gerbick | # 21 | 2018-03-30, 14:10 | Report

In theory, yes. But that's not what I've observed thus far.

I think we're looking at it two different ways. You've decided to embed yourself in the minutiae of FOSS whereas it is important for it to be embedded everywhere and thus that propagates FOSS and its meritocracy however whenever a corporation, say LinkSys does that, they do so without adding any fixes, concerns or other finds into the mainstream and create a fork that benefits only themselves. Making money out in the open is quite hard - meaning that it's great to have an army of developers solve your problems yet many bigger corporations rarely give back.

But for how long? Many great projects with a lot of hope that started off promising simply die to lack of updates. I'll rather respect somebody that continues to support their endeavors or at least try to remain visible and drum up energy. Folks like Shuttleworth, Torvalds and even to a lesser extent Somasegar, all rallied behind projects that required many others to support their endeavors but they did so with a passion that made adding to the project feel like you were adding to the better not to the worse parts of the FOSS meritocracy.

Many other companies have benefited from this work and have contributed nothing (if anything) back.

Sure. It works from your view. But from a corporate down view, I just see a bunch of unpaid folks getting taken advantage of.

Allow me to simplify my statements and be brutally blunt: I meant these so-called experts that bury themselves into the FOSS environment and rarely add much more than snide remarks, contrarian beliefs and impose their point of view unto every single ****ing discussion and rarely add anything of worth, ever.

I'm tired of these so-called experts that bring nothing to the table but an opposing view because they want to see the world burn. They want to see everybody as miserable as they are. Tired of it doesn't even do justice to how I truly feel about this ever-growing sector that wants me to hear about how they never buy anything firsthand, how they're experts in all things but actually doing a damn thing.

Simply put - shut up, do something. Or shut the **** up. That is the group that adds nothing to the folks that are actually doing any work. Worse, they do absolutely nothing to point out that folks are doing great, inspired work that ends up being utilized without getting a credit by larger corporations.

Corruption is a semantic term that most want to surround. How about this, propose a better word, not a weirdly phrased adjustment that really says absolutely nothing.

Take it personal or not. I don't give a damn. But in the end, we all miss out - so taking it personal means nothing other than you're unable to break the egocentric trend and see the world for more than yourself.

That is the second part of why I disagree with the current iteration of FOSS meritocracy. It actually works, but how do you enforce corporation to give back? They take and take.

And if they take, they should pay (respect or money).

juiceme | # 22 | 2018-03-30, 15:06 | Report

Of course I will. I pay (or try to pay[1]) for every application I use.
Can you tell me what are your applications?


[1] There are few developers who don't accept my payments or refund me back when I pay them, but at least I tried...

juiceme | # 23 | 2018-03-30, 16:18 | Report

Giving back is an essential part of it, and I do understand how it is very difficult for commercial enterprises to work that way. It takes a lot of work to convince the organization to behave "the right way" and to upstream corrections and modifications and unless there is a clear reason for doing it the management will see it just as an useless expense to be rid of.

There is the added burden of license management; the products need to be layered correctly in order for keeping the in-house code separate from FOSS code; this is something that requires considerable amount of work so the smallest companies might find it too difficult to do.

We have solved this by adhering to few simple rules;

• The OS is a separate build that works-by-itself; Everything on the OS level is licensed under GPL/BSD/Apache et al, we will not accept any proprietary-licensed code in OS.
• The OS provides only dynamically linkable libraries to applications and we check the licensing of those libraries very carefully.
• We meticulously offer all enhancements and fixes as patches to upstream. Our policy is to always take the latest code from upstream and only apply our own patches if our fixes are not accepted upstream. (This really makes our life a lot easier too, as we don't have to support a wide set of inhouse patches)
• All company-confidental code is built into applications that run on top of the OS. We evaluate all linking to OS libraries and use od OS interfaces to make sure no cross-contamination happens

I have a somewhat darwinistic view on this; if the project is viable, then there will be an user base and active developers for it. If not, well then perhaps it deserves to stagnate.
(I am not saying "die" here but "stagante", since I don't believe it is possible for a FOSS project to really die, it is there for all to see and for someone to pick up if ever found worthy.

To recap; if it doesn't take into fire maybe it really was not the "great project with a lot of hope" you mentioned?


I certainly hope you don't view my contributions this way!


I see this is a problem somewhere, but I feel that those corporations that work the way you describe are wasting their own resources; In the end your own maintanance load grows to unmanageable size pretty quick if you are not synchronizing with upstream.
It would help that they would realize it is to their own benefit to work the FOSS way.
I do have hopes that more and more companies will start working towards that; internally the people who do the FOSS integration in the companies do realize this, it is only that they'd need to make the management also understand it and align the workflow correctly.

