Firefox, Apache, nginx, mySQL, Postgres, Redis, PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, Kotlin... Jeez, such an awful example of narrow-mindness and ignorance.
mindslight 6y ago
I don't get all the backlash in this thread. There is truth here. The critique misses the mark a little by focusing on compiling and patches, but the analogy is sound. I have a secure computing environment I can trust, a plethora of online nyms isolated into different VMs and IPs, my phone surveils me as little as possible, private email, tv/movies play easily and immediately, local music in good quality that plays out of nice speakers but can controlled by any handy device, conversations with friends that aren't being analyzed by surveillance companies, very little advertising exposure, secure non-cloud backups, security cameras that only I can view, etc. But all of this took work to set up, and takes occasional ongoing maintenance. I certainly don't fault everyone whose primary focus is not computing for not expending the effort to be as Free. If we want Free solutions to succeed for larger adoption, it behooves us to recognize this barrier and improve the situation.
voicedYoda 6y ago
You know why piano's are free? Because they are heavy, and though are great to use, are limited in their functionality... Much like foss projects
8bitsrule 6y ago
Actual piano players are more likely to appreciate a free piano. As opposed to the the people who buy a baby grand, then let it sit there hoping for a piano player to visit.

152 points by PretzelFisch 6y ago

quercusa 6y ago

Sturgeon's Law suggests we should be surprised if this were not the case.

chrispeel 6y ago
"Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage that states that "ninety percent of everything is crap." The adage was coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic. The adage was inspired by Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality, and science fiction was thus no different in that regard from other art." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

tyingq 6y ago

One improvement* over the "old days" is that there are fewer popular platforms now. There used to be a lot of otherwise good free software that was very painful to compile on a platform other than what the author had access to. Getting something written on a SunOS box to compile on, say, AIX, was often a chore. * Yes, other aspects of this aren't improvements.

jfhnchjnxse 6y ago

The author of this tweet is really making fun of indie gratis software, which is pretty rude, since that software is hard to use because the authors don't have many resources and are volunteers. Is Firefox hard to use? Does the author struggle to use Twitter, built on libre software as a base? Is the Android kernel free as in piano? Twitter people are stupid

praptak 6y ago
"Free as the marginal cost of producing a copy of software once enough people and companies invested their resources into making it usable". To be fair the tweet didn't say all free software is like this.
542458 6y ago
I don’t think the tweet author is trying to make a point about crown-jewel FOSS like Firefox, Blender, etc.
falcolas 6y ago
Somewhat humorously, Firefox is free like swag. You get it for free, but you get bugged constantly about all the other great things Mozilla is doing.
- gnabgib 6y ago
  I don't think this is fair. Other than after some updates FF opens a new tab talking about new features, I haven't seen much. Do we have different settings?
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Pocket, the VPN, the now-defunct send, etc. Not to mention regular emails from having an account to sync between browsers.
- mindslight 6y ago
  I'd rather be pushed uniform information about what a company is up to, than have specific information about me pulled into a surveillance database. Neither one is good, but at least the generic push leaves me alone the rest of the time.
iso1210 6y ago
> Twitter people are stupid Some are, some aren't. Sometimes stupid people make non-stupid posts. Sometimes non-stupid people make stupid posts. This one clearly is a stupid post.
xboxnolifes 6y ago
Twitter people aren't stupid. The stupid people are those who care a little too much about what 1 person on twitter has to say about some topic.

praptak 6y ago

"Free as in herpes" - basically everything preinstalled by hardware vendors.

Zambyte 6y ago

This is a great analogy. Unfortunately the person has a cynical view on it. Another view on the same analogy: the work of one person in a public space can benefit many of those around them. Be it a piano, or Free Software.

CarVac 6y ago

Speaking as someone who tries not to make my open-source software "free as in piano" and also got a free piano, my free piano is insanely fun. I've learned to tune it, I lubed the keypins to reduce friction, I stuck a shim in the soundboard where it was buzzing… And it emits music when I play it.

altitudinous 6y ago

Well, I think this is true. Many devs are slaving over high quality software that is technically fine and a real achievement but nobody truly loves the niche except for them. I think the real talent is in writing software that other folk are inspired by and actually want. Too much focus on the technical side of things, not enough focus on the human side of things. But then, it is important to be true to yourself, if you love that software, then you love it. Depends on your reason for working on it, whether your profit is your own enjoyment or the enjoyment by others.

benjohnson 6y ago

>>is free as in piano Ok then. Just use your mouse to click though InstallWizard.exe until the talking paperclip tells you to stop.

