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by alangibson 2055 days ago
The reason that response is so rare is that people forgot the origin of open source. Once I solve my problem, it costs me nothing to give you the solution.

If you just want me to solve your problem when I don't also have it, you need to compensate me for my time.
2 comments
falcolas 2055 days ago
Respectfully, this is not the origin of open source.

The origin of open source is the ideal that "users should be able to see - and modify - the code that is running on their machines."

The "it costs me nothing" has also also proven to be false, because there's a pretty sizable overhead to open sourcing and maintaining an open source project, especially once it becomes popular. If there was no overhead, you wouldn't see articles like the "Pay Me or Fork This" post from earlier this morning.

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alangibson 2055 days ago
I always understood that as a later Richard Stallman-esque take on it.

Transparency would have just been assumed by the first people to do OSS because they'd be the ones loading the programs.

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falcolas 2055 days ago
It's worth reading into the history of OSS. There was a bit of sharing going on in the early 70's, but it was all being locked down before Richard Stallman and his contemporaries created the modern OSS movement via the GNU project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_free_and_open-sourc...

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autarch 2055 days ago
The term "free software" predates "open source" by many years. Stallman started work on free software (the movement and the code) many, many years before Eric S Raymond coined the term "open source".
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alangibson 2055 days ago
It's about the sharing of code, whatever label you put on it. Terminology usually lags behind practice.
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autarch 2055 days ago
The terms "free software" and "open source" were created very deliberately to express different values. The conflict between those values has been the source of a lot of contention in the past. Nowadays there's less of that, probably because as the industry grows, the proportion of developers who are old enough to remember this stuff is going down.
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carapace 2055 days ago
No, you could always share your code, "Open" source adds nothing to that.

"Free" software is about preventing technology lock-in. As in "I'll share with you but only if you agree to share with me."

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White_Wolf 2055 days ago
I think (some)people forget that that particular piece of software saves them money and/or time and think they are entitled to it (somehow). They forget that nobody owes them anything and should be grateful for the fact it's FOSS in the first place.
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