Slashdot Mirror
New Site Makes OSS Development Easier
An anonymous reader submits "OpenSnippets is a fledgling online community for OSS developers. New members are welcome to submit articles and code of interest, and everyone can view/download the code! It's blog-styled with topics for most popular languages. How useful- I only wish it'd make my coffee..."
(Score:5, Funny)!
The default licence assumed is apparently GPL, which isn't open -- it's GPL. I can't use GPLed snippets in my code that I wish to make BSD or MIT or MPL licensed.
Great idea, lousy default licence choice.
-a
Ni bhionn an rath achx mar a mbionn an smacht (There is no Luck without Discipline)
A friend just told me I was /.ed. Sorry that the site is on such a slow line, I'll be moving it to a faster one tomorrow.
As for the name, it's open if you can read it. If you are trying to get code for commercial software, check out planet source code. I might change the default license in the near future, but it isn't very likely. Submissions can specify their license of choice in their comments.
Email me with any suggestions, complaints, burning garbage, or offers of endorsement.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I suspect the reason for this, is that it simply is a too large scope to have "everything useful". Categorizing all this stuff, throwing away the 99% of junk code, it's just too much work for anyone to do. And making it into a blog isn't going to make it work better.
Sure, let the people who want to, have some fun with it. Follow the discussions, read the code posted, learn from it... But don't ever expect to ever find something you actually need there!
I'd really appreciate it if someone could point to an article or site which gave an overview of all the different licenses, and in which cases to use which ones, the pros and the cons, etc.. It's just getting so difficult.
Here is what you're looking for.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I think that's a sideways swipe at my own comment regarding the poor choice of default licence.
I was quite specific that I prefer to source my own code BSD, MIT, or MPL -- none of which could happen if I used a single snippet from this resource. As I said: the GPL isn't "open" in the sense of most OSS licences; it is "free" in the doublespeak sense of the FSF. It's a licence that makes sense, from a perspective, but is most effective against other open source licences.
Commercial licensors are either going to use the code without reporting it, they have another way of making their money, or they're going to find other code that doesn't interfere with their licence of choice. It's the rest of the open source community that suffers when tiny but useful bits of code or libraries are put under the most restrictive "open source" licence.
So the submitter of the story is probably more at fault than you are (as I said, I don't like the name because it's not quite true) because this site won't help *open source* developers; it will help the so-called "free software" developers.
Make it easier by letting people select the licence as an attribute on the snippet itself, and make it so that any of the OSI approved but GPL-compatible licences are allowed. Then I think you'll actually have "OpenSnippets".
-austin
Ni bhionn an rath achx mar a mbionn an smacht (There is no Luck without Discipline)
Thanks
But I'm too busy enjoying my new found /. fame to add such a feature just yet. I'll probably add it by next weekend, or at the very least give a list of acceptable licenses. Maybe I should add a default license selection to the user settings, or a default comment header.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
But your spelling is lousy, despite weeks of karma-whoring, hmmm?
The GNU site is a very biased place to go. However it is a good place if you want to know if a license is compatible with the GPL.
I can't think of any places which aren't biased, but opensource.org lists a whole tonne of them without stating one is better than the other. I suppose they have to be certified as "open source" by the site to be listed there, but it seems more objective to me...
It is a good thing that there is a site aggreagting rich code seqment examples. The code segment is not necessary too long, therefore people can catch the point more quickly. OpenSnippets may be a good start. But it seems there are too many OSS developing sites in the world. Too many premuture sites may disperse the development power of OSS.
I could not find an FAQ on the site explaining how Osnippets.org differs from other repositories of open source code. There are many such repositories these days. Why would I choose to spend time on Osnippets instead of one of the others? Could someone please enlighten me?
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
Sortof,
It's guidelines: Here
Open Snippets->Misc Stuff->Official->Snippet Guidelines
She's not a karma-whore, man! I thought she made it pretty clear: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=70864&cid=6429 641
If you're developing code, and you want a function to quickly factor numbers, it's a lot easier to just find that one subroutine that to find a calculator project and dig through its source code.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
She's English.
As one of the coders who has provided snippets for them, I gotta say that I the gpl licence works just fine. the purpose is to TEACH you how to do it, not just copy paste and be done with it. The gpl has a handy little clause that says you can rewrite the code and call it your own.
If you like my code, the only thing I ask is that you figure out what what it does before using it. If you understand it, you don't have to copy/paste it and can just write your own.
I think that gpl is perfect for this site because the snippets are small, and easy to rewrite. It's perfect for me because in order to rewrite it, you have to understand it, which is why I posted the snippets in the first place- to help people learn.
Good job sheenmaster, but you really gotta get a different handle:)
if you want to check out other projects I've worked on, check out morgajel.com
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
Took a look at the site. And I thought /. was anti-MS!
I won't be returning to the site...I don't want social commentary, I want useful source code and coding techniques, algorythms.
Try www.codeproject.com for a decent site.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
She's English.
Either way, (s)he can't spell. In this case the English spelling is the same as the American spelling. Superior is not one of those words in International/British English such as "colour", "favour", and "honour", that have a 'u' that is omitted in US English.
I just checked it out. (Sorry, but I'm a busy guy.) All I can say is, why do they center all the text in the snippets? Makes it harder to read the stuff and follow the code when indentation is often used as a visual assist in expressing the logical flow of code. Also, centering everything makes posting Python code rather cumbersome. (Not exactly the word I want, but it's as close as I'm going to get right now.)
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
That sounds like a browser issue; I can't seem to recreat your problem.
Email me a screenshot and your browser info. I've specifically altered the site for lynx support; one more mod won't be that big of a deal.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.