He is the inventor of the Qi (later Shen) language (essentially a Lisp dialect with a configurable type system). He experimented with taking it open source. He was very underwhelmed by the results and has made later revisions closed source again. In particular as far as I can tell he felt he was losing creative control of the project and getting little to nothing back for it in terms of contributions and features (and in general very unimpressed with people's reaction to the language and the wider programming community's capability of understanding the language).
> This is the time when reddit made an appearance. I blessed the Shen subreddit because I thought that reddit was some polite ladies bookclub - obviously showing my ignorance of it. It is nothing of the sort of course and some of its most vicious sites like Coontown - the reddit for racists only recently closed - shows what is so often like. Reddit is a shit hole; and to a lesser degree so are SlashDot, and Hacker News.
> Unfortunately some members of the Shen group, imbibing the mindshare poison, gave much power away to the opinions on reddit.
> The OS fanatics relished their power to bully and shame and people used to mail me and say 'You need to say something because XYZ has said such and such on reddit'. I did on occasion call such people 'complete prats', but really this was whack-a-mole because the supply of arseholes was unending.
It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable."
When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github.
The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterparts, both in quality, and in their ability to be extended and customized. Customization is not going to be cheap or easy, but it will at least be possible.
The fact that I wrote a toy renderer in Rust five years ago and haven't touched it since then doesn't change this. The fact that there are 100 or 1000 times as many toy projects as there are serious projects doesn't change this either.
Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If we can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the mountain of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or worse, the stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.
The author is wrong on innovation as well usability. One of his arguments is summarized as follows:
> [Open source] did not reward innovation. The most successful products of open source are knockoffs of old ideas; Linux included.
So what about Spark? What about Python numpy, pandas, and scikit-learn? Most people don't just use them because they are open source. They are innovative solutions to difficult problems.
Ironically, he anticipated this objection, which many people beyond the parent poster are making, and answered it in the paragraph that contains:
"... Open source users will admit that a lot of open source is buggy abandonware. However they argue that this really does not matter since some small significant fraction is really quite good and that's the stuff we should use. ..."
Finding and dissecting the paragraph that contains the above sentence is left as an exercise to the reader.
> The fact that I wrote a toy renderer in Rust five years ago and haven't touched it since then doesn't change this.
I ask you in good faith...if you pushed this to a public github repo that was your reasoning? If it was something I found to be of value and you'd LICENSE'd it under a promiscuous license and I took that code and made a few million dollars from your idea (and kept all the money), would you be happy with that?
Was this just a thing to show potential employers you can code and use git, how does an employer even know actually you wrote that code?
> they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc.
I feel you're missing the point here, not all the contributors to these projects are getting paid for their efforts. See his point about Linux Torvalds comment about:
This model of using people was acknowledged right from the beginning with a sly wink to Linus Torvalds from Eric S. Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Eric S. Raymond: "In fact, I think Linus’s cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: “I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do."
Those things I agree with it. The good open-source programs mostly are better than other programs in these ways.
Yes there will be many badly written programs (I think someone said that 90% of anything will be not very good), but there is good stuff too. I think it may be the case even with the closed sources, but in that case they are unavailable so we will not have any statistics about it.
>...an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on Github at about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects after a year [0]. This has coined a phrase - abandonware.
I'm not a programmer, I'm a researcher. Let me tell you a fact: about 100% of research articles are not updated.
Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but what's wrong with programs which are not updated? After all there is a (small) group of people who keep telling that programs are the next level in mathematics, (ideally they are) better than proofs.
Moreover he's using the large amount of wreckage to argue that the Darwinian process of selecting "category killers" isn't working, which is completely backwards.
If "category killer" is a winner-take-all competition, then there are going to be a vast number of losers, and we do see a vast number of unmaintained projects. It's just that no one is bothering to remove them from view when they're defeated.
Not to mention that abandoned github repos wind up in google searches and I have learned something from looking at them in such a context, even if untouched for years.
Don't delete your repos because they are "old". You could be doing a favor for some random person with a google search, looking at something you looked at too.
The concept does need some qualification. “Small software” can probably become “done.” Grep, as an example, is done. Frameworks, libraries, and applications all have a steering wheel requirement of support.
I’d suggest that a fair amount of github open source is resume padding, or at least an attempt at it rather than “scratching a developer’s itch” which the original ESR paper mentioned as a reason.
>Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but what's wrong with programs which are not updated?
Bit rot, for one (not keeping up with changing OSes, APIs they talk to, environments, libs they use, security concerns, etc), but also the fact that when they stopped updating they were still incomplete and more often than not half arsed.
