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My skepticism of FOSS is a little stronger. First, constant churn that always breaks backward compatibility forcing upgrades and never allowing any old softwar

My skepticism of FOSS is a little stronger. First, constant churn that always breaks backward compatibility forcing upgrades and never allowing any old software to be used without a permanently high maintenance burden. Second, the constant diminution of quality in FOSS is annoying af. Third, FOSS has become a religion for many. All things must be FOSS because it’s a holy conquest, and if just everything were FOSS all would be perfection because reasons. Unfortunately, I’ve seen things only get worse as FOSS has come to dominate the world. These could be completely unrelated, and maybe everything would still have been crap, but I cannot help but think that were people forced to pay for development they’d be more discerning.

npteljes 5y ago
>I’ve seen things only get worse as FOSS has come to dominate the world You know how the IT world looked before FOSS? Relentless rent-seeking with the software controlling access, combined with a very high barrier of entry, financially. I also think people give too much weight to the developer being paid for the software or not. There's shitty closed source software and also shitty FOSS stuff. Brilliant minds can work on either. Many eyeballs on the code haven't prevented Heartbleed, for example, and the high paid devs at whatever company also make mistakes and maintain huge leaky legacy codebases all the time. The big thing with anything digital is that it can be copied very cheaply. This is a game changer because if I have something digital, we all can have something digital, which is not a case, for example, with a piece of bread, which gets smaller the more we share. This quirk or the digital space can give rise to a movement where a single contribution can empower literally every other person, with no additional expense on the contributor's part. This, coupled with ideology that emphatizes personal empowerment, and a lawful document that ensures further participation in the ecosystem, is what made IT accessible to many, without resorting to piracy. I'm sure folks can be annoying af about this. But the world hasn't gone to crap, it has always been crap, and the free software / open source movement is one of the larger influences that made it so much better.
guerrilla 5y ago
> First, constant churn that always breaks backward compatibility forcing upgrades and never allowing any old software to be used without a permanently high maintenance burden. Is that not what enterprise Linux is for? You just pay for that if you need it. And also what about exceptions like python and such. > Third, FOSS has become a religion for many. All things must be FOSS because it’s a holy conquest, and if just everything were FOSS all would be perfection because reasons. This seems dismissive since there are actually well-thought out arguments for these things posted everywhere, they are not based on faith nor worship. This dismissal is tantamount to you saying you don't care about the same things that they care about. How could this possibly effect you negatively? > Unfortunately, I’ve seen things only get worse as FOSS has come to dominate the world. These could be completely unrelated, and maybe everything would still have been crap, but I cannot help but think that were people forced to pay for development they’d be more discerning. That's pretty vague, care to clarify?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
emptysongglass 5y ago
I wouldn't go as far as religion. It is not blind. Some in the FOSS community are ensuring what they see as a UN charter of inalienable human rights for what people can do with code that has a presence in nearly every arena of human life. That presence will grow not diminish. Diminution of quality and constant churn isn't a very good reason to stop allowing people to look at code and fork it. And you see these terrible qualities magnified in monolithic programs like JIRA or EPIC, which is fully closed and runs the entire healthcare backend for the US and some nations abroad. EPIC and other programs like it are a rentseeking disaster. Replacing it with an open source equivalent would be a huge win for downstream costs and extensible interoperability.
- BirAdam 5y ago
  I see your point, and don’t entirely disagree, but I am skeptical. If EPIC became open source you’d now need more tech staff to maintain your installations too, as the maintenance burden would creep ever larger, and at some point a business decision would be made to use closed source SAAS again anyway.
  - arjvik 5y ago
    Please explain how open sourcing code causes increased maintenance burden?
    - BirAdam 5y ago
      This is observed behavior. The churn in the rest of the ecosystem forces everything to be in a state of constant releases, patches, and upgrades. The alternative is that you depend on outdated code and then must maintain it yourself or just freeze your system forever… which is very much worse unless you’re talking about something non-networked.
matsemann 5y ago
I feel sorry for you, having paid so much for this software and it not living up to your expectations.
jancsika 5y ago
> Third, FOSS has become a religion for many. All things must be FOSS because it’s a holy conquest, and if just everything were FOSS all would be perfection because reasons. If FOSS were actually a religion, the holy conquest you describe would be the most adorable and least bloody holy conquest in the history civilization. If FOSS were actually a religion, then what is stopping you from joining the least bloody and most adorable religion in the history of civilization? Come. Join us. (Patches accepted.)

