How did you start hating opensource?
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
it's completely unfair to sheet home the blame for some asshole you find acting like an asshole to the authors of the GPL
If most authors of GPL software act like arsehats, meybe there's something about the license that draws arsehats to it
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@groo said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I agree, but that doesn't mean they need to be an asshole. And it was free money for them.
The GPL license doesn't obligue the library's author to be an asshole, and has nothing to do with it.
But there is a strong correlation. The authors of a GPL library are almost certainly going to be assholes. It's rare that they aren't.
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@Jaloopa Or maybe most software developers are asshats. Which would, in my experience, be pretty close to the truth.
Filed under: sturgeon strikes again
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@groo And open-source it under a BSD/MIT licence :-)
Those licenses are at least usable in the real world, and are what I typically use if I decide to make something open-source.
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
What you're not allowed to do under the GPL is redistribute that modified code without also making its source code available to those you're distributing it to. That is, you're not allowed to deny to your customers the same freedoms that the supplier of the GPL licenced software has granted to you.
That's not why people object to it.
If I build an awesome program and it has 99 features that I implemented myself, and I want to add one important feature that's implemented in a GPL library, and I can do so without modifying the GPL code in any way, does the GPL leave me alone and allow me to do that? Of course not; it takes over your entire codebase. This is why people dislike viral licenses.
@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Nice. So it's closed-source's fault when open-source projects fail.
Please don't fall into the all-too-common trap of equating the GPL with open source software. The term "open source" was actually coined by a bunch of developers who got sick of the FSF's extremist ideology alienating everyone else, and so they developed a more reasonable set of principles to point out that "we're not all like those rabid crazies over there."
@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
It's always with stupid things too, like a PNG or weird compression library for some obscure platform. I can see wanting big useful free alternatives to commercial software for things like OS's and word processing suites...but come on, a PNG library?
...why not simply use libpng, which is freely available under a highly permissive license?
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Working around the GPL is easy.
Build a wrapper service that talks via IPC or HTTP or whatever. Hit it from your actual product. That wrapper is now opensource. Treat it as such.
Shit like AGPL is much more problematical.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
...why not simply use libpng, which is freely available under a highly permissive license?
It's been a while so I forget the specifics for the PNG example, but this was in the heyday of Silverlight so it had to be sandbox-safe C# code. It might not have been PNG either, could have been an Excel exporter or something too. I just grabbed PNG as an example because the point was I needed the library for like 2 function calls, but would have had to spend 6+ months implementing the library myself because the author of the GPL library turned down money.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If I build an awesome program and it has 99 features that I implemented myself, and I want to add one important feature that's implemented in a GPL library, and I can do so without modifying the GPL code in any way, does the GPL leave me alone and allow me to do that? Of course not; it takes over your entire codebase. This is why people dislike viral licenses.
What if I have my awesome free program with 99 features, and I can't add one feature because it costs 10usd per user to license?
See, the library isn't available, you have no right for it.
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@groo said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If I build an awesome program and it has 99 features that I implemented myself, and I want to add one important feature that's implemented in a GPL library, and I can do so without modifying the GPL code in any way, does the GPL leave me alone and allow me to do that? Of course not; it takes over your entire codebase. This is why people dislike viral licenses.
What if I have my awesome free program with 99 features, and I can't add one feature because it costs 10usd per user to license?
See, the library isn't available, you have no right for it.
If you're doing it for free, then you probably have the time to develop it yourself. And don't blame closed-source for the failure of open-source to come up with an alternative.
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
It means that if the software is available to you, so is its source code.
That's not true, at least not according to RMS. A program can be open source without being GPL or having the "four freedoms" bullshit.
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Blame the inherent susceptibility of the closed-source commercial software ecosystem to market failure.
Haha what?
As opposed to the open source ecosystem, SO FULL OF INDUSTRY-LEADING PROGRAMS?
You are smoking the good ganja this morning.
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@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Open-Source Guy: No! You make your stuff open source NOW! GPL OR DIE!!! FREEDOM!! FREEDOM!! ALL HAIL STALLMAN!! frothing at mouth
Well at least that open source guy is honest about his goal not being to produce quality software.
A lot of them pretend their open source is better, that's the really troublesome scenario because morons start believing them against all the evidence of their own eyes.
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@groo said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Then write your own stupid PNG library.
Or use a better framework that's actually comprehensive, instead of one of those shitty ones (like Node.JS, or Python, or what-not) where extremely basic features like parsing PNG files is locked in a package manager whose contributors are all random wankers with no acceptance or quality guidelines and where every package has its own annoying license you need to digest.
One of the best things about .net is it's actually pretty complete. It's not like 1/4th of a language ecosystem being sold as a complete finished product, the way Node.JS, Python, GoLang, etc all are.
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@blakeyrat Are any of those three things sold?
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@flabdablet Ok you're not just high, you're actually insane.
