And some say FOSS sucks

lucas1

Open Source folks do make the claim that the Open Source model tends to produce technically better software than proprietary development methods.

I have no idea what this means. What is a proprietary development method exactly?

morbiuswilters

@stinerman said:

Not to be a pedantic dickweed, but all free software licenses are open source licenses (but not necessarily vice versa, and that's assuming that you define "open source" as based on the OSI definition of the same). I'm pretty sure you mean copyleft v. non-copyleft...

The funny thing is, I was just using the same terminology you did. I didn't feel the need to correct you because was you said was quite understandable. But that's why I'm not a pedantic dickweed.

error

@morbiuswilters said:

@stinerman said:
Not to be a pedantic dickweed, but all free software licenses are open source licenses (but not necessarily vice versa, and that's assuming that you define "open source" as based on the OSI definition of the same). I'm pretty sure you mean copyleft v. non-copyleft...

The funny thing is, I was just using the same terminology you did. I didn't feel the need to correct you because was you said was quite understandable. But that's why I'm not a pedantic dickweed.

Did you just troll someone into pedantic dickweeding himself? +1 Internets to you, sir.

morbiuswilters

@MiffTheFox said:

Now, if Android was copyleft, on the other hand, vendors wouldn't be able to lock it down at all and third parties can bring builds of stock AOSP to it. In almost all cases, installing a third party rom on an Android device requires either a nasty hack or is impossible, notable exceptions including Google's aforementioned Nexus devices.

I don't see how copyleft is going to keep people from producing shitty versions of Android. What you really want is some model where Google, like, owns the code for Android. And, like, they can require OEMs to abide by a license. If only there was some model like that..

The illustration why copyleft sucks is Linux. How many awesome features can't be added to the kernel because they're not GPL? I mean, they're even fucking open source, but they have a slightly different license, so instead we have to reinvent the fucking wheel just to get anything done. A notable example is ZFS--open source, but can't be included in the kernel because slightly different license. And this is supposed to be "freedom"? Fuck no, it's a fucking cult.

morbiuswilters

@joe.edwards said:

@morbiuswilters said:
@stinerman said:
Not to be a pedantic dickweed, but all free software licenses are open source licenses (but not necessarily vice versa, and that's assuming that you define "open source" as based on the OSI definition of the same). I'm pretty sure you mean copyleft v. non-copyleft...

The funny thing is, I was just using the same terminology you did. I didn't feel the need to correct you because was you said was quite understandable. But that's why I'm not a pedantic dickweed.

Did you just troll someone into pedantic dickweeding himself? +1 Internets to you, sir.

Not troll, I just didn't anticipate someone would be enough of an anal-retentive jackass to nit-pick the same terminology he had just used himself.

morbiuswilters

@boomzilla said:

No ~~Windows~~ computer user trusts a progress bar to be accurate.

FTFY.

morbiuswilters

@alphadogg said:

I'm more and more convinced Blakeyrat has truly shitty systems, where good software goes bad, but he likes to rant about software so bias forces him to think all software is shit.

Like Go! Oh, Blakey, how could your shitty system sully the good name of Go??

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@morbiuswilters said:

@alphadogg said:
I'm more and more convinced Blakeyrat has truly shitty systems, where good software goes bad, but he likes to rant about software so bias forces him to think all software is shit.

Like Go! Oh, Blakey, how could your shitty system sully the good name of Go??

I like Go. It's an ancient Chinese game that predates chess and computer AIs still lose to moderately skilled humans.

beginner_

@morbiuswilters said:

@beginner_ said:
Plus a lot of commerical, propretiary software is a lot shitter than FOSS...

[citation needed] Seriously, provide some fucking examples if you're going to make dumb comments like this.

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You're welcome to come visit me at work. You know those applications are like i said not stuff a lot of people know or use but they are commercial and they are crappy. In this specific case it's an ASP (yes without .net) based app. Just found a new WTF today on a search page. If in a certain field you enter a string that is too long the application will say at the top "Found 12 hits" (or so) and just below "Sorry, no hits found". And if you then remove the one character to much all the hits display properly.

