How did you start hating opensource?
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@FrostCat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I don't know what the fuck [QEMU] is.
It emulates Q from Star Trek TNG. That is to say, it's like the old Eliza program, but snarkier.
Come now, Jean-Luc, after all I've done for you and all your... little people.
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I am absolutely certain the FSF and its garbage fire license is entirely responsiblefor the idiot put-it-all-in-a-browser and SaaS crap being the default state of things. Can't distribute the software because it's dubious whether you actually comply with the insane "give away everything that touches this code" license terms (particularly in the eyes of the company lawyers)?
Put it in the web. You're not distributing it then!
Of course, I recently saw an open source license that required publication of linking source at all times, even if you're using it strictly internally. The stock library binary and source actually has a license mechanism where you have to email the author a link to where you're sharing your app source and they issues you instructions to stop it from spamming stdout with dire warnings about the license.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@bb36e said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Because when companies strive to make their interfaces more accessible, they usually remove the parts that made it easy/fast/intuitive for knowledgeable users.
Not true.
That ribbon was and always will be a piece of shit. Windows 8, I don't think they even bothered asking anyone if they considered it an improvement.
Back in the late 90s/2000s it was easy as fuck to print a simple envelope in word. Then Microsoft improved it and it's a cluster fuck. So yeah that's not true.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@fbmac said in How did you start hating opensource?:
and QEMU
I don't know what the fuck that is.
Is that the wheel of karma turning that I hear? Perhaps you will finally realize (among other things) that your own experience of the IT world is not everyone else's?
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@blakeyrat You definitely met a bigger star but I had a much more personalized incident.
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@Arantor said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Come now, Jean-Luc, after all I've done for you and all your... little people.
Let's face it, that's more interesting than what it actually is.
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@HardwareGeek said in How did you start hating opensource?:
One or another of the Office applications crashes at least once a day, on average.
Hmm, MS have gone downhill.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Node.JS broke their debug build so it crashes if there's long file names
What the fuck are you talking about?
@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Ben L's talking about that one right now.
No I'm not.
The closest I can figure out to what you might mean is that there's a buffer overrun in V8's gdbjit module, which isn't included by default, and which is caused by a long regular expression. V8, by the way, is a JavaScript JIT used by Google Chrome, a closed-source browser.
It's also available in .NET, which means that by proxy, everything written in any language Microsoft supports is bad.
But I'm not telepathic so I'll just assume you were lying.
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@anonymous234 said in How did you start hating opensource?:
The real reason why companies don't do it is because it's illegal.
Or the application's just easier to get along with when there's an expert available to do the support. That's true for quite a few applications we use at work; we could do everything ourselves, but we don't want to have to look after all the infrastructure to make it happen ourselves, so paying for the SaaS model is very nice.
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@Weng said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I am absolutely certain the FSF and its garbage fire license is entirely responsiblefor the idiot put-it-all-in-a-browser and SaaS crap being the default state of things.
I wouldn't say “entirely”. For some stuff, SaaS makes plenty of sense. Of course, anyone who says that it should be used for everything by everyone is an idiot who's been smoking a few too many Gartner reports, but there's a lot of diversity in the space between there and the firms that have very predictable and stern data safety requirements that justify keeping absolutely everything in house.
From the perspective of SaaS providers, the benefit is that it opens up the use of the software to companies (usually) that would otherwise not be able to afford the use of the software at all. I remember doing research in this area around 10 years ago, and that was the key case: a small firm that makes, e.g., wind turbines would benefit a lot from proper computing support in the design stage, but would be actually spending most of their time in the construction and support stages where heavy compute isn't required. The software vendor we were working with was entirely pragmatic: better to have their own cluster and support staff and rent some time out to various SMEs than not have any of their money at all. The license wasn't on the radar at all; it was their proprietary code and stayed that.
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Hey, I just remembered that OpenOffice wasn't developed as opensource. It was StarOffice, and they released the code after they gave up competing with Word.
That's was a lot better than leting their product die off wasn't it?