ttt0 6y ago

I don't get it. I use free software and I'm more than happy with it. Am I supposed to not be happy with it or what?

draw_down 6y ago

Good thing the software usually has a forum attached where volunteers try to help others without recompense. You can go on there and yell at them about how they’re not working hard enough for you (in their free time from their job that actually pays their bills). How dare they not put the effort in to make the software understandable and perfectly easily usable to you, personally, because you are so super duper special??

scoutt 6y ago

> Everyone knows you won't. I think the most important thing is that you can, if you want.

leoedin 6y ago

Not every open source project is polished. Fair enough - that's evident. However, that doesn't mean it's not useful. Sometimes a snippet from an abandoned project on GitHub is exactly what you need.

abakker 6y ago

I assume this is just meant as an observation, not a criticism. I've certainly experienced this with some free software for various purposes, where you wade through 3000 forum posts to get it to run and someone chimes in, "oh, it only works if you install in in X directory...". Sure it sucked to read 3000 forum posts and google things for 2 hours, but, once it worked, it worked. I don't know why this would be a "problem" though. This year I got a free snowblower. it had all the parts, but it didn't work. After much reading, disassembly, and other mess, I got it to work and now I have a snowblower. To me, commercial software is often about ergonomics and immediacy - if I can pay to have it now, with no work, great. But, free software can be about capturing marginal value below the market clearing price. If I need to put in some time and effort but I don't need to spend any currency, then great! I've succeeded at getting a job done and exchanged time for cost. Seems reasonable, and it's nice to have the option. (obligatory hardware example: just look at youtube for the humongous number of things made with washing machine motors. Sure, they're inconvenient, but they are free and available. For a lot of people this trade is worth it.)

D13Fd 6y ago
For individuals, a lot of it comes down to how you value your time. The snowblower was not free, you just paid in time rather than money.
- foxhop 6y ago
  There are other costs with not fixing it, but I get your point regarding time. That said the experience earned and the courage to take on bigger efforts is found through trying and spending time keeping other people's trash out of a landfill. This is true with software too otherwise we wouldn't have free and open source software. Right to repair for the win! https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed
- iso1210 6y ago
  > For individuals, a lot of it comes down to how you value your time. That's why I use open source, I don't have the time to deal with crappy closed source programs

enriquto 6y ago

Then proprietary software must surely be a pianola (a player piano that plays automatically): it plays alone, but it is always the same song and you cannot change a note.

Spivak 6y ago
I really don’t get where this idea that proprietary software is inflexible comes from. We can’t simultaneously all be working at feature factories and making inflexible software. Sure, we’ve all had to experience the annoyance of working out the limitations of proprietary software we can’t patch but FAR FAR more common is working around the limitations of FOSS software that is infeasible to patch. You’re probably not going to patch some bug you found in your jdbc driver, tomcat, or nginx because it’s expensive to maintain. I’ve been really really happy with our paid software at & $company because I have a vendor I can pester to fix my bug or implement my feature.
- mindslight 6y ago
  > We can’t simultaneously all be working at feature factories and making inflexible software Actually, yes we can. The key insight behind liberal economics is that central planners are incapable of understanding the demands at the edges. The same goes for software - the feature factories can only generate features imagined by centralized focus groups (or even worse, the business desires of the company itself), whereas desires of actual users are much more vibrant than that.

jihadjihad 6y ago

"The software is free if your time has no value"

iso1210 6y ago
The software is expensive and restricts your rights if your time have no value

082349872349872 6y ago

Better libre software that's free as in piano than gratis software that's free as in mattress?

benjohnson 6y ago

I have to admit that this quip pisses me off because open source developers have been so very generous to me. That their work is done in public and in front of the world should not give us extra ammunition to put their efforts down. There are countless closed source packages that are arcane and hard to deal with - we just don't see them so there not able to be criticized.

throwaway823882 6y ago
I write open source software. If it was difficult for people to use, I would not get pissed off that people pointed this out. Like, if I were a woodworker, and made free chairs... you would be right in complaining if it was full of splinters, if it required you to buy hardware and drills, if it was uneven and clunky. It's a shit chair. There's no dishonor in acknowledging what it is. I would not expect a pat on the back just because I made it free.
- qchris 6y ago
  I'm some ways, I get your analogy, but I think you're making an assumption that it doesn't support. Open source software is rarely "here's a free chair, that also doesn't have splinters." It's far more often "Here are some free blanks for a chair I made. It's not totally finished, so you'll probably need to do some work on it yourself. But the joints are easy to dis/re-assemble, so feel free to examine it all and modify or replace them to meet your needs. Also, don't sue me." In that context, it's much more understandable, not because anyone's wrong per se, but because fundamentally the expectations are mismatched.
  - visiblink 6y ago
    I would take issue with "far more often." I guess that's true if you're searching out software on Github or the equivalent. If you're installing packages from your distribution's repository, there are tens of thousands of finished free software products (inasmuch as any software, open or proprietary, is ever finished).

