| I skimmed these responses, I'd say that most of them are the result of not reading the material in the
essay or nit-picking or ad hominem remarks. I really tried to find something of real worth. '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. I'm afraid this in an attempt to redefine open source and is an example of the 'isolated points fallacy' covered in the essay. Open source includes everything with an open source license. To say OS is successful by defining all projects that do not succeed as not part of OS is simply to coin a tautology. '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.' Again covered in the essay 'Proprietary software vendors typically make money by producing software that people want to use.
This is a strong incentive to make it more usable. (It doesn’t always work: for example, Microsoft, Apple,
and Adobe software sometimes becomes worse but remains dominant through network effects. But it works
most of the time.) With volunteer projects, though, any incentive is much weaker. The number of users rarely makes any financial
difference to developers, and with freely redistributable software, it’s near-impossible to count users anyway.
There are other incentives — impressing future employers, or getting your software included in a popular OS —
but they’re rather oblique.' What an absurd dichotomy. Even if you work full time on open source, you probably can't be a major contributor
to more than a handful of large projects, at most; many people specialize in just one. But you probably use dozens to hundreds of open source programs. So for any project with a modicum of popularity, of course the number of people who use the software without contributing dwarfs the number of contributors.
That would be true even if everyone worked full time on open source. A giver is a person who gives as much or more than he takes. A taker is one who takes more than he gives.
Define it in relation to open source as a whole and the dichotomy is valid. There are users and corporations
who take far more from OS collectively than they give back. Is this hard to grasp? 'The vast majority of comments that take issue with it in this thread thus far are nitpicks about minor points,
and almost none address the essential thrusts of Tarver’s argument, all of which are actually quite cogent.' That's basically right and that's why after 20 years the OS movement is still stuck where ESR left it. |