Slashdot Mirror
Open Community vs. Open Code
snydeq writes "Recent silence regarding the future of OpenSolaris under Oracle's hand has InfoWorld blogger Savio Rodrigues questioning the relative importance of open code. 'Source code availability is a central factor in establishing trust in the open source community, as knowledge that the source is available can often allay fears about the future of a particular open source project or product. And yet, this trust can often be overstated,' Rodrigues writes. Members of the OpenSolaris community have been agitating for Oracle to clarify its plans for OpenSolaris in the wake of its acquisition of Sun, with some suggesting a fork as a way of severing ties. But, as Rodrigues points out, 'The community around an open source project or product can certainly be vibrant without having the resources to support a fork. In fact, this is true for many open source communities, which count numerous members, very few of whom would be qualified to develop the open source project further should a fork occur. Worse, even fewer would be interested in doing so.'"
It's what you cocksuckers want.
So the short and neutral for of this article is:
A company opening the source to a given product at a given time may decide that - upon seeing not enough external developers jumping on - that it may be not worth continuing this effort. And the "community of administrators and users" complains they dont have enough programmers to fork it on their own.
How to say: Congratulations. But you know that *working* open source ecosystems also include programmers.
Trolltalk has returned
Recent talk regarding the lack of stability in MSFT's stock price under Steve Ballmer's hand has Slashdot commenter questioning the relative importance of closed-source code. 'Having availability of large assets is a central factor in establishing trust in the business community, as knowledge that the assets are available can often allay fears about the liability of a particular business product. And yet, this trust can often be overstated, the commenter pint out. Members of the business community have been agitating for Microsoft to clarify its plans for Windows in the wake of Sun's sellout to Oracle, with some suggesting a spinoff as a way of severing ties. But, as the commenters points out, 'The community around a closed-source project or product can certainly be vibrant without having the resources to support a large company. In fact, this is true for many closed source companies, which count numerous licensed users, very few of whom would be qualified to develop a competitive product should a spinoff occur. Worse, even fewer would be interested in doing so.
Let's not forget that Sun bought MySQL, which competes with Oracle's core database products.
If you choose a GPL app for your critical infrastructure, you're pretty safe. If the vendor, sponsor, developers and everybody else involved drops it you can support it yourself until you can migrate to another platform or just become the primary fork. Choosing GPL means never having to say "oops", unless you're the kind of fool that wants to take a GPL app proprietary.
A commercial closed-source app? No, you're maintaining legacy hardware that supports it until you can't get parts on Ebay any more, and then you're sunk.
A non-GPL open source app? Your mileage may vary. Consult your attorney. Consult several attorneys. Be prepared to pay those attorneys to defend you in court.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am wondering, why OpenSolaris should even continue?, its not like there is no open UNIX available for x86, you have the BSD family, and even though its not a UNIX you have GNU/Linux. If you are running on Sparc hardware it may be worth it but methinks that oracle might have been interesting in Solaris as a way of getting away from linux.
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
In fact, this is true for many open source communities, which count numerous members, very few of whom would be qualified to develop the open source project further should a fork occur.
Did someone just say that very few people in open source project communities are qualified to do development work?
Kinda nice to hear that admission of reality, after a decade plus of open source developers using the "do it yourself" line to escape from listening to feedback and requests from end users.
Please help metamoderate.
KDE is still superior to GNOME. Always has been, always will be. They haven't even fixed the bug that forces all GNOME users to look at a smelly foot sitting on their desktop. Even Linus Torvalds himself uses KDE, and encourages others to do the same.
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted with a rusty clothes hanger!
There are many reasons why Open Source is good. The availability of developers is only one reason. Even if there seems to be a lack of competent developers ready to take over the project, simply having that potential can mean all the difference. If nothing else, the more eyes on the code, the more likely that bugs can be found and reported. At some point all closed source software will become unmaintained because technology changes, and there is only a finite set of resources. OSS, however, is always available to tinker with, even long after it seems to be worthwhile. As a comparison, think about older cars. They don't have all the bells and whistles, but still have value because they can still be worked on long after their respective companies moved on to newer models.
As a user of OSS, I prefer it even if there is a slightly better closed source alternative. Even though I very rarely look at that actual code, it's nice to know that it is there. It also says a lot about the company when they close up the code. I'm sure that others feel that way too. I don't mind if you sell your product, but I feel that once I buy it, it should be mine to take apart.