Are there any numbers on closed source projects to compare this with? Say, if closed source projects have a 99% abandonment rate, what do these numbers tell us?
I agree. There are plenty of good points to consider in the article, but this is not one of them. Lots and lots of things on Github are little experiments that someone tried out and made available so that others can benefit from what they learned or tried. That can be called 'abandonware' in order to reinforce a straw man, or it could also be called a source of community learning.
I’m saying nothing for or against the rest of the article, but this one sentence does not describe software as I know it: “But above all this is the sheer waste of human effort in terms of the production of rotting software in repositories.”
The act of writing code changes the programmer. I have written many things that didn’t turn into successful open source, nor did they act as resume-ware. But the act of writing them taught me something.
There is no waste of human effort involved when you practice your craft. This is like telling me that if I climb a cliff and then lower myself back to the ground, I haven’t gone anywhere.
Right now I’m working on implementing a subset of regular expressions that compile to finite-state recognizers. There is a zero-percent chance that my working code will be used in production.
So what? I am learning something about pattern-matching, and perhaps it will grow into a little language like SNOBOL.
> But above all this is the sheer waste of human effort in terms of the production of rotting software in repositories.
Yup, what about the amount of human effort that has been wasted in the course of producing off-the-shelf proprietary software? How much of that proprietary stuff is now entirely useless, for some reason or another? It's just so weird to make an engineering-focused argument for proprietary stuff, when the only case that's even remotely plausible is about production incentives, and everything else hugely favors FLOSS.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure that, in the medium-to-long run, we'll manage to fund FLOSS development to an entirely satisfactory extent via crowdfunding, and that while saving a lot of dough compared to what it would take to fund proprietary development in the same way.
But in fact, even his point about support revenues is misguided. Well-designed and easy-to-use software does not really draw fewer paid-support arrangements than software that's hackish, unintuitive and the like. The nees for paid support is almost entirely an organizational one, so it matters zilch how easy the software is to support in reality; it's far more important that the organization can point to that support contract if any such need should arise.
I have like 30 projects on github, I don't expect any of them to really go anywhere, it's just where I put stuff when I'm playing with a new concept.
There are ~3 projects that I would have actually have liked to go somewhere, real projects not toys, that I have abandoned.
So that "98% of projects" statistic is fair, but I think those numbers would be looking a lot better if you accounted for the fact that github is just a place to throw stuff up. Just because something is on github doesn't mean it's an open source "project".
It seems like a silly metric. Almost all code gets abandoned, and at an alarming rate. Unless you happened to build a popular database or an operating system component, it’s likely that your code is gone in 10 years. And if not, your code is likely the future bane of some developer who despises maintaining it since it is such a bear to update to their unforeseeable requirements.
> I have like 30 projects on github, I don't expect any of them to really go anywhere, it's just where I put stuff when I'm playing with a new concept.
Then why put it there?
git works fine without github. And by putting your projects on github all you did was add to the baseline white noise that people have to filter through.
Lots of proprietary software are abandoned & unmaintained on old storage devices, the statistic about abandoned software on Github is meaningless.
On quality: quality is very suggestive. Quality changes if you factor in questions such as: Does it run well on low-end devices, does it track you, will it still open your files in 10 years, will the company still exist in 10 years, does it work well on many platforms, can it be automated, etc.
Writing software within old-school enterprises is a daunting task involving lots of proprietary systems that create a lock-in of sorts. Complex build and test systems, complex deployment and production systems are the norm. Weird tools and libraries with their own proprietary names and conventions increase the learning curve for any new-joinee. Some even have very proprietary non-standard language, runtime etc. making the skills acquired in such environments to be largely useless outside of such environments.
Open source culture changed all this drastically. This culture started with individuals loosely connected via Internet who collaborated on writing software and without much complex central infrastructure. Common conventions and standards emerged as these individuals openly discussed them and took with them to other projects – not just conventions and standards, but also the code. Without the enterprise lock-in, this has proven to be extremely successful and cost-effective.
Most commercial software companies today follow this new model for their internal software development practices. Using openly available technology components lets everyone to acquire portable skills that they can continue to improve throughout their careers across many different companies. This drastically reduces the cost of software production as cost of acquiring skills is amortized over many companies and cost of development effort of these open source standardized components is also amortized over many corporations/projects.
Every company I worked in has supported contributing to open-source with the selfish motive to attract talented engineers. And the engineers like contributing to open-source projects as a way of showing off their skills and building their resume.