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

This made me laugh, but if you think about it most non-free software is like an expensive player piano. Just as difficult to move, but it only plays music approved by the manufacturer, and requires special tools to tune that they only sell to approved partners.

chociej 6y ago
That's a great point. I get a lot of additional value from FOSS because it's not dead set on roping me into some proprietary lock-in scenario. It far outweighs any inconvenience I experience.
hsitz 6y ago
Yes. Also, for a person with the requisite piano tuning/repair skills, a free piano can be a great thing. And this person can identify which free pianos are great things and which are likely to be unsalvageable. For someone who has no clue about pianos, or on how to work on pianos, not so much. A lot of open source software is intended to be used by developers, or, in other words, by someone who knows what they're doing. Not all, of course. There's plenty of open source stuff out there targeted at end users, or at admin-types, non-developers. Much of it is excellent. (In fact, much of it "runs the internet".) Much is not, or is really in a semi-developed state where it needs to be improved by actual developers. None of this is anything new. You need to be aware of how "ready for use" the open source project you choose is. By the very nature of how open source works, projects are available "in the wild" when they aren't really ready for general use.

rjsw 6y ago

But I am a piano tuner/mover.

eitland 6y ago

Maybe yes, and it is also free like in free puppy, but guess what: The expensive puppets needs house training as well and they bite too and more worrying their previous owner refuses to agree that he has sold it - and he bites. My qualifications: I've installed and supported Oracle databases for customers for years and I frequently wished they were Postgres. Also more expensive pianos generally won't play automatically either and if they did you'd probably pay for them to stop sooner or later. Software setup and installation is in many ways an art. Sometimes done on site with the customers watching, other times meticulously crafted as install and getting started wizards or whatever.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
I don't think most developers have ever administered proprietary software so they don't really "get it". A developer mindset sees having source access as about developing the software. For an administrator, though, having source access is the difference between fumbling in the dark and looking like a fool (or paying vendor tech support to act like a fool for you) versus being able to look at the code and understand what's happening when documentation doesn't agree with reality, etc. Many of us are forced to integrate proprietary software. We have to live with the compiled artifacts we're given (for "support" reasons, because license agreements say we can't reverse-engineer/decompile, because we want our Customers to have systems that aren't one-offs that can be supported by the "next guy", etc). When I'm stuck fighting with proprietary software and unable to see the inner workings I find myself pining for free/open-source software.

bombcar 6y ago

It seems this tweet is about someone trying to hand off maintenance of a free software project.

jcpst 6y ago

Say I do accept this analogy. For some people, getting a free piano would be life-changing. Composers, Song Writers, aspiring musicians... Some people would look at a free piano as “that would be nice to have because it’s free”. Clunky free software that needs TLC, but is valuable may still be worth it to the people who care. So you can make this comparison, but I don’t like the attitude.

sheriff 6y ago
And yet the reality is that there is no shortage of free pianos listed on my local Craigslist that no one has picked up yet.

approxim8ion 6y ago

How ungrateful does one have to be when they want a piano, are given one for free but don't want to take the bare minimum effort of moving it into their house?

ponow 6y ago
Yeah, just like looking the gift horse in the mouth. Entitlement is so ugly.

clarge1120 6y ago

After reading the rest of the quote, I agree. It's an apt quote and a challenge to FOSS founders to bring make their software better. From that standpoint, Challenge Accepted.

bullen 6y ago

For 10 years I have been working on this open-source HTTP app. server. During this time only 4 external parties have used it afaik: 1) Some CS class at an Indian University. 2) An Indian startup to share physical things freely. 3) A Japanese university doctorate study about analyzing concurrency! 4) A Minecraft map server. To me this is mindblowing, here you have the simplest and most performant version of the most used protocol on Earth and nobody cares! Nobody wants to learn!