Sadly, Microsoft is a great example of how well closed source and good marketing can be. That is why I secretly want that giant to fall. I still think there is an unfortunately large number of people who don't care where their stuff comes from and what the real cost is as long as it works for the short term.
There are 10 commandments: 01)Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God 10)Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.Matt22:34-40
A telling statement. If enough programmers find the program useful, but in need of improvement, then it is very likely some of them will improve it. If enough non-programmers think that way then they can pay to have it improved. If this doesn't happen then maybe the program wasn't so very important after all.
This is merely natural selection at work, and for the most part the outcome will be as it should be — unlike closed-source products, which live entirely at the whim of their creator.
SCO acquires a new business partner - GNAA
Darl here, with another fine Fr1st P0st. After all -- SCO did
everything first, and the rest of the responses to this story will owe
their heritage to a foundation built on SCO's staff of talented programmers.
You may be wondering why SCO salesmen are not answering your numerous calls
while you try to order more SCO licenses. Well, we aren't answering the phones
because we're too busy celebrating our newest business partner. Rather than
explaining it myself, I'll let our formal press release do the talking. Take it
away, Mr. Reuters...
LINDON, Utah, Sept. 8/PRNewswire - FirstCall/ -- The SCO Group,
Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOX [yahoo.com]
- News [yahoo.com]), the owner and
licensor of the core UNIX operating system source code, today announced its
second Fortune 500 clent for the SCO Linux IP license, the GNAA (Nasdaq: RHAT [yahoo.com] -
News [yahoo.com]), developer of fine
Slashdot trolls on irc.efnet.net #GNAA, also well-known for
revolutionizing small business development with its "Step 2: ??????" profit
model. The availability of the SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux
affords Linux deployments to come into compliance with international law for
the use of all 2.4 and future kernels. The run-time license permits the use of
SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as contained in Linux
distributions.
By purchasing a SCO Intellectual Property License, customers avoid
infringement of SCO's intellectual property rights in Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5
kernels and assure Darl financial security for the purchase of his second home.
Because the SCO license authorizes run-time use only, customers also comply
with the General Public License, under which Linux is distributed. Source may
still be distributed under the terms of the GPL, however source distributors
are held accountable for all violation of SCO's IP. Indemnification is provided
for customers of runtime clients only. Read that twice, dirty hippy. You're not
in the clear yet.
GNAA spokesperson penisbird said of the licensure, "coming into compliance
affords us a new competitive advantage with the other Slashdot authors. By
being in the right, we can thumb down our noses at not only the Windows users
and the BSD-thieving Mac Users, but also the unwashed Linux hippies running
stolen code on their parents' PCs." VP of anus enlargement goat-see added,
"fr1st p0st? damn i miss. how do i next story?"
Mr. Darl McBride concurred with GNAA's analysis, adding "We soon hope to
convince additional clients such as Trollklore and Cabal of Logged In Trolls of
the benefits of licensing SCO's valuable IP. Also, I <3 GNAA bunny. (@.@)"
JesuitX clarified the nature of the SCO and GNAA alliance, adding "We're more
than just a licensing client. We're also going to be helping to bring these
other potential licensors into compliance. We can break them in little by
little as paying sublicensors. The alternative is pretty horrible. Our lawyers
can take a reticent client from virgin to hello.jpg [figure
2 [yahoo.com]] in under an hour, and believe me -- it is not pleasant."
Commander Taco was unavailable for comment, however Cowboy Kneel was said to
ask for a print of [figure 2] for his basement apartment. Simoniker remained
British and unable to spell "color," while Timothy responded by posting the
same story six times, and Hemos reposted a seventh time, the submission
huh? not kidding really, from personal experience. nothing new here.
you have the right to remain silent.
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"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."
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they would have turned openSolaris into an M$ killer but they need to level up a few more characters first.
We want source code under an open source license so that when a dickhead company like Oracle gets a hold of Solaris and Java, we can still continue to use it (which includes fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to the platforms we like).
And even if I wanted to use closed source software, on my lists of companies to trust, Oracle would rank near the bottom.
Linux leveled up meanwhile. OpenSolaris is noob, it needs to grind with an established party to gain some experience.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
And Apple would rank near the top, but only because I'm gay.
And a bottom. Yeah, I love it in the ass.