Unfortunately that only leads to another kind of lock-in. The culture assumes everyone is using the same tools, so you are not allowed to use any kind of non mainstream software. And any smaller project using non mainstream libraries gets killed.
For example I use Mercurial rather than Git. Mercurial had better Windows support, a better command line syntax and with TortoiseHg a better Linux GUI. However, it happens all the time that linux distributions include wrong versions of Mercurial and TortoiseHg. You can use an old version of Mercurial and an old version of TortoiseHg, or a new version of Mercurial and an new version of TortoiseHg, but the distributions package a new version of Mercurial and an old version of TortoiseHg, and then TortoiseHg does not start. So they ship a completely broken package and no one cares because it is not a standard tool.
(and last time I tried to install TortoiseHg from source separately, it also did not run, because was not compatible to the Python version installed by the distribution)
Recently I wanted to use a tool written in OCaml. It is really well written, has a GUI, using gnomecanvas. And it does not start anymore. Debian/Ubuntu has decided, gnomecanvas from gnome2 is deprecated and will no longer be installed. But the new gnome does not seem to have OCaml bindings. I am not aware of anyone working on a update to fix that. OCaml is too small to be allowed to make GUIs.
I write my software in FreePascal. After a system update, my projects do not start anymore on Android. Turns out binutils has enabled relro by default and FreePascal does not work with relro enabled. Imagine GCC could not create Android apps in the default settings. That would be fixed quickly, but with FreePascal no one cares
there's a lot of nits to pick about this essay, but the real punchline is that corporations have reaped the profits from open source software, far more than any developers do directly, and that claim seems hard to dispute.
I think a lot of people have reaped the benefits of open source software. And corporations are formed of people.
It is a check and balance on proprietary software, in quality, cost, privacy and independence.
It has benefitted developers directly, in education, in transferrence of skills to other employers, and in direct customization of software for their personal needs.
I can't argue with this assertion. Can we start discussing how to correct this a bit. I have no issue with corporations reaping profits from open source software but would love to see more developers benefiting directly.
The article is wrong in attributing "open source" to Eric Raymond alone. As it's now used, it was apparently coined by Christine Patterson and mutually agreed to at a meeting where Eric Raymond was present in February 5, 1998. [1]
According to the release history, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was written in 1997, but originally used the term "free software". The term was changed to "open source" on February 9th. [2]
"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules."
Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.
Not all open source software is produced by a "herd"; many are written by one person.
My own projects I write by myself; often there are no other contributors at all (although I do accept bug reports and sometimes accept contributed code too, I am the only maintainer).
SQLite is a good open source software project (there are some proprietary extensions, but the core system is open source, and there are also open source extensions which are as good as the proprietary ones if you do not need the warranties and professional support they provide), and is written by only three people. Still, the commit history is public and I often look to see what changes they will have in the next version (and in one case, even found a bug and reported it, and they quickly corrected it).
I have heard Bourbaki before but didn't know much about that, but now I look it up and I can see what it is. I did not know that Bourbaki is actually a group of mathematicians, but I looked and now I know. I also did not know that the "dangerous bend" sign used by Knuth was invented by Bourbaki.
Bourbaki were certainly made up of a collection of leading mathematicians, but the works of Bourbaki are not innovations themselves. As much as I love the books, they do not contain major new results, rather they are an excellent organisation of pre-existing knowledge, perhaps with some novel proofs.
A novel also is produced by a “herd”. There are a lot of people involved. People that make suggestions, corrections, the editor... It’s not a single person effort.
Movies are also team work only in the sense of many people working under the vision of a single person: the director. But that's also true for any system designed by 1-2-3 people where 100s also work on.
Well, to be fair, a textbook is not a theorem or an enjoyable novel... Also, a movie is not made by a “herd” (unless one thinks of a company as a herd.) Wikipedia would be a better example.
The Bible has something like 40 authors. It would probably be classified as a "work of art of importance", even if you don't classify it as anything more than that.
A main point of this seems to be that most projects on github are abandoned.
What a stupid comparison. That would be like listing all the commercial projects that go out of bussiness, or dont even progress far enough to get funding in the first place, and saying closed source model is a failure because most closed source projects fail.
This article seems to leave out why open-source changed it's meaning from "source available" to "source shared". That results from the FSF, GNU, copyleft and the rise of Linux.
⌘-F show only two references to GNU or Stallman, both derogatory references to Emacs. All references to Linux are about how early versions sucked and how it was a "copy" of Unix.
This highlights a lack of understanding from the author which may explain a lot of the viewpoints.
