[HN Gopher] When free software isn't practically superior (2015)
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When free software isn't practically superior (2015)
Author : henning
Score : 45 points
Date : 2020-12-17 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gnu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gnu.org)
| linspace wrote:
| Although I agree more with the idea of free SW than with open
| source I cannot help finding here a resemblance of the obsession
| of all religions with heresies. And the smaller the community the
| more ridiculous it looks.
|
| In particular attacking open source by downplaying the importance
| of collaboration, by giving quite absurd numbers IMO, it's
| attacking one of the things that I find transcend technical
| merit, like the freedom that is at the core of the free SW
| movement.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Sure "Open source" is a bad term. "Free software" is also a bad
| term as that heavily connotes strains of American individualism
| which isn't really the appropriate ideological basis either.
|
| We need a new discourse of the "forkable commons" and how it
| transcends old individualism-vs-collectivism battles.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Entomologist E.O Wilson said about communism, "great idea, wrong
| species". It's basically how I feel about 'free software'.
| There's a very straight forward reason why, as the author points
| out, free software projects are run by lone developers and lack
| resources. Because free software, by its own stated mission goal,
| basically has no good way to reap the rewards for the benefits it
| brings to the public. It's a great idea in the wrong economic
| system.
| phkahler wrote:
| Lone developers have the option of dual licensing, and I think
| more people should do that. Use GPLv3 or even AGPL for the free
| version and offer commercial license as well.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > free software projects are run by lone developers and lack
| resources
|
| Sometimes. The Linux kernel is developed mostly by paid
| professionals, as is OpenJDK, Chromium, and Firefox.
| _jal wrote:
| Ideological commitments like this are just blinding. People
| convince themselves of something and literally can no longer
| see things right in front of them.
|
| > free software projects are run by lone developers and lack
| resources
|
| I'm sure nonsense like this gets sage nods when presented in
| front of of nontechnical executives, and there are indeed
| projects this describes.
|
| It doesn't describe RedHat, Ubuntu, Postgres, the Linux kernel,
| any number of Apache Foundation projects... it is either
| ignorant or dishonest cherry-picking.
|
| > It's a great idea in the wrong economic system.
|
| Economics is a useful domain of study, but studying economics
| does bad things to a certain kind of person.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The Linux kernel does not capture the market value that it
| provides to its users, or Torvalds net worth would look more
| like Gates. Neither does Ubuntu or Postgres, and Red Hat has
| commercialised services rather than software.
|
| In your reflexive attack on economics you seem to have
| misunderstood my point. I think free software is good, it's
| also on an organisational level successful, but it does not
| capture its own value, that much is fairly obvious, which
| answers the question of the author 'why is free software not
| mainstream?'
| skavi wrote:
| wrong culture maybe, but their have definitely been successful
| communal societies. And there have definitely been successful
| free software projects.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I spent a year in a kibbutz, I am definitely aware that
| there's success on the margins. But it very much has to exist
| in the crevasses of the system. The 'free software' movement
| is explicitly ethical for that reason, it is hard to justify
| it on economic grounds, and free software is undersupplied
| for that reason.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Feudalism seemed like an immovable foundation of the world
| until it wasn't. The problem with free software is the need
| for private competition to restrict people to make money.
| In a cooperative vs a competitive economy, this idea would
| come to the forefront.
|
| For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
| jancsika wrote:
| There's an alternate history where Stallman did the Aikido move
| of accepting the descriptor of "open source" to simply describe a
| subset of the free software philosophy.
|
| After all, in his initial announcement to create Gnu, he didn't
| say, "Of course it might turn out to perform worse, and it won't
| have near as many features, nor attract many other developers, or
| have a sane review process, or be secure... but that doesn't
| matter because it's all in the interest of freedom and that's the
| model people should follow." No, as with the OSI, he set out with
| some bold claims, then inspired people to help by incrementally
| _making those claims be true_.
|
| Anyway, I fail to see how anything bad would have happened from
| him making this clever play. What would have been wrong with
| going to open source conferences, and eventually reaching a
| larger audience with his prescient warnings about mass
| surveillance, DRM, and whatnot?
| jfax wrote:
| This was the article that sold me on the Free software / open
| source distinction years ago. Everything started to make so much
| more sense afterwards.
| josteink wrote:
| I know my GPL from my BSD. I know FSF's stand on "free" vs "open"
| software. That part is crystal clear to me.
|
| This piece confuses me though.
|
| It constantly seems to intermix and conflate "open source
| software" with "proprietary software".