Posting anonymously to avoid down-mod for being gay.
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OpenSolaris as an open source project fails at the same point as OpenJDK did - they are not really suited for participation. The environment needed to run successful open source communities is one of many discussions (real time and not) and a lot of experimentation, plus fairly relaxed rules for code changes/additions to actually make it into some sort of public trial in the main piece of software. Sun barely offered any of this in adequate fashion - most of the actual procedure to get changes in was modeled after huge corporation standards bodies. Madness like the JEP - a procedure in which you could spend years in meetings and writing absolutely huge stacks of documentation, only to find out after things had passed multiple reviews that there was no one really going to put a sample implementation of software into the JDK or JRE (JSR-106 for instance).
I've been using FreeBSD for several months now, specifically for ZFS. The more I play with it, the more I like it. Of course, if it wasn't for the few years of running Ubuntu, I wouldn't have built up the skillset or the patience to tinker with things until they work, which is what I've had to do (not so much ZFS, but the FreeBSD side of it).
As part of the design process, Jeff Bonwick questioned pretty much every convention that went with filesystem design, threw out everything that no long applied, and instituted everything he thought was a good idea. It shows. Dealing with ZFS is different, but in a much better way. The most beautiful thing is the checksums/hashes for every block, so that you KNOW when something has corrupted, and more importantly, you should have a backup, and hopefully, some redundancy so fixing it is as simple as swapping in another drive. Why should we, in 2010, when prices per gigabyte are dirt cheap, be still dealing with silent data corruption? There is no reason for it. Everywhere I look with ZFS shows that it has been sensibly architected.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
for it. I don't GAY NNIGERS FROM
"So, no, both open- and closed-source products are subject to natural selection, it's just that the selection forces on them are somewhat different."
That is YOUR point, and it is correct. I think the parent poster's idea is that once you have committed yourself to a software, the more "open source" and "free software" it is, the better. A company can just shut down their project, and you are then stuck with that version without the code. Worse, with DRM, you might lose all access and your data as well.. While if you have the sourcecode, you can maintain updates yourself or pay someone to do it. Heck, someone else may fork it, and you get all the updates for free, or someone to work with.
So the DECISIONMAKER of what and when to shut down, is entirely different in open source, than in closed source. The risks are much higher in closed source, since your sugardaddy will be a company that will base all its decisions based on revenue to their shareholders, and not their customers. The bigger they become, the more they will forget where their money is coming from. This is a big failing of the capitalistic system, but unfortunately, nobody seems powerful and wise enough to change it yet.
but if there isnt demand for it, there will be no use if you allocate numerous paid developers to it.
Read radical news here
There is plenty of demand for a high end photo manipulation and editing package.
While gimp is pretty good (it would certainly take a man year or two to catch up to it), its still like 10 years behind photoshop and even paintshop in most of the meaningful ways. The problem is that the demands being filled is not the same.
The developers of GIMP are fulfilling developer demand. There is no advantage to fulfilling professional or consumer demand, even though there is PLENTY of both.
"His name was James Damore."
That's wisely put.
As I look at the landscape, I'm actually inclined to think that opensolaris is usefully distinct enough from *BSDs, with interesting and rich tools and infrastructure to attract developers from (esp.) the *BSD kernel development communities, if it becomes clear that a clearer cut opportunity to do this exists.
Also, it looks to me as if the internal Solaris devs actually liked having an open process, and valued being open source, and that while a lot of the reasons for keeping the development and design communication internal were competitive, they were also just intended to avoid taxing the productivity of a very productive team. I'm surprised Sun's solaris devs wouldn't have tried to make more (perhaps piecewise) efforts to engage external developers in areas where those interests wouldn't conflict, and, perhaps they still might.
Matt
thats an important developer culture problem. developers are creating stuff that would appeal to developers, in developer mindset. if we want open source to really take off as a culture, we need to learn how to work for the needs of the common man, without despising it or harboring elitism.
Read radical news here
...which is to completely change direction every year or two. x86 on, x86 off, linux is crap, we're the biggest linux vendor, screw linux, solaris, opensolaris, change licenses, x86 off...
I do understand that Solaris technology is excellent, but anybody who counted on Sun maintaining consistent support for it hasn't been paying attention. So if Sun made you happy before, then Oracle should make you happy now; nothing has changed, the strategy spinner is still spinning.