Disclaimer: I've been working full time on various large FLOSS projects for many years and I contribute to other ones in my spare time.
You start with "I salute you. I’m a fan" and then call a lot of people "fundamentalist", then "You have made a choice based on an ideology", "blind to the realities of the world you live in".
Then "But like most utopian views, it’s naive", "It’s a pipe dream", and finally "Like all fundamentalists, they simply ignore some inconvenient truths".
Then you ramble through justifications of your business model (and quite a few logical fallacies).
For being a fan, you express your support in a strange way.
Now excuse me while I go back to writing software as a gift to whoever wants to use it.
Proprietary software developers "love FOSS" when they can build their products on it. But, if users desire those same freedoms, they're suddenly fundamentalists or zealots.
I think you fail to see the usefulness of fundamentalists. They help keep some kind of balance in the overall system, by pulling some of the practices towards one end. If no FOSS fundamentalists existed, we may be living in a very different software world right now. A number of extremely useful POSIX tools were the products of such ideologies.
I think one of the "better" approaches if you cannot survive with a "support/customization" model (which is certainly not for everyone) is to open-source elements of your software offering that are not business critical but still somewhat useful for other parties to live in the open. This way you do not take away your livelihood, but you still contribute back in some amount to the tech world. That's like being a good citizen.
Interesting point, but I think it's a fallacy.
Taking this line of argument and applying it to the social sphere - you would be arguing that there is a place for nazi's in this world (I'm just making a point - not saying you support nazis!)
Totally agree with your "good citizen" argument though. Something we should consider.
Your nazi argument works against you here, by only providing proprietary software to your users you are being totalitarian (completely in control of the software) and users won't know if you treat them fairly either.
I think you're equivocating a bit here: FOSS fundamentalism (as you put it) isn't even close to the same kind of thing as Nazis. I think a better name would be FOSS purists.
IIUC you mean this in the context of desktop environments (and not including things like Android, server OSes, or ChromeOS). The problem with your argument is that those of us who use Linux as our main desktop environment don't want just another platform: the entire point of its existence is its openness. The point is and has always been that you can download it, install it, and run it without having to jump through arbitrary hoops, agree to restrictive licensing, pay anyone, etc.
Watering that down for proprietary software vendors goes against the whole point.
Maybe we would get more, possibly better software. Steam has certainly shown that for games. However, the entire reason that Steam for Linux even exists is that folks at Valve didn't like what Microsoft was doing with Windows 8, specifically the Windows Store and its games for sale, competing directly with Valve. They created Steam Machines and Steam for Linux as a contingency in case Microsoft tried to use their position to prevent another, competing marketplace from existing.
They can do that because of the license, and specifically because of the license no one can later revoke Valve's ability to use the OS, even if Linus or GNU decide to go into the games marketplace business. That's why us purists insist on it.
Garbage point, because Nazi ideology is not based on anything other than supremacy. There's no other 'ideas' to it, if you will. No other substance. Take for example socialism and while far from perfect, there are ideas that could and should be adopted from it.
He is pointing out a phenomenon that holds very true and is not talked about very much: That authors of proprietary software are often attacked by FOSS Fundamentalists. It's a kind of bullying that I have personally experienced, and at least I do strongly believe that it is in nobody's best interest.
Key point is this: If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux. Simple as that really.
As a proprietary app, we have encountered quite a bit of resistance from Linux users, usually berating us for not being open source. I think that's short sighted. We need more pragmatists.
Linux users who understand where Linux come from (don't bag Linux users under a single umbrella, there's a wide variety of them) have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few) or seen the effect of "bad proprietary apps" (Chrome systematically trying to spy on you, software with backdoors, etc... that it's going to be a difficult case to come and say "this time, it's different" with a new proprietary app offering.
>have suffered from proprietary software companies not supporting their OS/distros (Adobe, Microsoft, just to pick a few)
And here lies the main point - they believe that many users will simply reject their proprietary software on principle. If the community was seen to embrace proprietary, which is what I'm calling for in the article, they might just support Linux.
Also worth noting that the largest contributor to the Linux kernel is... Microsoft.
> many users will simply reject their proprietary software on principle.
Yes, because we've grown tired of companies abusing their relationships with customers: abandoning products and leaving them useless, charging more and more for the same or less levels of support, removing features, suing users for repairing their own property... The list goes on. Sure, similar issues can happen with FOSS, but at least you have some recourse if the creators disappear.
> Also worth noting that the largest contributor to the Linux kernel is... Microsoft.
Yes, but only now. And only because they did what they could to kill Linux, and they still lost. That former behavior is the kind of thing we like to never be an issue in the first place.
They have only themselves to blame (as a whole, not individuals) because their platform is a pain to develop for compared to others unless your code is open source so distros can compile it themselves.