|
| Is that intentional? Do they really mean that? That "open source"
| software is in no way better than a closed-source, proprietary
| equivalent? That closed source and permissively licensed software
| is equivalent?
|
| They can't possibly mean that, can they? Is it perhaps only badly
| written, and I'm reading too much into this?
| phkahler wrote:
| When the OSI first started approving open source licenses, it
| seemed like rain. Like every company wanted to create their own
| license with the intent to get free development work that they
| could then wrap up in closed commercial products. They were
| often incompatible with other licenses as well for that reason.
|
| To ensure code is maximally reusable IMHO all we need are MIT,
| BSD and GPL, LGPL. And two of those are not really different in
| my mind. I understand AGPL too, but not MPL or Apache licenses.
| But if they are needed then that really should be all of them.
| Any others have some kind of non-free agenda.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| The article doesn't conflate open source with proprietary
| software.
|
| It elaborates on why Stallman wrote, so many years ago, that
| Open Source is misguided, or at least, that it doesn't share
| the same goals as Free Software.
|
| Here's the gist of it:
|
| - Open Source presents itself as a _technically_ better
| alternative to proprietary software. Also, it often claims to
| be developed in a more collaborative way, "all bugs are
| shallow when there are many eyeballs", etc. If you want a
| specific name, someone who used to vocally make this kind of
| claims was Open Source's advocate Eric Raymond.
|
| - There is then the onus of _proving_ this assertion. Is it
| true that Open Source is, _as a norm_ , technically better than
| proprietary software as some of its more vocal advocates claim?
| Is it true that its development is more collaborative?
|
| - The article states that no, as any user can plainly see, Open
| Source is not always _technically_ better than proprietary
| software. Open Source is often more difficult to use, or
| unpolished, or has a worse UI, and critically, many open source
| projects are maintained by a single person, so it 's not really
| always developed more collaboratively.
|
| - The article states that this is not a problem for Free
| Software, because Free Software doesn't claim to be always
| technically better than proprietary software. It's not even its
| goal. Free Software claims to protect user's _freedoms_ , even
| at the cost of being less polished or lacking some features.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| That's a generous interpretation of the article. This line in
| the article shows the author's purposefully distorted view:
|
| > For open source, poor-quality software is a problem to be
| explained away or a reason to eschew the software altogether.
| For free software, it is a problem to be worked through.
|
| I cannot think of an OSS project that tried to "explain away"
| the quality issues they have (as in "It's poor quality
| because it is open source"), as opposed to working on them
| ("Yes, this is a bug. We'll fix some time in the future.").
| worik wrote:
| I can
|
| When a Ubuntu update completely replaced the Desktop with
| buggy unity, with out warning or option, the response of
| Ubuntu developers was "it's open sauce software, you get it
| for free, stop complaining"
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's also common to see "It's open source, fix it
| yourself."
| merb wrote:
| actually the first release was flawed, but I still liked
| unity. it's sad that it was so tangled to ubuntu.
| the_af wrote:
| I think it's more about the general stance that OSS is _in
| general_ technically superior, than about particular
| projects. The problem that must be "explained away" --
| according to the article -- is not a particular flaw of a
| specific project, but the observation that OSS is not, in
| general, technically better.
|
| TFA states that OSS, by claiming it's technically superior,
| must defend itself when it's not superior. On the other
| hand, FSS must not defend against technical flaws or
| limitations because it doesn't claim it's technically
| superior, only that it respects user freedoms better.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| The fsf considers open source to basically be a marketing
| tactic for companies to sell services around free software.
| They don't like that the open source movement is focused on
| practical reasons to use free/opensource when freedom should be
| the main reason to use it. Especially in light of the fact that
| many times it is impractical to choose free/opensource software
| over proprietary software. Free software focuses on principals
| over pragmatism
|
| They are using free and opensource as interchangeable terms for
| the same code, but used by people with different goals. I think
| at the time of this article, there was no license that was one
| and not the other. Bruce Perens has openly stated that the GPL
| was the example for the open source definition.
| [deleted]
| fsflover wrote:
| They don't mean that open source is the same as proprietary,
| but: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
| point.....
| Shared404 wrote:
| > Is it perhaps only badly written
|
| I did not find it to be badly written.
|
| > I'm reading too much into this?
|
| I would think so.
|
| My interpretation was that "Open Source" advocates must win the
| argument that Open Source will always turn out higher quality
| software, while "Free Software" advocates have an inherent
| advantage in that the software is explicitly designed to
| protect freedoms and therefore starts out ahead of proprietary
| software, even if it's less featureful.
|
| Whether I agree with this argument, I'm unsure.