@morbiuswilters said:

@beginner_ said:
...then you lost because you can't fix it yourself.

Right, because writing patches for your window manager or office suite is clearly the fucking Gold Standard of quality..

Well again, there is stuff that isn't 100 Mio LOC and you can actually understand an adapt for your needs. Not to mention that for a lot of these things no commerical version exists at all. Just as example of a JS library I used and adjusted:

http://www.jsphylosvg.com/

I made it use raphael-zpd whichprobbaly wont say shit to you but anyway it makes the generated svg zoom, pan and draggable...which obvioulsy helps a lot with usability. And took 1 line of code. I could not have done what I needed to without this. Or it woudl have taken a lot longer...

@morbiuswilters said:

@beginner_ said:
Of course stuff like MS Office, Adobe Photoshop etc. are better than the FOSS versions but then the budgets behind them are gigantic.

So fucking what? I love this fucking goalpost-moving. "FOSS is better than proprietary!" "Really, what about all these shitty apps that can't even compare?" "whine Well, of course the proprietary versions of those are better, but that's not fair to bring up because they have large budgets behind them!!" "Well what FOSS apps are comparable (or ever better) than their proprietary competitors?" "silence Well, even if the FOSS apps do have bugs, at least you can waste a lot of time trying to patch them yourself! Because clearly that pissed-away effort doesn't count against FOSS, it's actually a bonus!"

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I'm not saying it's better. I'm saying there is crappy commercial proprietary software out there and a lo. Also commercial "enterprise" support tends to suck and so does maintenance fees because mostly, if you actually want a specific feature, you have to pay it separately. And then there are a lot of small projects (like the one above) which no commercial version exists of and which are very helpful. You know not all people juts use Office and Photoshop and other standard of the shelf stuff. Some people actually do have more specialized needs....but I doubt you get that with your limited view...

error

@beginner_ said:

@morbiuswilters said:
@beginner_ said:
Plus a lot of commerical, propretiary software is a lot shitter than FOSS...

[citation needed] Seriously, provide some fucking examples if you're going to make dumb comments like this.

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This probably wasn't intentional, but it's a fairly good example of proprietary software being shitty.

morbiuswilters

@beginner_ said:

You're welcome to come visit me at work. You know those
applications are like i said not stuff a lot of people know or use but they are
commercial and they are crappy.

So you work on crappy applications and this proves FOSS is better? This isn't cited evidence, this is just a rambling anecdote.

morbiuswilters

@joe.edwards said:

This probably wasn't intentional, but it's a fairly good example of proprietary software being shitty.

What, TinyMCE?

beginner_

@joe.edwards said:

@beginner_ said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@beginner_ said:
Plus a lot of commerical, propretiary software is a lot shitter than FOSS...

[citation needed] Seriously, provide some fucking examples if you're going to make dumb comments like this.

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This probably wasn't intentional, but it's a fairly good example of proprietary software being shitty.

lol. Yeah it was not intentional at all.

beginner_

@morbiuswilters said:

@beginner_ said:
You're welcome to come visit me at work. You know those applications are like i said not stuff a lot of people know or use but they are commercial and they are crappy.

So you work on crappy applications and this proves FOSS is better? This
isn't cited evidence, this is just a rambling anecdote.

Nice quoting by removing like 90% of the relevant context:

@beginner_ said:

I'm not saying it's better. I'm saying there is crappy
commercial proprietary software out there and a lot.

learn to read, moron.

morbiuswilters

@beginner_ said:

Nice quoting by removing like 90% of the relevant context:

I honestly couldn't follow your rambling, typo-and-grammatical-error-laden manifesto. Learn to write, moron.

But your original statement is that a lot of proprietary is shittier than FOSS, which you didn't provide evidence of.

lucas1

@beginner_ said:

I'm not saying it's better. I'm saying there is crappy commercial proprietary software out there and a lo. Also commercial "enterprise" support tends to suck and so does maintenance fees because mostly, if you actually want a specific feature, you have to pay it separately. And then there are a lot of small projects (like the one above) which no commercial version exists of and which are very helpful. You know not all people juts use Office and Photoshop and other standard of the shelf stuff. Some people actually do have more specialized needs....but I doubt you get that with your limited view...

