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by atoav 977 days ago
Now if everybody followed that strategy, where would we be?
1 comments

Lots of FOSS that can be used by individuals, tinkerers, SMBs, but not so much megacorps?
lots of foss thats not useful or valuable to anyone, big or small.
Is SQLite not useful because some of their test harnesses are private and they charge for certification when it gets used for avionics?
Is sqlite the world? Does any single example invalidate anything if it is not representative of the majority?

If sqlite is one example, then the "open source" displaylink drivers are another. (they are nothing, they just create shim for a blob)

No. But it's definitely much closer to what's described in the article than binary blob drivers.

Complaining that a company only makes available the source to everything you'll ever want to run in your computer, but not the tools certify it for avionics (SQLite), or to scale it horizontally to 100s of nodes (Fermyon Spin), is not the same as not giving you the source to display drivers.

I'm not complaining about anything (other than the article, but not because they want to sell their software).

But is a fact that a lot of companies that want to straddle both sides of the fence, the open side is kinda crap. It's also true that a lot is not crap, but so what?

Another random example I happen to be familiar with, a long time ago a company essentially took over hylafax, and what do you know, ever since then the open parts got practically no useful or valuable advancement, and ifax commercialized such trivial to implement but end user valuable nicities as being able to associate a fax job with a db record. hylafax+ was forked and has been the good useful version ever since.

ifax didn't really hurt anyone since the fork was possible and actually happened, and has been great, but they didn't help either. they provide essentially no value to the open source ecosystem in trade for their ownership and commercialization of hylafax. I don't know if they ever tried to write a blog post like this one though. If not, then they were at least more honest, ish. It's not that honest to claim to be managing and caring for some open source project, while for some mysterious reason not accepting prs for features that compete with ones you sell in your commercial version of the same thing, for 20 years.