For a project created as OSS from the beginning, I think we have abiword and gnumeric and whatever comes with kde.
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@dkf said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@HardwareGeek said in How did you start hating opensource?:
One or another of the Office applications crashes at least once a day, on average.
Hmm, MS have gone downhill.
And today's crash is brought to you by Excel and the letters "foo (version 1).xlsb [Autosaved]."
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@Weng said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I am absolutely certain the FSF and its garbage fire license is entirely responsiblefor the idiot put-it-all-in-a-browser and SaaS crap being the default state of things. Can't distribute the software because it's dubious whether you actually comply with the insane "give away everything that touches this code" license terms (particularly in the eyes of the company lawyers)?
Put it in the web. You're not distributing it then!
Of course, I recently saw an open source license that required publication of linking source at all times, even if you're using it strictly internally. The stock library binary and source actually has a license mechanism where you have to email the author a link to where you're sharing your app source and they issues you instructions to stop it from spamming stdout with dire warnings about the license.
You're thinking of the AGPL, of course. The name is as confusing as anyone who thinks it's a good license....... and yes. I have had "discussions" with that particular sort of developer. They tend to believe that closed-source software of any type is a sin against nature and are horrified to see the gross exploitation of software under the toothless GPL 3.0 that the web age has brought about.
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@pydsigner whenever there is a viable OSS, I don't see why I should lose my freedoms to some closed source thing
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In this thread:
@blakeyrat fails to understand humans yet again
@blakeyrat fails to understand differing requirements yet again
@blakeyrat fails to understand different abilities and preferences yet again
@blakeyrat fails to understand how software and file format compatibility and the network effect combine to squash competition
@blakeyrat fails to understand how competition will sometimes force commercial software to become better or die
@blakeyrat thinks that because nodejs is bad and nodejs is OSS, all OSS is bad
@blakeyrat thinks OSS is bad because (he thinks) the software produced by OSS is bad, yet simultaneously thinks software quality is orthoganal to whether it's OSS or not
@ChrisH does his best @blakeyrat impersonation and forgets that unfinished doesn't mean "doesn't do what I want" and also doesn't mean "has no value for anybody"
@everybody misunderstands the GPL
@everybody thinks the GPL forces them to use it and be constrained by it
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@pydsigner Apparently AGPL has been superceded by the GNU Affero GPL, which is inevitably an stallmanified version of the Affero GPL.
The particular library I have in mind is actually dual licensed for closed source commercial use - I'm pretty sure their primary motivation is to bait developers into using the damned library and then force sales when legal finds out. Fuck knows that's why it's going through WTFCorp Procurement right now (some other division under our previous VP loves it and uses it "free". I was told to use it. I said "Fuck no that's not free". They said "Fucking do it." I fucking did it. And then we changed VPs and I screamed until we started procurement.
(I also screamed before we changed VPs, but nobody cared. Still nobody cares, but we had an opportunity to charge a customer for it so that's what we're doing. And the only reason that's happening is because I outright refused to allow my team to write another line of code using the library, including the code for this customer. Sigh.)
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@Weng said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I am absolutely certain the FSF and its garbage fire license is entirely responsiblefor the idiot put-it-all-in-a-browser and SaaS crap being the default state of things.
I'm certain that the rise in prevalence of browser-based SaaS comes about from a convergence of several things:
- Mobile platforms are wildly popular.
- Mobile platforms are diverse so supporting them all means a lot of porting.
- Mobile platforms are limited by memory, CPU, graphics, storage, etc, but they all have a browser.
- Browsers have greatly improved as application platforms.
Browser-based SaaS has a few other advantages over traditional desktop applications:
- zero installation or desktop management overhead.
- update schedules can be forced, no need to worry about legacy versions floating around.
- updates can be seamless, the users need not even know when one happens.
- updates can be as frequent as desired.
It's the thin client dream finally come true.
