from early_riser@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 17 Mar 17:19
https://lemmy.world/post/44386416
I know everyone here loves FOSS, and for good reason, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t have its own issues. UX and accessibility are two I whine about regularly, but another big one is project abandonment.
I can’t tell you how many old forum/reddit posts I’ve run across of a lone developer hyping up their latest project, only for me to go to the github page and notice the last commit was 7 years ago.
If you’re not familiar with the Gemini protocol, it’s an updated alternative to Gopher, which in turn was an early competitor to the WWW back in the 90s. Gemini itself I can’t speak to, but if you go down the list of gemini servers and clients on geminiprotocol.net, you’ll see 404s, broken links, and expired certs galore. There was a flood of developer interest 5 or 6 years ago when the protocol was new, but everyone wandered away once the shiny wore off.
My recent foray into wiki software has turned up a few corpses as well. Wiki.js development seems to have stalled, and Pepperminty wiki has been abandoned for three years now.
And yes, I know this is because FOSS devs are often doing this on their own time for little to no money, so passion is the only thing driving them, but passion can only get you so far.
Besides loss of developer interest, community schisms can cause a project to sink. Remember what happened to Audacity? I think it ended up surviving but there was a real concern for a while that the forks wouldn’t be as well supported.
All the FOSS offerings I can think of that are “too big to fail” have big corporate support, like the Linux kernel.
I’m guessing most of us are self-hosting as a hobby, and we can afford to risk a loss of support when a project is abandoned, but businesses don’t have that luxury. That’s why they use proprietary software.
#selfhosted
threaded - newest
I really enjoyed Gifable, a self-hosted gif library. It was great, albeit a bit feature light. About 3 years ago the maintainer stopped maintaining and went AFK, nothing to be heard of then. I’ve since forked it, and I’ve been working on some new features to hopefully bring it up to speed. (Things like S3 storage, using AI image captioning to auto-caption your memes, categories, and hopefully full matrix integration), but it’s a slog.
….
Youre missing a few key things here.
I wouldn’t put much agreement toward your argument for proprietary here, because I’ve seen (and had to deal with) proprietary solutions being abandoned with no workable solution available, especially as the current generation of proprietary solutions require a license server or other cloud-connected back end in order to work.
So when they get abandoned, its just over.
So no, this argument against open source for business has no merits IMO.
I’m not saying proprietary software doesn’t also have problems, just that FOSS has problems unique to it that are rarely acknowledged.
Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval. But I’m also practically the only one interacting with those systems, so I’m the only one who’s affected if something breaks.
None of the issues you’ve noted are unique to open source though.
And most of the problems actually have solutions with FOSS vs proprietary.
Just to say, though, I feel like 99% of the software we deploy is open-source for that exact reason. Projects generally start out small, where you try to evaluate some concept. You’re not gonna spend months to go through the purchase process of some proprietary tool, if you can help it…
@curbstickle @early_riser I drive a school bus. I have to maintain a seating chart for my kids, in case of accident and whatnot.
Let me tell you about the locked-in software that the Division is probably paying thousands per year to use, which I have to use in order to update that chart.
It's... from the 90s. No javascript whatsoever. To update a seat, I click one of those HTML1.0 popopen lists. After I choose the new student, I wait about five seconds for the page to reload. There is no option to do a bunch of updates then hit save. Only this Promethean pecking at my geekish liver with each passing second.
I could code something better in a weekend and I never touch LLM slop of any kind, and I offered to, for free, because I will give it to all other drivers, but so far, they are not taking me up on it.
Proprietary = you* are meat for shareholder leeches
*edit: The "you" here being my local community, who have to pay for this garbage, but don't get to see how fucking appallingly bad it is.
I had to spend months moving our IBM3270 automations to a new product because the company we had a license with apparently went under (they wouldn’t respond to requests for a new license when we needed to do a server upgrade.
It took so long because their proprietary BASIC like language had basically no documentation, and the scripts had been written like 12 years before. At least I moved us to an open source solution, which didn’t have the best documentation, but I could just look through the source to get the answers I needed (and had to program in some missing functionality).
I’m still sad that I wasn’t allowed to contribute to the project due to our government contracts. At least I could contribute to the python wrapper I found for it to make it Python 3 compatible.
Perhaps an org whose income depends on foss should sponsor those products? Just like they pay big tech for shitty services.
This isn’t exclusive to Open Source projects. This happens all the time with proprietary apps as well: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Even things like TV shows can get killed after 1 season.
Complex social hierarchy is a super important aspect to account for too. In the proprietary software realm, you infer confidence in the accumulated wealth hierarchy. In FOSS the hierarchy is not wealth, but reputation like in academia or the film industry. If some company in Oman makes some really great proprietary app, are you going to build your European startup over top of it? Likewise, if in FOSS someone with no reputation makes some killer app, the first question to ask is whether this is going to anchor or support a stellar reputation. Maybe they are just showing off skills to land a job. If that is the case, they are just like startups that are only looking to get bought up quickly by some bigger fish. We are all conditioned to think in terms of horded wealth as the only form of hierarchy, but that is primitive. If all the wealth was gone, humans are still fundamentally complex social animals, and will always establish a complex hierarchy. This is one of the spaces where it is different.
Wait, that doesn’t match my business experience. Those proprietary solutions are usually a collection of open source libraries and DBs and Elasticserach or Redis and whatever running Linux VMs held together with duct tape and a small amount of proprietary application code (compared to everything else) using five different open source frameworks.
Or if you buy, say, a Lasercutter, how do you think they convert the images you prepare for engraving? Their own commercial libraries they bought from someone? Because businesses don’t do open source? Nope. How do you think businesses compile the firmware that goes into their CNC machine? Borland C++? Nope.
When you use the proprietary software, they don’t tell you what went into it. That’s kind of the point - you are buying a solution and only want to know the price. When you host your own instead, you kind of need to know what goes into it, because you didn’t pay someone to do the integration for you.
Or more fundamentally: with open source, you only get what the developer wanted to build. If you want someone to build what you need, you got to be either lucky that the two things align close enough, or find a way to pay someone to focus on your needs instead of theirs. Or you can hope someone else pays someone to make it and then pays a little bit extra to also publish it open source for everyone else to use. Rarely happens, but it does happen.
Installing a program on discover store with 0 reviews seems sketchy