Please open source all the things

[BuZz]

Originally Posted by Dunny

what people really want is to not have to write that code themselves.

That's certainly not why projects I work on are open source.

[JonSick]

There is another problem with open source.

When music became something that everyone could create for minimal or no cost and nobody could make money from, the quality of it plummeted. Under the "dinosaur" model where artists were signed and got released, pragmatically all the crap was essentially filtered. Sure there were great underground artists, but by in large most of the "bigger" artists remained untouched.

With the influx of open source becoming such that you are demonized for not participating, the liklihood of future software quality going down is immeasurably increased. Just look at Android apps vs Apple iPhone apps. Android is a platform where anyone can throw on whatever crap they make for minimal costs. And the result is a Play store that is so chock full of crap, you need to go through 10-15 or so apps before you find one that's usable. My time with the iPhone was wholly different. Moderated, requires a financial stake from the developer, the apps quality is just far far higher.

Personally, though I have participated in open source, usually those projects are mainly for interest only rather than being a commercially applied piece of software. The last thing I would do is dedicate myself as a developer full time to a free and open source project. Exactly how is my mortgage meant to get paid? Love? Fairies?

[BuZz]

You can get paid for working on free / open software, but some people enjoy programming in their spare time too. many companies use / benefit and contribute to open source. eg http://automattic.com have open source at their heart -

We have a one-button deploy system for WordPress.com, and we push code to the site 60-80 times a day. WordPress.com is synced with the WordPress.org trunk pretty much every weekday. We’re strong believers in Open Source, and we try to open source everything we can. The company was structured to align the economic incentives as such.

Just because there are some poor Android apps doesn't mean proprietary code is better. I'm not a fan of Apple censorship and prefer to have the choice (sure there are some nasty/badly made apps, but there are ones that Apple just didn't like because they don't like competition - such as banning a magazine about Android). I've also not had a problem finding usable apps as you have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censor...unes_App_Store

Here's a report regarding code quality between open source / proprietary software http://www.coverity.com/press-releas...he-first-time/

Open source code quality surpasses proprietary code quality in C/C++ projects. Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality, and a defect density of 1.0 is considered the accepted industry standard for good quality software. Coverity’s analysis found an average defect density of .59 for open source C/C++ projects that leverage the Scan service, compared to an average defect density of .72 for proprietary C/C++ code developed for enterprise projects. In 2013, code quality of open source projects using the Scan service surpassed that of proprietary projects at all code base sizes, which further highlights the open source community’s strong commitment to development testing.

[BigFan]

Originally Posted by JonSick

There is another problem with open source.

When music became something that everyone could create for minimal or no cost and nobody could make money from, the quality of it plummeted. Under the "dinosaur" model where artists were signed and got released, pragmatically all the crap was essentially filtered. Sure there were great underground artists, but by in large most of the "bigger" artists remained untouched.

You cannot compare arts to architecture. Music, movies, paintings, all that expresses what the creator wants you to see/hear as his/her vision.
F*ing greedy managers blocked arts that don't fill their pockets based on ecomic expectations on target market.
Yes , the crap has been filtered out, but good stuff too. Until the underground goes mainstream and they can't ignore any longer.

The crap in architecture (hard or software) is filtered too during the process of planning-creating-releasing. There might be other devs interested in continuing development or not. But there is no self-entitled supervisor judging what is good and what is bad.
Except for todays globally dominating companies, but they focus on propietary code anyway.

Just my 2 cent

[Dunny]

I tend to agree with JonSick above. Nearly all of my own hobby code is open; usually public domain rather than a restrictive license like GPL etc. Anything I have to write for someone is closed immediately, especially if I'm going to get paid for it.

I'm actually developing one of my PD applications now, upgrading and enhancing it for a paying customer - none of the changes will be open source, and the code will be closed and proprietary from now on.

D.

[wXR]

Well, that settles it then. Today's music and code, which JonSick has spent several lifetimes thoroughly exploring to its ultimate depths, is crap, because it's not being disseminated by a centralized, proprietary tastemaker. Case closed, thread over.

[JonSick]

Originally Posted by wXR

Well, that settles it then. Today's music and code, which JonSick has spent several lifetimes thoroughly exploring to its ultimate depths, is crap, because it's not being disseminated by a centralized, proprietary tastemaker. Case closed, thread over.

Actually, that's counter to my point. The fact that music is now a lot worse, the centralized tastemakers are now able to hold to ransom both their own incorporated artists and underground artists. With underground artists being overshadowed by the sheer miles of crap that muddy the waters, the centralized tastemakers have never had a better time of spewing out their formulaic crap. The result? Music overall, in my humble 34 year experience as a musician, has certainly and substantially lessened in quality.

With open source - and I'm not saying this is fact - the sheer amount of crap that's around which either doesn't work or not very well overshadows almost any other free and open source material which is worth its salt. With all this crap knocking about, paid software houses know they can get away with a substantially lower quality and get away with it. Two words, E...A...

While I'm not totally dissing on open source - I contribute to some projects myself - I really don't think it's a sustainable model by in large.

[BuZz]

There is a lot of crap proprietary software around too (I have seen a lot of crap proprietary code). Why not read the article I linked to which is a more in depth analysis than just you saying you've seen a lot of crap

[Mrs Beanbag]

interesting article. i don't know what sort of "defects" such an automatic system can pick up, but from my own experience in proprietary commercial development, the problem is often not "bad code" but "bad design". And sometimes even that "bad design" isn't because of "bad decisions" but because of requirements that changed over the years; it was a good decision at some point in the past.