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@Weng said in How did you start hating opensource?:
The particular library I have in mind is actually dual licensed for closed source commercial use - I'm pretty sure their primary motivation is to bait developers into using the damned library and then force sales when legal finds out
Dual licensing is a common way to make money with OSS. You gain popularity giving it for free to oss projects and sell to commercial ones. That's not "baiting".
Your VP was a dumb asshole that asked you to pirate it.
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@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I don't see why I should lose my freedoms to some closed source thing
Ok, but unless I'm planning to tweak the code to better suit my purposes (which I've done exactly once) and/or redistribute it (which I've done never), the freedom to hypothetically do something I have no interest in actually doing is not so terribly important to me. Unless the licence is so restrictive that it claims the product of using the software is a derivative work, I don't really care much which licence it uses.
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@otter Naw, the way these guys structure things, it's quite clear they're doing bait and switch marketing.
The license is BURIED. Their website reads 100% like "Free proprietary library with optional commercial support!" or maybe "GPL library with optional commercial support" until you've actually:
- Downloaded the binary and read license.txt (Which in turn tells you to go to the FSF wobsite to read the license). Show me a developer that doesn't default to "Oh it's just another GPL library. Box it off in its own library and if we're extremely paranoid, box that in a thin wrapper web service and it'll be fine" and I'll show you someone who needs a promotion.
- Downloaded the binary, linked it, and called it, at which point it starts spamming STDERR and STDOUT about how you're in violation of the license because you didn't email them a link to your download URL so they could send you a special binary without the spam built in (WTF!).
- Googled harder, scrolled past the vendor, their book, etc. to the bottom of page 1, where there's a SourceForge link, discovered it's no longer hosted there, followed the link through to another site Google doesn't know about, discovered it isn't actually available there, and clicked through from there to Github, clicked license.txt, followed the link through to the FSF, scrolled down the page to the AGPL, clicked that.
- Clicked no fewer than 5 screens past the traditional downloads page, whereupon it is kind enough to actually outline the main AGPL requirements and offer to sell you a commercial license instead.
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@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
For a project created as OSS from the beginning, I think we have abiword and gnumeric and whatever comes with kde.
I think gnumeric belongs to Gnome, and there is KOffice suite for KDE.
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@pydsigner said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@Weng said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I am absolutely certain the FSF and its garbage fire license is entirely responsiblefor the idiot put-it-all-in-a-browser and SaaS crap being the default state of things. Can't distribute the software because it's dubious whether you actually comply with the insane "give away everything that touches this code" license terms (particularly in the eyes of the company lawyers)?
Put it in the web. You're not distributing it then!
Of course, I recently saw an open source license that required publication of linking source at all times, even if you're using it strictly internally. The stock library binary and source actually has a license mechanism where you have to email the author a link to where you're sharing your app source and they issues you instructions to stop it from spamming stdout with dire warnings about the license.
You're thinking of the AGPL, of course. The name is as confusing as anyone who thinks it's a good license....... and yes. I have had "discussions" with that particular sort of developer. They tend to believe that closed-source software of any type is a sin against nature and are horrified to see the gross exploitation of software under the toothless GPL 3.0 that the web age has brought about.
Run away from AGPL like plague. I personally choose BSD/MIT if I like my software to be widely used. GPLv2 was fine, but with GPLv3, GPLvN+, ... crap anything with the word GPL in it is fucked. Only usable GPLv2 software is kernel. If you end up changing it, you better open your source anyways or your out of tree driver sooner or later will need complete re-write. Fortunately you can have user code with any license use the kernel without being considered a derivative work.
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@bb36e said in How did you start hating opensource?:
With a CLI, once I know the command it's one step to do it again.
You have photographic memory?
No, just up-arrow and Ctrl-R.
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@dse said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Run away from AGPL like plague.
That's the advice I've given on it too. The other GPL variants are hardly much better except possibly the LGPL, and that's the one where you need to talk to Legal about it. So it's probably Don't Anyway. The others don't need you to spend time bothering the lawyers; you can figure out the NOPE! yourself.
I personally choose BSD/MIT if I like my software to be widely used.