| mrob wrote:
| Free Software prioritizes Freedom[0]. Both permissive and
| copyleft licenses can support this goal. Free Software
| developers use a permissive license when they judge that best
| supports their goal of maximizing Freedom (e.g. Ogg Vorbis
| using a permissive license to encourage people to switch from
| patent-encumbered MP3).
|
| Open Source Software prioritizes quality. Open Source Software
| developers do not care about Freedom except as a means to that
| end. However, almost all Open Source Software is also Free
| Software, so despite this difference they end up supporting
| Freedom as a byproduct.
|
| Proprietary software development also prioritizes quality, but
| the important difference is that proprietary software actively
| opposes Freedom. The article is discussing priorities, so it's
| natural for it to compare two methodologies with the same
| priority, but the two are not conflated. Open Source Software
| still (usually) provides Freedom, while proprietary software
| never does, and Freedom still matters even when the developers
| don't care about it.
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
| CarVac wrote:
| This is why it's important for single devs to be in a community
| with peers working on different solutions in the same problem
| space, for cross-pollination of ideas.
|
| One such example is the pixls.us community for photography-
| related free software. All kinds of devs from projects like
| RawTherapee, darktable, PhotoFlow, Filmulator, rawproc, G'MIC,
| and more, plus users, are all in the https://discuss.pixls.us/
| forums and we can all learn from one another and collaborate in
| ways other than directly contributing code.
| MH15 wrote:
| Do you know of any other communities similar to pixls.us but
| for other specializations? That's such a powerful idea!
| CarVac wrote:
| No, but here's an interview with the founder about how it
| came to be:
|
| http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/interview-with-
| pat-...
|
| Hopefully others can learn from him and forge their own
| collaborative communities.
| na85 wrote:
| I don't understand how the content of the article relates to the
| title.
|
| I was expecting a treatise on the trade offs of developing free
| software and instead it seemed mostly like a rant that boils down
| to "open source bad".
|
| What about when free software is actually inferior? The reason
| the year of Linux on the desktop never comes is that Windows and
| MacOS provide an experience that for the majority of users is
| overwhelmingly better than Linux.
|
| The response from the FSF crowd seems to mostly be "deal with it
| because freedom" which is fine, I guess, but I have better things
| to do with my time than battle my operating system to recognize
| my external monitor correctly.
| matthias509 wrote:
| Exactly, I use my free will to exchange money for an experience
| with less hassle and thus get back time which I can spend on
| other pursuits.
| 1_player wrote:
| The reason why desktop Linux is so bad has not very much to do
| with it being free software, but instead it's more of a
| political problem which many open source proponents still
| haven't understood.
|
| Everyone seems to point to Linux as the best model of open
| source community that managed to outgrow and outpace any
| commercial offering. Why is that?
|
| The secret sauce for any project, open source or not, that can
| grow as fast as successfully as Linux is the presence of a BDFL
| at the top. The one that sets the vision, that pushes back
| again anything that would impact negatively from that vision
| and, yikes, might reject patches people have spent their free
| time on. Blender and Godot are other fully open source project
| that are competing with commercial offerings, and all have
| either a BDFL or a very close-knit governance model at the top,
| that is not afraid to take the next step and find sources of
| funding for its own full time developers.
|
| All of which is opposite to the governance model of the two
| biggest UI projects in the Linux desktop world, GNOME and KDE.
| It's a loose bunch of passionate people that work on whatever
| tickles the fancy right now, and if they get bored they'll just
| rewrite a core library or app, backward compatibility be
| damned, we're just volunteer we don't owe you anything.
|
| We'd have Linux on the desktop in 2020 if any of those projects
| had some Torvalds-like figure ranting on a mailing list about
| why the user is always right, shame on you on redesigning the
| menubar yet again breaking any UI convention for no real
| purpose, and no, Canonical/Red Hat/whoever, we will not accept
| this patch that undermines the goals of this project.
|
| So it's really got nothing to do with open source, it's just an
| organisational problem. Well, that, and the fact that the vast
| majority of Linux users seems to be incredibly stingy and
| reluctant to support and pay for these volunteers' time.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > We'd have Linux on the desktop in 2020 if any of those
| projects had some Torvalds-like figure ranting on a mailing
| list about why the user is always right, shame on you on
| redesigning the menubar yet again breaking any UI convention
| for no real purpose, and no, Canonical/Red Hat/whoever, we
| will not accept this patch that undermines the goals of this
| project.
|
| I don't think a Torvalds like BDFL would save Linux desktop.