NateEag 6y ago
Simplest and most performant would need to be an order of magnitude improvement on nginx for anyone to care.
- bullen 6y ago
  Nginx was single-threaded until recently... now it uses separate processes for multi-threading. So yes my app. server is 10x better than than Nginx for joint parallel tasks like a MMO server f.ex. Try hot-deploying a project to Nginx without the live users having to login again. You still don't care! :D
  - NateEag 6y ago
    I'm not saying you aren't doing good work, or that it's not worth doing. I'm just saying that nginx is good enough for most people, and they'd need to see massive improvements to their workflows to change. I'm a web dev, and I've maintained multiple sites / APIs with nginx (ranging from ~millions of requests per day to virtually unused) and have never found a reason to look for a different webserver. I've never had an issue with deployment requiring users to log out. I can only assume you're referring to something in your MMO server use case? Again - my intent was not to disparage. It was to say disrupting something that's "good enough" requires a massive improvement to the users' lives.

thih9 6y ago

I wish this submission pointed to a longer article instead of two tweets; especially since it's opinionated and addresses a complex topic. I feel like I'm missing the real world context and that I'm seeing only a part of the author's point.

kazinator 6y ago

This isn't such a great analogy (in the way it is presented) because ... - There is light-weight software that is easy to understand and use: like piccolo or flute, rather than a piano. - This light-weight software can be both proprietary and free (in beer and speech sense): there are expensive flutes, and there are free flutes. - There is heavy-weight software that users wrestle with, like getting a piano up the stairs. Likewise, this can be proprietary and free (in both senses). - In proprietary software, support contracts can be extra, or part of the deal. Just like if you buy a piano, you may have to arrange for your own moving (exactly like with a free piano) or the piano shop could arrange it for you, factored into the piano price or itemized separately. If we don't take the viewpoint that free software is always like a free piano, but allow for free flutes, then we can repair the analogy. Otherwise it is just bigoted. It is quite insulting, actually, because, for instance, free GNU/Linux, though a complex behemoth, is a lot more wieldy to ordinary end-users than proprietary Unix ever was. Many users report being more happy with a friendly GNU/Linux distro than with the proprietary OS they used previously.

onikolas7 6y ago

So on top of the free piano, they also want a free piano delivery service, free piano tuning and maintenance, and free piano lessons? The word that comes to mind is entitled..

jrockway 6y ago

All software has a learning curve. I have never bought paid software that instantly solved my problems with no configuration or learning. I think the time cost is intrinsic in all software, it's just that free software doesn't have a dollar cost. It is something that annoys me, for sure, but it's not unique to "free software".

hospadar 6y ago

As a person who has acquired several "free" pianos, I personally love this analogy and in no way view it as a criticism. Free pianos _are_ free - when I was broke and 22, it was the only way to get a piano. I had lots of other broke 22 year old friends with nothing to do, we hauled it up the steps and then I was playing piano! If I were rich and busy, I wouldn't have bothered, but I wasn't. I think this is an important counterpoint to the "FOSS solves all problems and is perfect" or "commercial software is always bad" attitude that some folk present. I'm so thankful that any developer opens up their code, even when it's not perfect. I've often learned how to do something, borrowed a function, or learned what the right configuration option is from FOSS projects that I didn't even attempt to use wholesale.

rch 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. I'll take the the time to learn and use open source software over navigating a corporate hierarchy looking for budget to buy something any day. It's worth noting that contributing, in whatever capacity, to OSS is similarly rewarding.

SergeAx 6y ago

Tell that to users, authors and contributors of Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Firefox, Apache, nginx, mySQL, Postgres, Redis, PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, Kotlin... Jeez, such an awful example of narrow-mindness and ignorance.

mindslight 6y ago

I don't get all the backlash in this thread. There is truth here. The critique misses the mark a little by focusing on compiling and patches, but the analogy is sound. I have a secure computing environment I can trust, a plethora of online nyms isolated into different VMs and IPs, my phone surveils me as little as possible, private email, tv/movies play easily and immediately, local music in good quality that plays out of nice speakers but can controlled by any handy device, conversations with friends that aren't being analyzed by surveillance companies, very little advertising exposure, secure non-cloud backups, security cameras that only I can view, etc. But all of this took work to set up, and takes occasional ongoing maintenance. I certainly don't fault everyone whose primary focus is not computing for not expending the effort to be as Free. If we want Free solutions to succeed for larger adoption, it behooves us to recognize this barrier and improve the situation.

voicedYoda 6y ago

You know why piano's are free? Because they are heavy, and though are great to use, are limited in their functionality... Much like foss projects

8bitsrule 6y ago

Actual piano players are more likely to appreciate a free piano. As opposed to the the people who buy a baby grand, then let it sit there hoping for a piano player to visit.