What "three things" are you referring to? And note you might have to give a pretty comprehensive answer because I'm pretty sure your question isn't founded on any actual text that exists here in the real world, but on the whisperings of the pink elephant standing behind you.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
It's not like 1/4th of a language ecosystem being sold as a complete finished product, the way Node.JS, Python, GoLang, etc all are.
@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@blakeyrat Are any of those three things sold?
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
What "three things" are you referring to?
Reading comprehension fail...
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@masonwheeler I never made a list of three things. "etc." stands for et cetera, a Latin phrase meaning, basically, "and so on". Therefore, the list has an indeterminate number of items in it.
I also didn't mean the definition of "sold" meaning "exchanged for money." I mean the definition that's more like, "convinced of the quality of". Like, "are you sold on this car?" It doesn't mean you bought the car, it's asking if you were convinced it was a good car to buy.
I'm not sure who you're suggesting had the reading comprehension failure, but it certainly wasn't me.
This has been Blakeyrat Explains Things Anybody With A 5th Grade Education Should Already Know.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@masonwheeler I never made a list of three things. "etc." stands for et cetera, a Latin phrase meaning, basically, "and so on". Therefore, the list has an indeterminate number of items in it.
I'm not sure who you're suggesting had the reading comprehension failure, but it certainly wasn't me.
You named three specific things before the etc. They were clearly what he was referring to. Please don't be obnoxiously ic about it.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
You named three specific things before the etc. They were clearly what he was referring to.
What he was referring to was obviously wrong and entirely unrelated to what I typed.
Obviously it wasn't "clearly" what he was referring to, demonstrably, because I didn't make the connection at all.
@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Please don't be obnoxiously ic about it.
I'm not being pedantic, I'm asking people to read the words on the screen before they reply. Apparently way too much to ask of the idiots on this forum.
Look, I'm "sorry" that he (and you, apparently, based on your failure to correctly boldface the items in the list) didn't read my post. That's not my problem. And when he posts a response based on his misreading, which is crazy and insane, I'm going to call it crazy and insane.
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@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I never did get what software "freedom" even means.
It's not all that difficult to understand: it's sort of an backwards copyright. You have the freedom to copy, use, and change GPL-licensed software, provided you grant those same freedoms of access to your changes to everyone else.
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Blame the inherent susceptibility of the closed-source commercial software ecosystem to market failure.
Picture this being asked in the same tone Jim Kirk asked "what does God need with a starship?": how does the failure of an open-source project indict the free market?
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@FrostCat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
It's not all that difficult to understand: it's sort of an backwards copyright. You have the freedom to copy, use, and change GPL-licensed software, provided you grant those same freedoms of access to your changes and the entirety of the rest of your codebase, whether the GPL code has anything to do with it or not to everyone else.
FTFY
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I completely fail to see how you get from what I said to what you said.
Nobody is surprised at this revelation.
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@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
a PNG library?
The basics of PNG are pretty easy to implement, actually: you could write a decoder for the handful of most important chunks in a couple of hours, including time spent reading the spec and writing a trivial program to draw the contents of an image onto a window.
Note the underlined word, of course.
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@FrostCat and @blakeyrat
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@groo said in How did you start hating opensource?:
The GPL license doesn't obligue the library's author to be an asshole
No, that seems to have been a free (see what I did there) bonus.
@groo said in How did you start hating opensource?:
and has nothing to do with it.
The kind of person who'd write a GPLed library is probably slightly more likely than others to answer like that, though. Correlation, if not causation, though.
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Or maybe most software developers are asshats.
While that's true, someone who had written a commercial (open- or closed-source) PNG library or whatever is almost trivially obviously not going to tell someone who wants to give them money to FOAD.
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@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I needed the library for like 2 function calls, but would have had to spend 6+ months implementing the library myself
Those must've been two really complex functions!
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@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Me: Hey, Open-Source guy, we'll throw money at you if you give us a non-GPL license for your library.
Open-Source Guy: No! You make your stuff open source NOW! GPL OR DIE!!! FREEDOM!! FREEDOM!! ALL HAIL STALLMAN!! frothing at mouthI'm calling shenanigans on this, simply because most OSS devs don't act like this. Yes, the GNU folks often do, but given that 99% of OSS devs have shifted away from GPL precisely because of this Free Software Master Race crap, and the fact that GNU themselves do nothing that isn't a copy of something some else already did (and often an inferior one at that) and has non-GPL equivalents in both closed and open source libraries, I can't imagine this ever actually happens.
For years, GPL was the only open license most people knew about; but as people started hearing about the BSD and MIT licenses more often, and other alternatives such as CC and FAL arose, most OSS devs I am familiar with have dropped GPL like a live grenade. Yes, GNU themselves always use a GPL derivative, but as loud and prominent as they are, they are not the entire OSS world.