The harsh reality is that most software, no matter whether it's open source or closed, never makes it big. Take a stroll through an app store on iPhone-- or better yet, on Android! just to see how many apps there. You'll find hundreds of flashlight apps, calendar apps, and so on.
Buggy, abandoned software is hardly unique to open source.
Then there is the argument that "open source isn't innovative." This seems like a really tired argument. Most software of any kind can be painted as just a mere modification or variation on something that someone once wrote in the past. We've had almost a century of software, after all. I also like the links to late-90s and 2000-era websites saying that Linux will never be innovative. The only way this could be better is if we could create a deep fake of Steve Ballmer saying it onstage.
But wait! Tensorflow is open source, so we can't use that, clearly. Financial deficiency disease and all. Luckily, I'm willing to make a special enterprise edition for this guy, at a modest charge.
> In 1990 when you said a program was 'open source', you meant that you could read the source code; the actual code the person had written to create the program.
Citation needed. I don't think people were saying "open source" in 1990. FSF/GNU had the term "free software" for longer but they had to explain it on every first use. (Probably still do to an extent.)
> In fact an article puts the abandonment rate of open source projects on Github at about 98% - meaning that there is no activity on 98% of projects after a year. This has coined a phrase - abandonware.
That's factually incorrect. The term "abandonware" dates back to the 90s (long before github) and was originally used to describe software that was predominantly proprietary. Virtually all proprietary software ever written has become abandoned or will eventually become abandoned, but I guess that fact doesn't really square with what the author wants to say.
I am not really responding to the article, but to the general concept of the Cathedral and the Bazarr.
The main problem is this: in sufficiently complex programs, roughly associated with LOC, there becomes a point where there are no longer enough eyes on enough pieces of code.
Therefore, I propose that the future of FOSS in the Bazarr style is to focus on reducing code complexity and increase readability as much as possible.
“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” - Bruce Lee
Cute title. But wow, this guy apparently does not live in the same universe as, I think, the rest of us.
I hadn't read ESRs paper in a few years, but just reread it again now. This author is definitely oversimplifying and mischaracterizing it. It's not right to conflate "Cathedral" with "Closed-Source" and "Commercial", nor to incorrectly imply that's what ESRs paper point was. Plenty of earlier Open Source software, notably FSF software itself, is (or was) developed "Cathedral" style and ESR definitely talks about that. I always read his paper as kind of "GNU FSF" process vs. "Linux", both being Open Source (or Free to please RMS). And I think history has proven his points rather nicely, IMHO.
But "Cathedral" and "Bazaar" are just two points on a spectrum anyway, and it's mostly orthogonal to a "Free/Open" vs. "Closed/Commercial" spectrum.
Now to the rest of the paper, while couched in formal and civil language, the author would have been much more succinct if he just came right out and said "Open Source Software Sux!". Which is an odd point to make for an academic having little experience writing either or any kind of real software.
I can see he thinks that, but there's not much in the way of actual arguments, other than opinions and cherry-picked sentences from ESR's paper, to make it worth picking apart or disagreeing with.
So yup, I fully agree: Dr Mark Tarver thinks that "Open Source Sux because Reasons".
Now then, I will just be getting back to the universe in which I live, where Open Source software is the foundation of the internet and just about every other piece of modern technology from doorbells to cars, including nearly all proprietary commercial products too...
> There's a larger group of not-so-harmless people than the givers who are driven by greed for free stuff and a sense of entitlement. We can call these the takers. Takers are generally abusive if their entitlement is challenged; because to criticise the open source model is to take away their intellectual candy and the result is a tantrum. Amongst this larger group are a smaller group of DRM crackers and pirates. In nearly all open source projects, they outnumber the givers. Michael 'Monty' Widenius, an open source advocate, acknowledges the problem.
> Help create a generation of takers that believed that all code should be open source and embraced open source as a religion. Online bullying of dissent began in forums. A large number of believers then traded 'code' for 'digitisable media' and the most active of those went in for DRM cracking and piracy.
Judging by the comments so far, I think he struck a nerve.
Unfinished experiments that aspire(d) to be something relevant are more like vaporware, not abandonware. I'd argue the vast majority of what's on github is this or dirty hacks that never warranted any further development or maintenance.
There's actually substantial value in access to such things. Rather than repeating the experiments yourself, you can go see where they led others without investing the time and energy to repeat the effort. If you find something that mostly resembles what you would have made, can get along with the license, and still wish to move forward - huzzah, a jump starting fork is born.
Abandonware IMHO is more appropriately applied to examples like Google's ever growing list of abandoned projects that actually had users, where the world noticed the abandonment of something useful.