[JonSick]

10KLOC is not a reasonable argument to open-source everything in the world ever. I'm not surprised that OS has a lower 10KLOC than proprietary simply due to the number of developers available to optimize code. But so long as the code itself works, then fair enough.

My argument is that open source developments are usually, simply in my experience, either software not worth charging for or you couldn't charge for. Most proprietary software is such that you can charge for it and, given the scale of development, you should.

I have to say though, the tone of argument against what I'm saying is strikingly similar to suggesting to someone that illegally downloading GBs worth of recorded music is in some way criminal and/or morally wrong. I have personally seen artists who have attacked music pirates drawn over the coals at the mere suggestion (e.g. the lead singer from the band Terror).

[copse]

Originally Posted by JonSick

I have to say though, the tone of argument against what I'm saying is strikingly similar to suggesting to someone that illegally downloading GBs worth of recorded music is in some way criminal and/or morally wrong. I have personally seen artists who have attacked music pirates drawn over the coals at the mere suggestion (e.g. the lead singer from the band Terror).

We live in a world of judgement, and comparing one judgement against another will always have a similarity.

I like your thoughts on open source though. I do however think it's a good business model, if you want to imprison your code by using a GPL license. There's a project I'd use, but I can't because the license clashes. But you can buy your way around the license. And I can look at the source code and say to myself, there's nothing like this and someone has worked away and made something special, they deserve money. But because of circumstances, it's locked away from me despite being right there.

[kolla]

In my professional life, where results counts and lack of functionality means lost revenue, open source is king, as functionality can be added and interfaces maintained in reasonable fashion. When "special needs" occure with proprietary software, all we can do is shrug and send a feature request that may or may not be dealt with, while we twiddle our thumbs. I recall waiting more than 2 years on support for something simple as proper certificate handling for https in a proprietary economy system (heck, most proprietary systems to this day do not do chained certificates correctly - HP, I am looking at you, your ILO solutions suck at certificate chains! You too VMware!). Also proprietary software suck at implementing internet standards, convincing a company that IPv6 support is essential is like trying to do agility training with a cow. No, that is unfair to the cow. Likewise explaining how database backends work for people that try to push proprietary web solutions. No, please, I rather do these fights with open source software, where the end result can be shared and improved by people with actual skills... reminds me how I once had a consultant from a big well known company, doing manual search and replace using notepad, on a dump from an Oracle DB, in relation to an upgrade. She was paid by the hour of course. I showed her how to do it in a more capable editor and invited her out on icecream for the next 30 minutes.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I use whatever I need to use. Why do you?

D.

I use whatever works and is maintainable over time. Typically that means open source in various shapes and forms. Proprietary is typically nice and shiny for a very short period only, once the need for more interoperability arise, or bugs emerge, proprietary solutions become foot chains.

[kolla]

As for Android software - most Android apps are proprietary, the problem is more that Android (in my experience) tend to lack a lot of basic features, and there seem to be zero quality control of software released on Google Play market.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by copse

But because of circumstances, it's locked away from me despite being right there.

But that is exactly the same with proprietary software. And in both cases you can contact owners for a possibility of solving legal issues, by dual licensing or other means.

[copse]

Originally Posted by kolla

As for Android software - most Android apps are proprietary, the problem is more that Android (in my experience) tend to lack a lot of basic features, and there seem to be zero quality control of software released on Google Play market.

Isn't this an opportunity?

Lacking features = takes less work to clone and make a more feature-full version. Lack of quality control = takes less work to clone and make a better quality version.

Even if you got the source, it's questionable whether it would be better to write something else from scratch.

[copse]

Originally Posted by kolla

But that is exactly the same with proprietary software. And in both cases you can contact owners for a possibility of solving legal issues, by dual licensing or other means.

I'm not sure what point you're making. It could be read as saying why open source, if just distributing a binary accomplishes exactly the same thing?

[kolla]

I also once, in a state of mild frustration with some proprietary product (from well known Cali company that delivers networking equipment, whos name rhymes with disco), if they did basic unit testing when coding this... stuff. I was replied with blank stares. The problem (802.1x authentication with dynamic vlan "leaking" previously authorized clients on to wrong VLAN upon reauthorization - fairly serious bug) On the funny side, we got to run a bunch of developer releases over the next year or so - all booting the wlc with a linux kernel. Final product was shipped with "RTOS" as kernel though - guess they were tied to agreements on shipping products, hah.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by copse

Isn't this an opportunity?

For Apple? Sure.

Lacking features = takes less work to clone and make a more feature-full version. Lack of quality control = takes less work to clone and make a better quality version.

Amazon did this with Kindle, didn't they?

Even if you got the source, it's questionable whether it would be better to write something else from scratch.

I updated ALSA (backported it) on my LG phone to improve sound quality, it wasn't so hard. Due to nvidia chipset I was locked to a given binary blob kernel module from nvidia, which did not come with an API wrapper, and hence it was also locked to both kernel and gcc revision. I eventually had it, and moved to iOS, which is also based around open source btw.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by copse

I'm not sure what point you're making. It could be read as saying why open source, if just distributing a binary accomplishes exactly the same thing?

Read the context. My comment was just that if you have problem with your product using existing open source solution, due to licensing, you would have the exact same problem using existing proprietary solution. And in both cases you may solve the issue by contacting the owners. Both proprietary and open source software come with different types of licenses covering distribution of binaries.