Yes there's plenty wrong about the GPL, regardless of the version, but if you are going to talk about OSS as a whole, bashing just that doesn't fly anymore. There are plenty of crappy things about both OSS and CSS to bitch over, so just repeating this ad nauseam has long since become necrohippomastigation.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Please don't be obnoxiously ic about it.
ITYM "a pedantic dickweed" to this particular person.
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@groo said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@FrostCat and @blakeyrat
Nah, more like
http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/30700000/Laurel-and-Hardy-laurel-and-hardy-30795259-1600-1283.jpgBlakey's the drunk-looking guy on the right.
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@FrostCat Yeah.
Don't make fun of the guy who doesn't know what "etc." is. Make fun of me. Because obviously I'm the most deserving of it.
Pile it on.
Come on.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@FrostCat Yeah.
Don't make fun of the guy who doesn't know what "etc."It's not his fault that the USA was sleeping through the language revolution and didn't make an american version of "et cetera" that would be understood by all americans.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Make fun of me.
Have you ever seen Laurel and Hardy? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess not, if you think "making fun of Blakey" was all that was going on.
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@blakeyrat Who's on first?
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@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@blakeyrat Who's on first?
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Addendum to my first post: Has anyone had the displeasure of using Audacity? Either I'm doing something wrong, or Audacity is just plain terrible. And many recommend it for audio editing, as well.
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Can't say I've had problems for the minor editing I've done (hiss/noise removal, chopping up a recording session into individual IVR prompts). What sort of trick are you attempting to accomplish>
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If I build an awesome program and it has 99 features that I implemented myself, and I want to add one important feature that's implemented in a GPL library, and I can do so without modifying the GPL code in any way, does the GPL leave me alone and allow me to do that? Of course not; it takes over your entire codebase. This is why people dislike viral licenses.
You should instead dislike the library's developers for choosing the GPL license instead of the LGPL license.
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Well at least that open source guy is honest about his goal not being to produce quality software.
Stallman was pretty explicit in his GNU Manifesto that his goal was to have free (as in speech) alternatives for every type of program. Quality wasn't really mentioned that much. I should probably go add this to the quixotic ideas thread.
@FrostCat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
It's not all that difficult to understand: it's sort of an backwards copyright. You have the freedom to copy, use, and change GPL-licensed software, provided you grant those same freedoms of access to your changes to everyone else.
Which is why I don't get all the GPL hate. It's essentially a "share and share alike" license. If it doesn't meet your needs, use something else. If there isn't anything else, how is that the fault of the GPL developer (though calling that a market failure is a bit much)?
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@groo said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Then write your own stupid PNG library.
I have done. I know I wrote it, and I know it is stupid. ;)
@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
And open-source it under a BSD/MIT licence
I have done that too.
@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
why not simply use libpng
I needed more control over how it recovered from failure. I have pretty strict requirements on that front.
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Please don't be obnoxiously ic about it.
YMBNH
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@HardwareGeek said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@flabdablet said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If it's really ever the case that the only library you can find to do some important thing is GPL-licenced with an unavailable author, don't blame the GPL for the resulting difficulty. Blame the inherent susceptibility of the closed-source commercial software ecosystem to market failure.
I think Flabby's started his weekend drinking. TDEMSYR
No, actually I think he's totally correct here. Yes, really.
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@mott555 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
But there is a strong correlation. The authors of a GPL library are almost certainly going to be assholes. It's rare that they aren't.
Where "being an asshole" means not licensing their software in a way that they don't want to?
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I'm not being pedantic, I'm asking people to read the words on the screen before they reply.
Except that you don't have to know the contents of what you wrote?
I don't understand why what @flabdablet is saying is at all controversial.
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@FrostCat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
how does the failure of an open-source project indict the free market?
How did an open-source project fail here? Because it didn't fit the needs of some non-open source project?
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@boomzilla said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@FrostCat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
how does the failure of an open-source project indict the free market?
How did an open-source project fail here? Because it didn't fit the needs of some non-open source project?
Bear in mind of whom I was asking the question. It is possible i was dealing with a guy who
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@masonwheeler said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Shakespeare's Who's On First – 08:58
Oh my shit. An upvote is not enough. + 󦹅
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@antiquarian said in How did you start hating opensource?:
If there isn't anything else, how is that the fault of the GPL developer (though calling that a market failure is a bit much)?
Well...there's demand, but no supply (in the scenario above). What else to call it?
Of course, the problem is the temporal variable: "I can write it but it will take 6 months." :jaundiced_shrug:
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@dkf said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I needed more control over how it recovered from failure. I have pretty strict requirements on that front.
But you forgot to complain here? I guess.
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@FrostCat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Bear in mind of whom I was asking the question.
Hang on....tequila is making this a non-trivial effort....oh...well, he and I have a...complicated intellectual relationship. We see eye to eye on a lot of technical things. And I really don't see what the problem is with what he's said here.