npteljes 5y ago

>I’ve seen things only get worse as FOSS has come to dominate the world You know how the IT world looked before FOSS? Relentless rent-seeking with the software controlling access, combined with a very high barrier of entry, financially. I also think people give too much weight to the developer being paid for the software or not. There's shitty closed source software and also shitty FOSS stuff. Brilliant minds can work on either. Many eyeballs on the code haven't prevented Heartbleed, for example, and the high paid devs at whatever company also make mistakes and maintain huge leaky legacy codebases all the time. The big thing with anything digital is that it can be copied very cheaply. This is a game changer because if I have something digital, we all can have something digital, which is not a case, for example, with a piece of bread, which gets smaller the more we share. This quirk or the digital space can give rise to a movement where a single contribution can empower literally every other person, with no additional expense on the contributor's part. This, coupled with ideology that emphatizes personal empowerment, and a lawful document that ensures further participation in the ecosystem, is what made IT accessible to many, without resorting to piracy. I'm sure folks can be annoying af about this. But the world hasn't gone to crap, it has always been crap, and the free software / open source movement is one of the larger influences that made it so much better.

guerrilla 5y ago

> First, constant churn that always breaks backward compatibility forcing upgrades and never allowing any old software to be used without a permanently high maintenance burden. Is that not what enterprise Linux is for? You just pay for that if you need it. And also what about exceptions like python and such. > Third, FOSS has become a religion for many. All things must be FOSS because it’s a holy conquest, and if just everything were FOSS all would be perfection because reasons. This seems dismissive since there are actually well-thought out arguments for these things posted everywhere, they are not based on faith nor worship. This dismissal is tantamount to you saying you don't care about the same things that they care about. How could this possibly effect you negatively? > Unfortunately, I’ve seen things only get worse as FOSS has come to dominate the world. These could be completely unrelated, and maybe everything would still have been crap, but I cannot help but think that were people forced to pay for development they’d be more discerning. That's pretty vague, care to clarify?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

emptysongglass 5y ago

I wouldn't go as far as religion. It is not blind. Some in the FOSS community are ensuring what they see as a UN charter of inalienable human rights for what people can do with code that has a presence in nearly every arena of human life. That presence will grow not diminish. Diminution of quality and constant churn isn't a very good reason to stop allowing people to look at code and fork it. And you see these terrible qualities magnified in monolithic programs like JIRA or EPIC, which is fully closed and runs the entire healthcare backend for the US and some nations abroad. EPIC and other programs like it are a rentseeking disaster. Replacing it with an open source equivalent would be a huge win for downstream costs and extensible interoperability.

BirAdam 5y ago
I see your point, and don’t entirely disagree, but I am skeptical. If EPIC became open source you’d now need more tech staff to maintain your installations too, as the maintenance burden would creep ever larger, and at some point a business decision would be made to use closed source SAAS again anyway.
- arjvik 5y ago
  Please explain how open sourcing code causes increased maintenance burden?
  - BirAdam 5y ago
    This is observed behavior. The churn in the rest of the ecosystem forces everything to be in a state of constant releases, patches, and upgrades. The alternative is that you depend on outdated code and then must maintain it yourself or just freeze your system forever… which is very much worse unless you’re talking about something non-networked.

matsemann 5y ago

I feel sorry for you, having paid so much for this software and it not living up to your expectations.

jancsika 5y ago

> Third, FOSS has become a religion for many. All things must be FOSS because it’s a holy conquest, and if just everything were FOSS all would be perfection because reasons. If FOSS were actually a religion, the holy conquest you describe would be the most adorable and least bloody holy conquest in the history civilization. If FOSS were actually a religion, then what is stopping you from joining the least bloody and most adorable religion in the history of civilization? Come. Join us. (Patches accepted.)