The facts as presented by this article do not match the facts I remember. I'm an old fart and was actually alive and active writing software at that time.
The cathedral and the bazaar was not a book, it was an essay. They apparently later turned it into a book but I know nobody who read the book. The essay, in contrast, was read by everybody in the scene.
Here's how I remember it.
Open source has no specific meaning before esr claimed it.
And after he claimed it, crucially, open source did not mean you could not charge for the software.
I practice almost no source code was released under non-liberal licenses, but there are some notable exceptions. For example, Microsoft released the source code of the Windows kernel for research use to universities. AFAIK that technically means Windows is open source.
esr was not against releasing source code under non-liberal licenses. He was just convinced those would not stand a chance against code released under liberal licenses. Time has proven him right, I would say.
Also this article misses the point, I think. Open source was not meant to define or enshrine a methodology. It was coined because at the time people felt that the free software movement was holding itself back in the fight against Microsoft (google "halloween documents" to get more insight into esr's struggle against Microsoft) because it sounded like you could not make money with it. Also because the GNU General Public License said if you make changes to a piece of GPL code, the result must also be under the GPL. So in a sense GPL actually did impede commercial exploitation of free software.
At the time many libertarians (like esr) felt that the market would solve this if you just let it, and software is not the place to fight ideological wars about the freedom of software.
I'm just paraphrasing the arguments here as I understood them. Personally I come down on the pro-GPL side of the aisle.
[+] [-] dwohnitmok|6 years ago|reply
The author is very critical of open source on the whole. He has a series of articles detailing criticisms of open source software.
http://marktarver.com/problems.html (The Problems of Open Source) http://marktarver.com/open.html (In Praise of Closed Source)
He is the inventor of the Qi (later Shen) language (essentially a Lisp dialect with a configurable type system). He experimented with taking it open source. He was very underwhelmed by the results and has made later revisions closed source again. In particular as far as I can tell he felt he was losing creative control of the project and getting little to nothing back for it in terms of contributions and features (and in general very unimpressed with people's reaction to the language and the wider programming community's capability of understanding the language).
He has also had at least one argument on Reddit about this (see the post by Mark_Tarver here https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/57h33q/arguing...).
This is one article in a long series of events and thoughts for him that have played out over the past decade.
[+] [-] iudqnolq|6 years ago|reply
> This is the time when reddit made an appearance. I blessed the Shen subreddit because I thought that reddit was some polite ladies bookclub - obviously showing my ignorance of it. It is nothing of the sort of course and some of its most vicious sites like Coontown - the reddit for racists only recently closed - shows what is so often like. Reddit is a shit hole; and to a lesser degree so are SlashDot, and Hacker News.
> Unfortunately some members of the Shen group, imbibing the mindshare poison, gave much power away to the opinions on reddit.
> The OS fanatics relished their power to bully and shame and people used to mail me and say 'You need to say something because XYZ has said such and such on reddit'. I did on occasion call such people 'complete prats', but really this was whack-a-mole because the supply of arseholes was unending.
[+] [-] stefan_|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ohazi|6 years ago|reply
When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github.
The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterparts, both in quality, and in their ability to be extended and customized. Customization is not going to be cheap or easy, but it will at least be possible.
The fact that I wrote a toy renderer in Rust five years ago and haven't touched it since then doesn't change this. The fact that there are 100 or 1000 times as many toy projects as there are serious projects doesn't change this either.
[+] [-] yjftsjthsd-h|6 years ago|reply
Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If we can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the mountain of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or worse, the stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.
[+] [-] hodgesrm|6 years ago|reply
> [Open source] did not reward innovation. The most successful products of open source are knockoffs of old ideas; Linux included.
So what about Spark? What about Python numpy, pandas, and scikit-learn? Most people don't just use them because they are open source. They are innovative solutions to difficult problems.
[+] [-] ThrowawayR2|6 years ago|reply
"... Open source users will admit that a lot of open source is buggy abandonware. However they argue that this really does not matter since some small significant fraction is really quite good and that's the stuff we should use. ..."
Finding and dissecting the paragraph that contains the above sentence is left as an exercise to the reader.
[+] [-] teh_klev|6 years ago|reply
I ask you in good faith...if you pushed this to a public github repo that was your reasoning? If it was something I found to be of value and you'd LICENSE'd it under a promiscuous license and I took that code and made a few million dollars from your idea (and kept all the money), would you be happy with that?
Was this just a thing to show potential employers you can code and use git, how does an employer even know actually you wrote that code?
> they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc.