One does wonder whether this situation is intentionally exacerbated by the fundamentalists. Case in point, there are people against Flatpak because it makes it easier for developers to bypass repos and their package maintainers.
Hello there. An not so much against it, as not "for it".
> it easier for developers to bypass repos and their package maintainers.
No, that's not the problem at all. The biggest problem is duplication of libraries, most of which will not see security updates nowhere near as promptly as the system version would, integration with the DE and the problems there, fundamentally replicating the Windows/macOS model, while many see native package management as superior for the reasons I mentioned.
Then I guess this is the trade-off you've agreed to. However, there are a whole lot of Linux and potential Linux users who complain about the lack of proprietary software ports, and package managers and their implications are one of the reasons for that.
Flatpak isn't even good enough, in my opinion, since it adds complexity to an otherwise simple scheme in an effort to accomplish some of the deduplication you and other fans of package managers want. Ditto its repo model.
Some people do not care about "spreading" anything. For many people proprietary software is just unacceptable on principle, just like selling food without giving the list of ingredients.
Yes I do. I was talking about selling packaged food, but still, restaurants make a good example also. They will always tell you if one of their recipe contains a particular ingredient (of which you might be allergic), and whether there are vegan options. Many restaurants even write the complete list of ingredients on each item in the menu!
Even then, except for very complex sauces, it is quite easy to see all the ingredients once you have the dish in front of you. This is impossible with proprietary software. Just grepping at a binary, you won't get too far.
That's not quite true. You can easily decompile any binary and glean all sorts of valuable information from it. On Windows you can find out which API calls it makes and can even use detours/trampolines to redirect such calls:
At one point I wrote a little piece of software as a proof of concept that used detours to redirect any file I/O in IE that was deemed "unsafe" to a special in-memory file system.
The bottom line is that you don't need the source code in order tell if an application is "phoning home" or if it makes suspicious API calls. In fact, it is often easier to just simply monitor how the software interacts with the host system to determine if it is performing (possibly) malicious actions. IOW, if you're concerned about a certain piece of software, then auditing the source code isn't going to be as good of a solution as just sandboxing the application so that it's impossible for the application to do something bad.
> They will always tell you if one of their recipe contains a particular ingredient (of which you might be allergic), and whether there are vegan options.
I authored the article. People ask us about our software all the time. We answer their questions. We have a post on our views on privacy, how we collect and use data etc. We give people the option to opt-out of data collection. Our email list is strictly opt-in. It seems that you are fine trusting the people that provide your food, but not your software.
>If more Linux people embraced proprietary software it would help spread Linux.
Microsoft uses Linux on something like 60% of their own cloud servers, presumably because they find it more profitable to do so than to use the software they wrote themselves.
One thing you have possibly missed is that the people you think are fundamentalists rather than pragmatists, are for the most part being fundamentalist about pragmatism.
They are not telling you to open source based on some abstract philosophy, but because they think that the practical effects of doing so are better.
And given that open source as an economic system of production is currently out-competing liberal capitalism at its own game, on its own terms, on its home turf, I suspect that they may have a point.
Do what you want, but it may be a mistake to dismiss the open source community as not being pragmatic when they critique you.
>I am dismissing those that reject proprietary software on principle.
That dismissal presumably includes both Stallman and the Debian project. I would not dismiss them all that lightly.
>I also made it clear that we would open source our software if we could find a business model that would work for us.
You are making a nice email client. The service of rock solid business email management would presumably be the obvious model to start with. There are more people willing to spend money on that than there are people willing to buy a better email client.
Linux is quite spread already. It is present on billions of Android devices, holds a quasi-monopoly on supercomputers, a large majority of servers and a quite fair chunks of embedded systems.
"But it doesn't run games or Excel on my desktop!" Ah yes you're right. Guess Linux is niche and needs spreading after all.
Games not running on Linux is slowly becoming a thing of the past. The largest hurdles are studios that develop their own engines from scratch and do not support anything other than directX.
You keep talking about helping Linux spread, as if you are trying to do some overlooked thing a favor. Linux is BY FAR the most deployed group of software environments/OS' on the planet. I'm not sure who you think you are trying to do a favor?
I think they mean on the user-facing side. Linux runs the world in the sense that it is the backbone of the infrastructure layer, but it's running on very few end-user computers.
That's my point, Linux "won" without needing any presence on the desktop side. Any suggestion about what should happen with Linux and/or Linux users that ignores this fundamental fact is utterly hopeless.
Linux "won" in the sense that every single one of those devices is special-purpose, and not for general-purpose computing. Linux is helping those that want to lock down computing so that it is consumption-only, which is completely antithetical to the goals of FOSS. Creation happens on the desktop, and right now the desktop is primarily Windows and Mac.
FOSS is something I aspire too, I still use some proprietary software but as I dream at a Star Trek world similar I dream that in future I would work only on FOSS.