So the conclusion we are coming to is that most software is a bit shit whether it is open source or not.

Look I think it is pretty obvious that the most successful FOSS projects are probably things like libraries, frameworks things that IT professionals use. The few applications that FOSS apps that aren't things for IT folks are normally funded and/or controlled by large corporations e.g. Android. Most successful proprietary software tends to be things that non-developers use.

mike_james

The learning curve for FOSS often feels like it starts somewhere about 20 feet off the ground , and you often fall off the stepladder trying to get on it.

And the best FOSS is things like Apache where enterprisey IBM people decided the money was in support so they fed 120 manyears into the open source project to give them a product good enough to support.

morbiuswilters

@mikedjames said:

...so they fed 120 manyears into the open source project to give them a product good enough to support.

But not so good that you don't need support.

MiffTheFox

@lucas said:

I have no idea what this means. What is a proprietary development method exactly?

Proprietary: You have managers, project leads, and usually architects who decide what direction the project should take. You have people "forced" to do the grunt work of development, like QA, unit testing, and code review.

Open-source: There's nobody in charge to give directions. Anyone can add or remove anything they want, and the only parts that get worked on are either to solve a person's single problem or something that seemed interesting to the dev.

MiffTheFox

@morbiuswilters said:

@MiffTheFox said:
Now, if Android was copyleft, on the other hand, vendors wouldn't be able to lock it down at all and third parties can bring builds of stock AOSP to it. In almost all cases, installing a third party rom on an Android device requires either a nasty hack or is impossible, notable exceptions including Google's aforementioned Nexus devices.

I don't see how copyleft is going to keep people from producing shitty versions of Android. What you really want is some model where Google, like, owns the code for Android. And, like, they can require OEMs to abide by a license. If only there was some model like that..

Copyleft wouldn't stop them from making shitty versions of Android, but (I'm assuming a license with an anti-anti-circumvention clause like GPLv3) it would stop them from forcing you to use them. The first step when getting a new Android phone would be to reflash the ROM with an acceptable community-created one, like how the first step when setting up a new Windows laptop is to install Windows from a Digital River ISO so as to remove the crapware.

blakeyrat

@morbiuswilters said:

@mikedjames said:
...so they fed 120 manyears into the open source project to give them a product good enough to support.

But not so good that you don't need support.

morbiuswilters

@MiffTheFox said:

The first step when getting a new Android phone would be to reflash the ROM with an acceptable community-created one...

Well, for one you can do this already on most not-shit Android phones. And two, you're putting a lot of burden onto end-users to reflash their phones, which isn't gonna happen. And three, I'm pretty sure you could take GPLv3 code and put it onto a phone that just didn't have a ROM that could be flashed.

@MiffTheFox said:

...like how the first step when setting up a new Windows laptop is to install Windows from a Digital River ISO so as to remove the crapware.

Once again, you're assuming a lot here. Most users probably just live with the crapware.

morbiuswilters

@blakeyrat said:

@morbiuswilters said:
@mikedjames said:
...so they fed 120 manyears into the open source project to give them a product good enough to support.

But not so good that you don't need support.

I did not read that as a joke. I figured he literally meant "good enough to support".

stinerman1

@MiffTheFox said:

Proprietary: You have managers, project leads, and usually architects who decide what direction the project should take. You have people "forced" to do the grunt work of development, like QA, unit testing, and code review.

Open-source: There's nobody in charge to give directions. Anyone can add or remove anything they want, and the only parts that get worked on are either to solve a person's single problem or something that seemed interesting to the dev.

More or less. The only thing I'd add is that there is usually some "benevolent dictator" (see Linus Torvalds with Linux or Larry Wall with Perl) with open source projects. If you don't like their decisions, you have to fork the project.

stinerman1

@morbiuswilters said:

Not troll, I just didn't anticipate someone would be enough of an anal-retentive jackass to nit-pick the same terminology he had just used himself.