I feel you're missing the point here, not all the contributors to these projects are getting paid for their efforts. See his point about Linux Torvalds comment about:
This model of using people was acknowledged right from the beginning with a sly wink to Linus Torvalds from Eric S. Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Eric S. Raymond: "In fact, I think Linus’s cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model. When I expressed this opinion in his presence once, he smiled and quietly repeated something he has often said: “I’m basically a very lazy person who likes to get credit for things other people actually do."
[+] [-] zzo38computer|6 years ago|reply
Yes there will be many badly written programs (I think someone said that 90% of anything will be not very good), but there is good stuff too. I think it may be the case even with the closed sources, but in that case they are unavailable so we will not have any statistics about it.
[+] [-] xorand|6 years ago|reply
I'm not a programmer, I'm a researcher. Let me tell you a fact: about 100% of research articles are not updated.
Somehow the link [0] cited in the article makes an indirect similar point, but what's wrong with programs which are not updated? After all there is a (small) group of people who keep telling that programs are the next level in mathematics, (ideally they are) better than proofs.
[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/open-source-failure-is-...
[+] [-] doublement|6 years ago|reply
If "category killer" is a winner-take-all competition, then there are going to be a vast number of losers, and we do see a vast number of unmaintained projects. It's just that no one is bothering to remove them from view when they're defeated.
[+] [-] asveikau|6 years ago|reply
Don't delete your repos because they are "old". You could be doing a favor for some random person with a google search, looking at something you looked at too.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|6 years ago|reply
Huh. "Abandonware" is a very old word as far as internet culture goes, referring to something entirely different.
[+] [-] TheCondor|6 years ago|reply
I’d suggest that a fair amount of github open source is resume padding, or at least an attempt at it rather than “scratching a developer’s itch” which the original ESR paper mentioned as a reason.
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
Bit rot, for one (not keeping up with changing OSes, APIs they talk to, environments, libs they use, security concerns, etc), but also the fact that when they stopped updating they were still incomplete and more often than not half arsed.
[+] [-] sedatk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
The same abandonment happens within healthy corporations with proprietary source code.
[+] [-] dev_tty01|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haecceity|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] braythwayt|6 years ago|reply
The act of writing code changes the programmer. I have written many things that didn’t turn into successful open source, nor did they act as resume-ware. But the act of writing them taught me something.
There is no waste of human effort involved when you practice your craft. This is like telling me that if I climb a cliff and then lower myself back to the ground, I haven’t gone anywhere.
Right now I’m working on implementing a subset of regular expressions that compile to finite-state recognizers. There is a zero-percent chance that my working code will be used in production.
So what? I am learning something about pattern-matching, and perhaps it will grow into a little language like SNOBOL.
http://raganwald.com/2019/09/21/regular-expressions.html
If that is a waste, then most of my most enjoyable moments programming were also a waste.
[+] [-] zozbot234|6 years ago|reply
Yup, what about the amount of human effort that has been wasted in the course of producing off-the-shelf proprietary software? How much of that proprietary stuff is now entirely useless, for some reason or another? It's just so weird to make an engineering-focused argument for proprietary stuff, when the only case that's even remotely plausible is about production incentives, and everything else hugely favors FLOSS.
As an aside, I'm pretty sure that, in the medium-to-long run, we'll manage to fund FLOSS development to an entirely satisfactory extent via crowdfunding, and that while saving a lot of dough compared to what it would take to fund proprietary development in the same way.
But in fact, even his point about support revenues is misguided. Well-designed and easy-to-use software does not really draw fewer paid-support arrangements than software that's hackish, unintuitive and the like. The nees for paid support is almost entirely an organizational one, so it matters zilch how easy the software is to support in reality; it's far more important that the organization can point to that support contract if any such need should arise.
[+] [-] traverseda|6 years ago|reply
There are ~3 projects that I would have actually have liked to go somewhere, real projects not toys, that I have abandoned.
So that "98% of projects" statistic is fair, but I think those numbers would be looking a lot better if you accounted for the fact that github is just a place to throw stuff up. Just because something is on github doesn't mean it's an open source "project".
[+] [-] zwkrt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
Then why put it there?
git works fine without github. And by putting your projects on github all you did was add to the baseline white noise that people have to filter through.
[+] [-] antoineMoPa|6 years ago|reply
On quality: quality is very suggestive. Quality changes if you factor in questions such as: Does it run well on low-end devices, does it track you, will it still open your files in 10 years, will the company still exist in 10 years, does it work well on many platforms, can it be automated, etc.