If there is a choice use FOSS app A or proprietary app B I will use A if it does what I need, as a developer I adapted the open source apps to my needs where with proprietary apps I could never done it.
I also am personally fine with "open-core", something like JetBrains or GitLab, where the commitment to FLOSS is clearly shown, even if not all versions of their product are completely FLOSS. This is however not the case with the author of this post.
I also question him being a fan, it seems to me like he's a fan of building on it, that's about it.
Most of the time, yes. Of course it's nuanced, so it can only be evaluated on case-by-case matter, but if the FLOSS choice is "good enough", there's no need for me to look for anything else, even if it might be somewhat "better choice". Losing freedoms is way more painful than using second best software for the task.
Yes. I'd rather stick with poor-quality FOSS on my Linux setup and not contaminate it as much as is possible. I'm more than willing to pay for good software on my Mac. One can decide to do both at the same time.
Poorer choice for what? If it's something I heavily rely on - it's should be FOSS because I already experienced sitting there with a bunch of proprietary files with no way to fix the issue when the vendor was closed down.
If I need to do some short time job and there are no FOSS tools I usually buy the license for proprietary software do the work and then uninstall it. Since I can't even see if there are some obvious security vulnerabilities so why risk having it installed.
About the "poorer choice", by using not sufficiently featurefull FOSS tools you get the chance to improve those and everyone benefits.
Sometimes/often there is not even such choice. It would be great if we could even have FOSS alternatives for everything, but we are very far from such a situation.
Personally I think you think in term of "what if I start to work FOSS way today" instead of "what if we push all together a political reform that mandate Free Software". In the former you are wright: if you live on a single proprietary software sold as a product you easily find yourself done, in the letter you have to look back at IT history where at start, not in academia but in business software was normally open and companies are far stable and profitable than today.
In an open world you can't sell product, you sell skill, time, resources. If you try to be something like JustEat, Booking, Expedia, ... you are simply dead, but that's not a problem except at an hypothetical "model change", that's a good things for the society that prize real innovation ad work instead of marketing ad use (legitimate or abuse) of a commercial position.
It's not a matter of fundamentalism but a different social model.
<count me out of "the tech community". My opinions are my own>
I honestly don't find anything controversial in that post. It just lists some points which are between "obvious" and "common sense". There is, however, a typo in your header! now that is interesting ('and' instead of 'an')
Except for the part where you don't automatically deserve all potential customers and they're free not to buy your product, unless a certain condition is met. Do you think butchers should complain about people not wanting to buy meat? Or even specifically their meat?
These are the same tired arguments being made for almost 3 decades now. Sure, go ahead and do your own thing. Just don't expect FOSS users to sympathize with your point of view. To wit tho', I'll try and explain why (I'm sure ineffectively, but if you were really interested, you'd have already made the effort to understand).
A lot of people often confuse FOSS users and users of proprietary software. The difference is that FOSS users (for example users who do install linux, even on a Mac) typically feel more comfortable with the 'idea' that they or anyone else can look under the hook and tinker, if it comes to it and bothers them sufficiently. This is the primary reason why proprietary software is unappealing to them. Users of proprietary software don't value the freedom to look under the hood and tinker as much. Personally speaking, I won't judge people choosing one or the other.
However, arguments such as OSS makes "life a lot easier for a bad actor to pick it apart." or "..if you only have a handful of contributors, mistakes may not be caught." or "there is nothing to stop someone from forking it and selling it for less /offering it for free." is just disingenuous.
> bad actor
Unless your software is crazy popular and there is cred to be earned in the black hat community, people who go around looking for exploits in OSS typically would not be bad actors. In fact, a proprietary tool that run /on top of/ an OSS platform would be a much more appealing target for bad actors than an open source one -- because hey, finding a way to use 'paid-for' software for free is far more appealing than finding a way to reverse engineer some random binary custom format used to store addressbooks.
> mistakes may not be caught ...
total(mistakes caught by in house team) <= total(mistakes caught by in house team + 1 contributor)
why is this hard to understand ?
> nothing to stop someone from forking it ...for free
Firstly - Licensing. Learn about it. Secondly, search for forks that are more popular than the upstream. I'm sure you might find a few (although I am also sure you won't find many). Understand why they are more popular (hint: will have nothing to do with code).
And finally, (most importantly) if you still feel that access to code is the only thing that will stop competitors from copying you and then beating you on price -- well, think hard about your future business strategy.
You start with "I salute you. I’m a fan" and then call a lot of people "fundamentalist", then "You have made a choice based on an ideology", "blind to the realities of the world you live in".
Then "But like most utopian views, it’s naive", "It’s a pipe dream", and finally "Like all fundamentalists, they simply ignore some inconvenient truths".
Then you ramble through justifications of your business model (and quite a few logical fallacies).
For being a fan, you express your support in a strange way.
Now excuse me while I go back to writing software as a gift to whoever wants to use it.