| With the Linux kernel, there is a massive incentive for
| everyone to circle their wagons around one kernel. By having
| a single Linux kernel, it makes it much easier for vendors to
| create drivers and services against. With the desktop, the
| incentive to stick with "one" desktop solution drops off
| quickly.
|
| If I want a tabbed window manager and one doesn't exist, I
| create it. This is great for me and the people who want a
| tabbed window manager, but for the other 95%+ of the
| population, it's essentially worthless. Multiply that effect
| by thousands of decision points and you have the Linux
| desktop: An abundance of fairly mediocre to good options with
| few really great ones.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The major reason why Linux thrives and other projects do not
| is not the governance model, but the fact that Linux solves a
| real, difficult problem for a large number of companies. The
| major contributors to Linux are companies, not anyone
| individual people.
|
| Would a Linux Steering Committee have worked for early Linux?
| Probably not. Would it work now? Absolutely.
| cycloptic wrote:
| >We'd have Linux on the desktop in 2020 if any of those
| projects had some Torvalds-like figure ranting on a mailing
| list about why the user is always right, shame on you on
| redesigning the menubar yet again breaking any UI convention
| for no real purpose, and no, Canonical/Red Hat/whoever, we
| will not accept this patch that undermines the goals of this
| project.
|
| I think if you followed things more closely you would see
| that this is not true. There is no shortage of highly
| opinionated people making angry rants and throwing out
| patches. That's not going to help with the ridiculous amount
| of edge cases it takes to keep a desktop working.
|
| Using the Linux kernel as an example, there has been a meme
| there for quite a long time from overworked maintainers
| complaining about how the BDFL model scales poorly. (Recent
| writing here: https://lwn.net/Articles/703005/)
| eznzt wrote:
| Hahaha, seemingly the FSF had a goal of getting 500 new members
| during 2020 and two weeks away of 2021 they only got 222.
| scubbo wrote:
| The title is quite timely for me (though I acknowledge that the
| message of the article doesn't quite match it). I have spent
| hundreds of hours, over the course of ~3 years, tweaking and
| tuning an NFS server on a RPi4 (1Gb RAM, 4x1.5GHz processor) to
| stream my media to various devices on Kodi on home network - with
| passable-at-best performance, but usually lots of pixellation,
| lag, buffering, audio mismatch, etc.
|
| Last night I finally gave up on trying to do it the FOSS way, set
| up a Samba share on a 6-year-old mid-range PC (8Gb RAM, 3.5GHz
| processor), and got flawless playback on each of my troublesome
| media entities with less than ten minutes of effort. On a whim, I
| also tried setting up Plex (a semi-paid service), and got
| similarly smooth and flawless service. My idealistic 13-year-old
| self would be horrified to hear me say "I regret all that time I
| spent messing around with Linux, when I could have just used a
| Microsoft product, or a different paid product, that Just Work".
|
| (And yes, I'm kind-of intentionally invoking Cunningham's Law,
| here, in the hopes that someone can suggest a way of tweaking a
| RPi4 to be an effective media server - I'd much rather use that
| than have my PC always-on, but if that's what it takes to get
| decent playback, I will)
| billyjobob wrote:
| Is Samba not FOSS?
|
| Also the PC can probably run entirely free software while the
| Pi will require non-free binary blobs due to its proprietary
| Broadcom hardware design, so I would say the PC is preferable
| from a freedom perspective.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Indeed it is https://www.samba.org/
|
| Also, comparing flawed performance on a RPi, vs good
| performance on a full-fledged PC.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I stopped trying to debate open vs. closed software in a business
| setting long ago. There is a time and place for both, and
| rational actors will evaluate the tradeoffs given their
| circumstances.
|
| When people start believing that open source software is
| inherently superior in every situation, or that ideological
| purity is the most important consideration, they aren't making
| decisions in the best interest of the company. Engineers are
| especially prone to overestimating the downside risks of using
| closed source software (A long list of what-ifs such as "What if
| the vendor goes out of business without warning?") and
| underestimating the downsides of using open source alternatives
| (Notably, the inability to pick up the phone and have another
| company's engineers deal with the problem, per your contract).
| The situation is compounded by engineers who genuinely enjoy
| tinkering with open source software on the company's dime and,
| frankly, would prefer to be paid to do so rather than purchase a
| more efficient closed-source solution.
|
| Of course, there are some situations where open-source software
| is practically superior to alternatives. I don't claim to suggest
| otherwise. However, the endless debates about ideological purity
| and avoiding hypothetical edge cases with 3rd party vendors
| frequently cloud decision making abilities in a business context.