I've lurked long enough to know this entire forum is just one big meta-troll. I got bored and decided to join in the fun.

lucas1

@MiffTheFox said:

Proprietary: You have managers, project leads, and usually architects who decide what direction the project should take. You have people "forced" to do the grunt work of development, like QA, unit testing, and code review.

Open-source: There's nobody in charge to give directions. Anyone can add or remove anything they want, and the only parts that get worked on are either to solve a person's single problem or something that seemed interesting to the dev.

That is more a philosophy not a development method. The point I was making is that it is a made up term by fosstards to try to create an argument.

Lot of open source projects have elements of what normally happens in software dev shops. You can't have good software without it.

stinerman1

Of course they do, what's your point?

Cassidy

@ender said:

The lagging caret really bothers me for some reason (and I don't particularly like the smooth fade in/out it does now, and the smooth moving of selected cell in Excel

Try disabling animations. You're not the only one I've heard about animations causing lag.

I used to disable the fade effect from start menus years ago because I didn't want to wait around for them to appear. And the new menu drop-down animation in LinkedIn sucks balls.

Cassidy

@dhromed said:

@morbiuswilters said:
Your average user will spend hours clicking around doing some repetitive task or dealing with badly-designed UIs without thinking anything of it, because to them it's just how the computer works. [...] To them, the UI is just something handed down by the gods and they have just got to learn to accept it.

This needs requoting because I only just noticed it.

And I nodded in sad agreement when I read it because I've raised this point when ~~screaming at fuckwited programmers~~ discussing the finer points of UI design with developers when analysing use case diagrams from the end-user perspective.

Too many times.

Cassidy

@powerlord said:

From what I can tell, Apache's popularity is dropping while nginx's popularity is rising.

Anyone got any informed comparisons between the two? I'm an Apache bod - I've only ever touched IIS[1] once or twice so would be curious to know how other webservers fare.

[1] and that was back in v4 & 5 days. It didn't mean anything. I was drunk, lonely and just got distracted.

lucas1

@stinerman said:

Of course they do, what's your point?

There is no such thing as a proprietary development method.

boomzilla

@lucas said:

@stinerman said:
Of course they do, what's your point?

There is no such thing as a proprietary development method.

IBM might disagree with you.

MiffTheFox

@Cassidy said:

[quote user="ender"]The lagging caret really bothers me for some reason (and I don't particularly like the smooth fade in/out it does now, and the smooth moving of selected cell in Excel

Try disabling animations. You're not the only one I've heard about animations causing lag.

I used to disable the fade effect from start menus years ago because I didn't want to wait around for them to appear. And the new menu drop-down animation in LinkedIn sucks balls.

[/quote]

I use Android's developer tools to disable all animations. Menus in Windows aren't even animated anymore (although I've yet to use 8 for any extended period of time, but this is more along how I do OS upgrades rather then any prejudice against 8).

ender

@Cassidy said:

Try disabling animations. You're not the only one I've heard about animations causing lag.

I thought I already did that, but apparently I haven't - setting that key made the caret work properly (though the value is DisableAnimations, not DisableAnimation). Unfortunately this also disables other animations, which weren't bothering.
@Cassidy said:

I used to disable the fade effect from start menus years ago because I didn't want to wait around for them to appear.

I disable the menu fade-in animation (for the same reason as you), but not the selected element fade-out (which I find useful).

morbiuswilters

@Cassidy said:

Anyone got any informed comparisons between the two?

Nginx is very good. It's got fantastic performance when serving static files and I think the configuration is cleaner than Apache. The only thing I use Apache for any more is mod_php.

@morbiuswilters said:

@blakeyrat said:
@veggen said:
An article I stumbled upon claims FOSS has better code quality than industry average.

Who gives a shit about code quality when they have terrible product quality?

A guy who is ugly, fat, has questionable hygiene and a tiny wang is going to play up his encyclopedic knowledge of Hobbits as much as possible.

But... what does Peter Jackson have to do with the topic of the thread?!