• 2 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Within the analogy (as it compares to Redhat and the Rebuilders), how is Foo helping Bar? Isn’t Foo simply leaving the TVs outside the factory for people to come and pickup? A bunch of trucks branded “Bar” come by, pick some of them up, rebrand them, and take jobs to install them, jobs that Foo thought they were going to get? Isn’t Foo now requiring individual people to walk through a lockable door, sign their name, verify that they don’t work for Bar, and grab a TV instead of just leaving them outside in a pile?


  • I don’t see how Company Foo can dictate that all other entities (customers, for example) can receive a free TV on their doorstep (since the code is open source) except for Company Bar. To make it map better to the situation, Company Bar would receive a shipment of free TVs, rebrand them, ship them out to customers, and install them.

    “They don’t have to give Company Bar TVs to install.” So the GPL doesn’t require that Company Foo permit free access to the TVs? They could decide to not give out their TVs to anyone?

    Also, what if I wanted to get my cousin a free TV but charge him a few bucks to install it? Is this only a problem at scale?


  • Oh, I see. But what do you think of this translation:

    “Company Foo makes TVs and is always working to make them better. They give them out for free with the hopes of making money installing them and providing guidance on how to use them, but someone starts Company Bar and installs them for cheaper and starts taking on installation jobs.”

    Is this wrong? Isn’t this just the definition of an open market? Please let me know if I’m missing some kind of context. I hope that we can continue to discuss this respectfully.

    I should say that I want any open source project with the motivation to write good software to have all of the funding they need to make that happen. I just don’t see how it can be justified in this instance when compared to any other market.







  • I think we may be talking about two different things with regards to corporate control. I’m saying that, in the case with Redhat specifically, that their injection of a fee to access the source code now no longer makes the code freely available to downstream repositories. If they comically charged a billion dollars to access the source code (with a GPL) it would practically become closed source, so I’m curious why any entity can charge any amount to access open source software. And if it’s totally legal with this type of license, doesn’t that mean that we should be avoiding GPL at all costs?


  • Correct me if I’m mistaken. What I read from your post sounds to me like you think that we should accept that a company will inject a revenue stream into the process that we all were working on as an open source project. We weren’t expecting to get paid, so why not allow the company to get paid, regardless of the downstream impacts for other projects that once relied on the project being completely free and open. Do I understand that properly? I don’t want to misrepresent your intent. I feel like I must be misunderstanding something.









  • My first programming language was QBasic, then Visual Basic, then Java, then C# (most experience with), then C++, then Python, and now Rust. Only when I learned C++ in college did I truly grasp the power of memory management. I think it’s important for new programmers to have some understanding of and experience with pointers, but it doesn’t need to be your first language. I think it’s okay to start with Python or C#, but you’ll want to go back and learn the hard stuff at some point (C++ and then Rust). Python will be super easy to learn the basics (data structures, algorithms, etc.). C# is also a good choice, but has you learning a few more things at the same time you’re trying to learn the basics.