[+] [-] vinay_ys|6 years ago|reply
Open source culture changed all this drastically. This culture started with individuals loosely connected via Internet who collaborated on writing software and without much complex central infrastructure. Common conventions and standards emerged as these individuals openly discussed them and took with them to other projects – not just conventions and standards, but also the code. Without the enterprise lock-in, this has proven to be extremely successful and cost-effective.
Most commercial software companies today follow this new model for their internal software development practices. Using openly available technology components lets everyone to acquire portable skills that they can continue to improve throughout their careers across many different companies. This drastically reduces the cost of software production as cost of acquiring skills is amortized over many companies and cost of development effort of these open source standardized components is also amortized over many corporations/projects.
Every company I worked in has supported contributing to open-source with the selfish motive to attract talented engineers. And the engineers like contributing to open-source projects as a way of showing off their skills and building their resume.
[+] [-] benibela|6 years ago|reply
For example I use Mercurial rather than Git. Mercurial had better Windows support, a better command line syntax and with TortoiseHg a better Linux GUI. However, it happens all the time that linux distributions include wrong versions of Mercurial and TortoiseHg. You can use an old version of Mercurial and an old version of TortoiseHg, or a new version of Mercurial and an new version of TortoiseHg, but the distributions package a new version of Mercurial and an old version of TortoiseHg, and then TortoiseHg does not start. So they ship a completely broken package and no one cares because it is not a standard tool. (and last time I tried to install TortoiseHg from source separately, it also did not run, because was not compatible to the Python version installed by the distribution)
Recently I wanted to use a tool written in OCaml. It is really well written, has a GUI, using gnomecanvas. And it does not start anymore. Debian/Ubuntu has decided, gnomecanvas from gnome2 is deprecated and will no longer be installed. But the new gnome does not seem to have OCaml bindings. I am not aware of anyone working on a update to fix that. OCaml is too small to be allowed to make GUIs.
I write my software in FreePascal. After a system update, my projects do not start anymore on Android. Turns out binutils has enabled relro by default and FreePascal does not work with relro enabled. Imagine GCC could not create Android apps in the default settings. That would be fixed quickly, but with FreePascal no one cares
[+] [-] Palomides|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|6 years ago|reply
It is a check and balance on proprietary software, in quality, cost, privacy and independence.
It has benefitted developers directly, in education, in transferrence of skills to other employers, and in direct customization of software for their personal needs.
[+] [-] randy5235|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|6 years ago|reply
According to the release history, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was written in 1997, but originally used the term "free software". The term was changed to "open source" on February 9th. [2]
[1] https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source... [2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
[+] [-] sdenton4|6 years ago|reply
Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.
[+] [-] zzo38computer|6 years ago|reply
My own projects I write by myself; often there are no other contributors at all (although I do accept bug reports and sometimes accept contributed code too, I am the only maintainer).
SQLite is a good open source software project (there are some proprietary extensions, but the core system is open source, and there are also open source extensions which are as good as the proprietary ones if you do not need the warranties and professional support they provide), and is written by only three people. Still, the commit history is public and I often look to see what changes they will have in the next version (and in one case, even found a bug and reported it, and they quickly corrected it).
I have heard Bourbaki before but didn't know much about that, but now I look it up and I can see what it is. I did not know that Bourbaki is actually a group of mathematicians, but I looked and now I know. I also did not know that the "dangerous bend" sign used by Knuth was invented by Bourbaki.
[+] [-] joppy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sildur|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|6 years ago|reply
Movies are also team work only in the sense of many people working under the vision of a single person: the director. But that's also true for any system designed by 1-2-3 people where 100s also work on.
[+] [-] Koshkin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bawolff|6 years ago|reply
What a stupid comparison. That would be like listing all the commercial projects that go out of bussiness, or dont even progress far enough to get funding in the first place, and saying closed source model is a failure because most closed source projects fail.
[+] [-] r00fus|6 years ago|reply
⌘-F show only two references to GNU or Stallman, both derogatory references to Emacs. All references to Linux are about how early versions sucked and how it was a "copy" of Unix.
This highlights a lack of understanding from the author which may explain a lot of the viewpoints.
[+] [-] colin_mccabe|6 years ago|reply
Then there is the argument that "open source isn't innovative." This seems like a really tired argument. Most software of any kind can be painted as just a mere modification or variation on something that someone once wrote in the past. We've had almost a century of software, after all. I also like the links to late-90s and 2000-era websites saying that Linux will never be innovative. The only way this could be better is if we could create a deep fake of Steve Ballmer saying it onstage.