Zeta | # 24 | 2018-03-30, 19:30 | Report

On the related note of corporations and FOSS, there was a news today from bootlin (ex free-electrons), a french software company well known for being the (co-)maintainers of some parts of the linux kernel (Atmel, Allwinner, Marvell, RTC&NAND subsystems...) : https://bootlin.com/blog/kickstarter...sfully-funded/

I don't recall having seen before a crowdfunding for developing drivers (except maybe bug-bounties), but I may have missed it.

Anyway, it was a success, and was backed by quite a few of the companies that will benefit from the support of the Allwinner VPU on the board they sell: OrangePi, Libre Computer, neutis.io, FriendlyArm, Pine64, Olimex.

Not exactly the same kind of contribution that what juiceme was showing above, and should be done by allwinner directly, but it is good to see that a lot of people and companies are ready to contribute in a way or another.

gerbick | # 25 | 2018-03-30, 21:27 | Report

Doesn't die? I disagree.

Two words: Fremantle WONTFIX

And no. I do not view your contributions as anything but completely positive. We're honored to have you here.

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Last edited by gerbick; 2018-03-30 at 21:40.

wicket | # 26 | 2018-03-30, 22:41 | Report

Although it has FOSS components, Fremantle was never really a FOSS project.

Having said that, I'd argue that it didn't die. It has lived on through CSSU and has now been given a new lease of life with Maemo Leste.

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Last edited by wicket; 2018-03-30 at 23:15.

pichlo | # 27 | 2018-03-31, 00:35 | Report

@juiceme, I admire your idealism but, "impossible for a FOSS project to die"? Seriously? I have long lost the count of applications I could no longer use because the developer got bored and lost interest.

I know, you will retort with the usual " yes, but, free, someone else, bla bla bla". Well let me tell you something. I know that in theory someone else may pick it up and continue. But how often does it really happen? In the real, non-cloud-cuckoo-land idealistic world? In my experience, hardly ever. There are more dead FOSS projects than weeds in my garden. To any sensible approximation, all FOSS projects are dead.

The same thing can of course happen in the non-FOSS world. But at least that world is not full of BS and does not pretend that everything is rosy and we all live in a harmony singing kumbaya.

theonelaw | # 28 | 2018-03-31, 01:31 | Report

This I have done - not to the full extent of resurrection into the marketplace,
but to the extent that I (and others !) have recrafted such code
for specific applications.
I did release the new code back to the community in question.
(in public - not in some private email)
[A mathematical data processing visualization project.]
The project is dead - but the code is still used by many,
and has even been stolen and is still worked upon in secret labs.

Code never dies.

And if such code is left available,
it can eventually occur that someone may have an aha moment.
The depth of that moment may be as crude as
"this code fixes an annoying problem with an old hack"
or it could be the moment that launches a new
decentralized networking solution everyone else
thought would need a ground-up engineering effort.

Any FOSS effort is not just a here-and-now benefit.

And the term 'WONTFIX' inspires incredible efforts.

gerbick | # 29 | 2018-03-31, 02:09 | Report

You know... I have never backed down from ever admitting where I could possibly be wrong.

So here I am stating just that. You guys are the best kind of right, you are undeniably correct.

WONTFIX really brought out the best minds to fix the stuff that Nokia just decided they would not fix.

I believe in FOSS despite a lot of the tools I'd require in my direct field not ever being there yet. But the fact that it does exist, it's always going to be my first choice to at least research or support.

juiceme | # 30 | 2018-03-31, 08:18 | Report

Well, read back what I wrote and think about it a bit.

Those countless projects you mention, that were abandoned; if the code exists they are not dead, someone could continue if she deemed it useful. You could do it yourself if you really needed the said application but it seems to me you don't need it badly enough...

So it seems to be those can be classified to the category "projects that deserve to die"


There are countless examples of quickly hacked stuff that is done just because someone needs it for any given reason at that moment. When that is no longer needed it is abandoned but if it ever was published so that the code is "out there", and as much as you seem to hate the idea, someone might well use parts of it for whatever reason later, come the need.

The important thing here is that writing software is not hard, just about anyone can hack up code suitable for a task at hand; it's just defining what you want to have and executing on that plan. Hence there exist code of so varying quality.
it's very much like playing a musical instrument; some can do it beautifully and some manage just to find some chords..

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Last edited by juiceme; 2018-03-31 at 09:04. Reason: Correct some typos