|
| For personal and open source projects, I'm all-in on free
| software alternatives. For business purposes, I'll evaluate the
| available options and try to make the best business decision for
| the company.
| aplummer wrote:
| This is why I like the open source + enterprise contract if you
| like model so much.
| alexilliamson wrote:
| What's your favorite such example?
| [deleted]
| Arnt wrote:
| I know at least four quite different examples. But they
| share one trait: They're quiet, softspoken, avoid
| controversy on internet forums. I won't name any of them.
|
| One uses low pricing, is likable, and provides a fine list
| of enterprise features. The HN crowd will realise that
| these features are really different ways of describing a
| very small amount of code. But if you want to spend your
| employer's money and don't care to spoil that by telling
| your managers too much, the list is fine. Engineers who
| like the likable make money be spent.
|
| One writes per-customer code on top of largely the same
| body of code, and charges very high prices, largely because
| they clearly know how to get stuff done using that code.
| They have the references to prove it, and they wrote the
| code, and the customers accept that they invoice customers
| for improvements to the free base too.
|
| One uses a technique I don't understand at all. It's
| different from the other three, and it works. I mention it
| to say that the other three aren't an exhaustive list.
|
| The fourth targets nontechnical customers and sell SaaS, I
| don't know the price level. You can git-clone the code and
| selfhost if you want, they'll be friendly but not helpful.
| If you make a PR on github they'll at least look at it.
| Privacy846 wrote:
| The logical endpoint (regarding purity) of free software is
| communism, so you're right that it doesn't make sense to pursue
| it 100% in the context of for-profit (presumably) companies.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The free software movement is not opposed to writing software
| in-house, software which you do not ever distribute to
| anyone, and hence, are not required to distribute the source
| of that software to anyone. Hence, never-distributed closed-
| source software can be privately owned to generate economic
| profit.
|
| The freedoms the free software movement tries to realize are
| not comparable to what you are saying.
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
| dnautics wrote:
| Depends on the model. Probably the less restrictive models
| lean towards proudhon/tucker style anarchism more than
| marxism.
| [deleted]
| zapzupnz wrote:
| Even when the means of production are in the hands of the
| workers, that presumably doesn't necessarily equate to
| accepting the workers tinkering all day, getting nothing
| done.
| Privacy846 wrote:
| I don't know what this means.
| yellowapple wrote:
| It does, however, typically necessitate the workers
| actually owning those means of production, which in the
| case of software typically entails either in-house
| development or the use of free software. The notion of any
| worker "owning" non-free software is illusory, at best.
| yellowapple wrote:
| I think you're downplaying the risks of non-free (or at least
| non-transparent) software in an enterprise setting, and
| overplaying the "value" of the vendor being able to provide
| meaningful assistance.
|
| Speaking from experience: even if a software product is not
| freely licensed, there is _immense_ value in source code being
| available and - better yet - modifiable (whether directly or
| through plugins) when trying to troubleshoot issues with that
| software or integrate it with other software or adapt it for
| your business ' needs. Further, if your company's finance
| department is worth its salt, any such customizations and
| integrations are assets with real value, so even if your
| company's engineers are "wasting time" tinkering, the company
| can - and should - still capture this value on the books.
|
| And further speaking from experience: with relatively few
| exceptions, I've found enterprise software vendors to be pretty
| much useless in terms of support, and to be more often than not
| an obstacle to business operations than a value to it when
| things go wrong. All for a pricetag that doesn't even come
| close to justifying their meager SLAs (that they'll inevitably
| weasel their way out of anyway).
|
| The decision to use transparent software _is_ more often than
| not a decision in the best interests of a company. Transparency
| is a dependency of trust; without that transparency, you have
| no real way of knowing whether you can trust your business on
| it.
| auggierose wrote:
| The free software / open source / proprietary software discussion
| is an important one. For someone new to it, this article is
| certainly interesting.
|
| For me the question is how to solve this in the context of this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
|
| We'll see there that freedom is pretty much high up in Maslow's
| hierarchy of needs (it's in the esteem part). Which means, it is
| very important, but only if your other needs are already met.
|
| Can I live from making free software? How well can I live from
| making free software? These are the really interesting questions
| in my opinion.
|
| Can I be free by making free software?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| For anyone new to it I recommend watching revolution OS, it's
| about 20 years old at this point, and just ignore the part at
| the end about the stocks, but it has some good interviews with
| stallman, linus, and others. Including the great line of
| stallman accepting the linus torvalds award on behalf of the
| fsf. "It's like giving the han solo award to the rebel fleet"
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054275
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