But wait! Tensorflow is open source, so we can't use that, clearly. Financial deficiency disease and all. Luckily, I'm willing to make a special enterprise edition for this guy, at a modest charge.
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asveikau|6 years ago|reply
Citation needed. I don't think people were saying "open source" in 1990. FSF/GNU had the term "free software" for longer but they had to explain it on every first use. (Probably still do to an extent.)
[+] [-] catalogia|6 years ago|reply
That's factually incorrect. The term "abandonware" dates back to the 90s (long before github) and was originally used to describe software that was predominantly proprietary. Virtually all proprietary software ever written has become abandoned or will eventually become abandoned, but I guess that fact doesn't really square with what the author wants to say.
[+] [-] arminiusreturns|6 years ago|reply
The main problem is this: in sufficiently complex programs, roughly associated with LOC, there becomes a point where there are no longer enough eyes on enough pieces of code.
Therefore, I propose that the future of FOSS in the Bazarr style is to focus on reducing code complexity and increase readability as much as possible.
“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.” - Bruce Lee
[+] [-] fargle|6 years ago|reply
I hadn't read ESRs paper in a few years, but just reread it again now. This author is definitely oversimplifying and mischaracterizing it. It's not right to conflate "Cathedral" with "Closed-Source" and "Commercial", nor to incorrectly imply that's what ESRs paper point was. Plenty of earlier Open Source software, notably FSF software itself, is (or was) developed "Cathedral" style and ESR definitely talks about that. I always read his paper as kind of "GNU FSF" process vs. "Linux", both being Open Source (or Free to please RMS). And I think history has proven his points rather nicely, IMHO.
But "Cathedral" and "Bazaar" are just two points on a spectrum anyway, and it's mostly orthogonal to a "Free/Open" vs. "Closed/Commercial" spectrum.
Now to the rest of the paper, while couched in formal and civil language, the author would have been much more succinct if he just came right out and said "Open Source Software Sux!". Which is an odd point to make for an academic having little experience writing either or any kind of real software.
I can see he thinks that, but there's not much in the way of actual arguments, other than opinions and cherry-picked sentences from ESR's paper, to make it worth picking apart or disagreeing with.
So yup, I fully agree: Dr Mark Tarver thinks that "Open Source Sux because Reasons".
Now then, I will just be getting back to the universe in which I live, where Open Source software is the foundation of the internet and just about every other piece of modern technology from doorbells to cars, including nearly all proprietary commercial products too...
[+] [-] hitekker|6 years ago|reply
> Help create a generation of takers that believed that all code should be open source and embraced open source as a religion. Online bullying of dissent began in forums. A large number of believers then traded 'code' for 'digitisable media' and the most active of those went in for DRM cracking and piracy.
Judging by the comments so far, I think he struck a nerve.
[+] [-] newnewpdro|6 years ago|reply
There's actually substantial value in access to such things. Rather than repeating the experiments yourself, you can go see where they led others without investing the time and energy to repeat the effort. If you find something that mostly resembles what you would have made, can get along with the license, and still wish to move forward - huzzah, a jump starting fork is born.
Abandonware IMHO is more appropriately applied to examples like Google's ever growing list of abandoned projects that actually had users, where the world noticed the abandonment of something useful.
[+] [-] fefe23|6 years ago|reply
The cathedral and the bazaar was not a book, it was an essay. They apparently later turned it into a book but I know nobody who read the book. The essay, in contrast, was read by everybody in the scene.
Here's how I remember it.
Open source has no specific meaning before esr claimed it. And after he claimed it, crucially, open source did not mean you could not charge for the software.
I practice almost no source code was released under non-liberal licenses, but there are some notable exceptions. For example, Microsoft released the source code of the Windows kernel for research use to universities. AFAIK that technically means Windows is open source.
esr was not against releasing source code under non-liberal licenses. He was just convinced those would not stand a chance against code released under liberal licenses. Time has proven him right, I would say.
Also this article misses the point, I think. Open source was not meant to define or enshrine a methodology. It was coined because at the time people felt that the free software movement was holding itself back in the fight against Microsoft (google "halloween documents" to get more insight into esr's struggle against Microsoft) because it sounded like you could not make money with it. Also because the GNU General Public License said if you make changes to a piece of GPL code, the result must also be under the GPL. So in a sense GPL actually did impede commercial exploitation of free software.
At the time many libertarians (like esr) felt that the market would solve this if you just let it, and software is not the place to fight ideological wars about the freedom of software.
I'm just paraphrasing the arguments here as I understood them. Personally I come down on the pro-GPL side of the aisle.