@stinch said:
@Alex Papadimoulis said:Anyone have any
better ideas? I think this CS software is a good demonstration of why
most open source things are a failure. Everyone wants to take time to
complain about it, but no one wants to fix it. The team developing it
is immature and has no idea how to develop good software.No doubt there is plenty of crap open source software out there, the low barrier of entry pretty much assures that.
If CS is open source or not really depends on your definition of open source. Sure you can get access to the source code but under a pretty restrictive license. The license is going to put off practically all contributors. There are thousands of open source projects out there, why would I bother contributing one that doesn't even let people redistribute the source.
No, the question of if something is open source is controlled by the Open Source Initiative, who coined the term after a careful search to make sure that nobody else was using it. They then trademarked the term. They have every right to decide if your project can be called open source or not. They have specifically decided that having the source available is not enough to call yourself open source, it must be redistributable. http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
Community server does not meet their qualifications for open source, nor do they claim to be open source (as far as I can tell anyway). They are fully in their rights to not make their code open source, and I support them fully in that decision.
However, because they are not open source, every programmer should think carefully before having anything to do with the source code without being paid for their efforts. That isn't to say you shouldn't give them the fruits of your labor for free, but you must understand that the rules are not fair, and not in your favor. Contributing to an open source project gives you the assurance that giving your code away will be done under fair rules.
Open source does not ensure that a program will be high quality. Like everything it varies.