The Apache license is also relatively good. I think it's effectively the same (except for perhaps some mechanically-satisfiable reporting requirements) as long as you're not making any sort of patent claims.
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@dse said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I personally choose BSD/MIT if I like my software to be widely used.
BSD/MIT has the additional feature that you can actually read the license text in a reasonable amount of time and without acquiring a pounding headache for your troubles. FWIW BSD/MIT is my main go-to license as well.
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@HardwareGeek said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
I don't see why I should lose my freedoms to some closed source thing
Ok, but unless I'm planning to tweak the code to better suit my purposes (which I've done exactly once) and/or redistribute it (which I've done never), the freedom to hypothetically do something I have no interest in actually doing is not so terribly important to me. Unless the licence is so restrictive that it claims the product of using the software is a derivative work, I don't really care much which licence it uses.
try removing bloat from an android phone without rooting
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@dse said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Run away from AGPL like plague.
only if you are a closed source dev looking for libraries
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You people call me back when windows let me read my ext4fs external HD, or when they release on opensource driver for NTFS that works well.
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@fbmac said in How did you start hating opensource?:
You people call me back when windows let me read my ext4fs external HD,
the wonders of open source:
or if you hate opensource you can pay for the obviously "superior" paid edition by a different developer:
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@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
when they release on opensource driver for NTFS that works well
Probably not until years after Microsoft changes to something else. It's a very closed format. Takes a while to reverse engineer all that while dodging lawsuit notifications.
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@accalia It didn't work well last time I checked
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@fbmac said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@accalia It didn't work well last time I checked
WOMM
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@anonymous234 My understanding of the state of NTFS support was that Microsoft publishes the spec but it's heavily versioned filesystem with an evolving and immense (and arbitrarily extendable) featureset, including core features that don't map to anything outside the Windows ecosystem (like ACLs full of SIDs).
So opensource drivers don't bother implementing the parts that don't map, and don't bother with the non core parts at all.
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@accalia WOMM as well.
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@ChrisH said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Also I hate OSS developers who justify their crappy, unfinished, bug-infested, works-for-me softwarez with the fact that they didn't get money for it. FUCK YOU.
@ChrisH didn't pay me a dime for NodeBB, therefore I can leave in as many bugs as I want. QED.
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Also the other day I plugged in my
BelgiumBrother MFC and Ubuntu automatically loaded drivers for it and I could print immediately. That's progress... (the scanner was a different story)
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@julianlam You could even put more bugs on purpose just to mess with him
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@julianlam Quiet, you. Now go make NodeBB work.properly on @Lorne-Kates' Mozilla Firebird install.
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@Weng Firebird?
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@pydsigner Firefox was originally released as Phoenix, which they dropped because it was already in use and trademarked.
They chose Firebird. Which was when it started gaining notoriety and tech people started using it as a mainstream browser.
Of course, Firebird is also the name of a DBMS. So they changed names again, to Firefox.
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@Weng Which was the name of a Clint Eastwood film.
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@Weng I prefer Iceweasel myself.
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@julianlam Iceweasel is just a rebranded Firefox
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@flabdablet That movie rocked.
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@julianlam IIRC Debian's moving away from Iceweasel now, they're changing it to just be 'Firefox ESR' because they settled their differences with Mozilla
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@blakeyrat said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@flabdablet That movie rocked.
Just like the browser amirite?
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@julianlam said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@Weng I prefer Iceweasel myself.
You'll be disheartened to know, then, that the Iceweasel Age is now over.
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@otter said in How did you start hating opensource?:
Hey, I just remembered that OpenOffice wasn't developed as opensource. It was StarOffice, and they released the code after they gave up competing with Word.
That's was a lot better than leting their product die off wasn't it?
For a project created as OSS from the beginning, I think we have abiword and gnumeric and whatever comes with kde.
Is that the product mentioned in the VirtuDyne series of stories?
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@Luhmann said in How did you start hating opensource?:
@accalia said in How did you start hating opensource?:
WOMM
we need an emoji for that ...