[logical_person]

To say business tools and confidentiality are at odds with open source is comical at best. Some of us work on FOSS as a career. We still have to sign NDAs with customers, we still upstream patches to core components.

Throwing your toys out of the ring because business is business is why open source has a funding problem.

[c-cube]

Why the heck would a IRC network, run by volunteer, with infra graciously provided by sponsors, have to sign NDAs with anyone? Everything about Freenode should have been transparent.

[duckfang]

> To say business tools and confidentiality are at odds with open source is comical at best. Some of us work on FOSS as a career. We still have to sign NDAs with customers, we still upstream patches to core components.

It makes sense that credentials to services are confidential. But aside that, the whole point behind a bulk of free software and open source is that everything's done out in the open. You get to watch the meat grinder - and you can even operate it as well! The head butcher may have exacting quality controls, but again - its viewable.

And yes, many of us have NDA's. I have a few myself, only on the specific implementations of systems I build and/or maintain, and internal business things. I reviewed it with an attorney, and believed their limited scope was acceptable and reasonable.

> Throwing your toys out of the ring because business is business is why open source has a funding problem.

There's a few assumptions there.

1. I helped *migrate* people away from (un)Freenode to Libera.chat . I didn't throw them away - i helped move people over for a mostly seamless experience.

2. That open source/free software has a funding problem... That's just a troll statement - you're assuming business needs are the same as FOSS. They're not. And unlike closed source proprietary, once FOSS code has been written, everyone can share. But you knew that; and that's why I call it a troll statement. It's disingenuous at its core.

[joepie91_]

I do commercial FOSS work without an NDA just fine. Seems it might just be a problem on your side...

[josefx]

One of the companies I worked for tried to avoid NDAs whenever it could. They were apparently full of retarded requirements like giving the customer full access to all of our systems for security review on demand, which of course is at odds with every other NDA requiring us not to share the information on those systems.

I am not sure how lawyers can write these requirements without noticing how impossible they are. Then again I had to can a project that was signed of by the lawyers of at least three different companies, the software licenses involved made it impossible to build a commercial or open source project from it (GPL, AGPL and at least two conflicting commercial ones). So it might just be that they have as much understanding of technology as I have of Chinese.

[uhfraid]

The way you choose to handle business doesn’t invalidate what he said, and you shouldn’t take that as a dig.