
Think about Loose Coupling

Re: If you want a passionate open source life, you need to fight for it

by brian_d_foy (Abbot)
on Jan 25, 2009 at 21:46 UTC ( #738830=note: print w/ replies, xml ) Need Help??

in reply to If you want a passionate open source life, you need to fight for it

Besides completely misunderstanding the difference between free and open software, you also fundamentally misunderstand open source software.

You have the source. You can modify it. If you need to fix something, you can. Your work is completely up to your own analysis of its benefits and costs to you.

Open source does not mean, in any sense, that anyone else owes you anything. If you want to have someone do work that benefits you, you can compensate that person. You may think that the big open source projects are donations in time and energy, but the money is still there. The money isn't coming from every consumer, necessarily. Major players in Perl have had corporate support and fellowships to work directly on Perl. Many module authors are paid by their employer to contribute their work. Linux certainly was not 100% free labor. GNU isn't free labor. You just didn't see the people who were paying for it so the developers could eat food, sleep under a roof, and have a computer.

If you force people to not be compensated for their work, you'll be left with the handful of virtually homeless Perl hackers and lose most of rest of the Perl community. After that, open source isn't all that great.

As for your modules, it looks like most haven't seen a release in several years. From someone complaining about other people not updating modules and from someone claiming to have a higher moral standard, I call bullshit. After you demonstrate that you'll maintain your modules on an ongoing basis, then you can talk about maintaining modules.

brian d foy <>
Subscribe to The Perl Review

Comment on Re: If you want a passionate open source life, you need to fight for it

Log In?

What's my password?
Create A New User
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://738830]
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this? | Other CB clients
Other Users?
Others cooling their heels in the Monastery: (6)
As of 2014-03-14 00:31 GMT
Find Nodes?
    Voting Booth?

    Have you used a cryptocurrency?

    Results (293 votes), past polls