- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
Goup Frist!
Admin
There's a bug in your post
Admin
Are those reports of specific products?
Admin
Oh, oh I want to solve the fifth one: "What is Disco-Horse?"
Admin
How is this any different to the way closed source development works (except for it being publicly visible)
Admin
The mass password reset wouldn't happen, for one.
Admin
That's the joke
Admin
Here's a way OS actually works:
Someone creates a product which becomes popular. Loads of developers are keen to work on it. Every one of them wants to do the glamorous work of adding new features or writing main functionality. No-one wants to work on bug-fixes, let alone UI improvements.
Admin
There is another way open-source works:
A group releases a product. The product becomes successful, bug reports and pull requests come, but they are not applied as fast as the community wished, or are rejected for some questionable reasons. Part of the community forks the project and makes its best to fix the outstanding issues. Effect: two (or more) diverging versions of the product. Then one is dropped, as it stops being maintained… and you never know which will be the one. Sometimes it is the original, sometimes the fork. In most the one we have chosen (considering it the best bet) will be the one dropped.
Admin
Sounds like someone really has a beef against open source... sure, some projects get abandoned and lack fixes. But when you create your own in-house alternative and the original developer leaves there's nobody necessarily left who knows the product, while there's a higher chance on an open source project that you can find someone else familiar with the source code to make progress. A popular library will have been battle tested against many scenarios, so those little things you didn't realise you'd need may have been implemented already by the time you realise you need them. Plus you can always fork the code and take it on yourself - I mean, you're doing all the work if you write your own version anyway, just writing less when you start with a substantial Open Source library as the starting point, so it's still less work.
Admin
It doesn't sound like anything of the sort. It's a humorous look at some of the ways OS can improve. You sound like the kind of nutty fanboi who can't tolerate even the slightest criticism of their cult.
Admin
A bit of a WOT but not a bad rant. You forgot the one where someone creates an init system and tries to get it to take over the world, closing any and all bug reports as WONTFIX: PEBKAC.
Admin
Oh boy, here comes the "many eyes" defense that totally ignores that most of those eyes are effectively useless. They're users who can't code, developers who can't code right, and developers who can't get past the "hurrrr teem playurz must put brackets heer or else!1one" gatekeepers that are far more interested in being petty tyrants than fixing bugs in their software.
Admin
If "most of those eyes" are useless, then a few of them are useful. Contrast that to closed source, where you have all the problems you mentioned, but have zero useful eyes.
Admin
Just because open source is better than the closed source approach doesn't mean it's perfect and should be immune to criticism. Get that past your fanboy bias.
To garner maximum benefits from the open source approach the community should fix its flaws (even when some of them actually aren't in the open source paradigm but in the implementation). But no flaws will ever be addressed if we shoot down any attempts at discussing them.
Admin
Can't believe nobody mentioned these ways that Open Source works:
A group releases a product. The product becomes successful, bug reports and pull requests come in from all over, as well as enhancement requests. Wannabee devs fork and re-fork the product code, and at each re-fork they introduce their own re-invented libraries and plugins that never seem to get published with the original product, so we can never compile it.
A group releases a product. The product becomes successful, bug reports and pull requests come in from all over, as well as enhancement requests. In an effort to keep up with bug fixes, support for any OS other than the dev's platform in its particular and peculiar configuration is eliminated and the autoconf file requires seven different versions of Fortran plus COBOL-85 to compile some C modules.
A group releases a product. The product becomes so successful the author decides to sell it for profit and in doing so rewrites the entire product in a different language he doesn't understand.
A developer releases a product. In order to make sure it's kept up to date, it checks all repositories for all of its dependencies to make sure your system is up to date. If it's not, the program won't run.
A developer releases a product that sounds like a great idea, but it's buggy. Other developers want to fork and fix bugs, but they can't because half of the "open source" is obfuscated.
Yep....... Open Source is the shit!
Admin
Yeah.... But it has never worked that way. It's gotten much better than it used to be, but it's nowhere near perfect.
Admin
So you think that closed source doesn't have anybody to look at the code and never hires anybody for that purpose?
Admin
I mean my point here is that alot of software has those problems and open source is really just passing the buck by making the absurd claim that being "open" somehow makes those problems acceptable and the code not a basket case.
Admin
I have a term I'm using now for "hostile forks": Pitchforks!
Admin
A dev writes a product using open source libraries, releases an OS version. Later, he pulls the OS version, illegally includes libraries from third-party commercial products violating copyright law, violates the OS licensing, and cripples the software by including nagging for batch processing.
Admin
A group releases a product that is a patched version of a closed-source product. The company making the closed-source product likes it so much they buy the open-source product's rights and hire the group. A pull request submitter realizes that unless the company makes the closed-source product open-source, the open-source product now violates the GPL. They immediately DMCA the open-source product into oblivion, nearly destroying the massive community built around both products. https://github.com/bukkit/craftbukkit
Admin
I'm amused how easily some assume that closed-source is zero-eyes and software companies do not employ anybody who actually knows about programming, they all just dd /dev/random until an installer falls out.
ObFlamebait: closed-source is when you have to pay to use the product, open-source is when you have to pay to improve the product.
Admin
"they all just dd /dev/random until an installer falls out."
that's called "genetic programming"
Admin
Missed one. Thanks for picking up my slack ;)
Admin
Nice article, but I don't buy the last line. People aren't really much more secure; a large proportion of the admins who had weak passwords before will just reset them to other weak passwords.