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I thought Old was gold!
But, such a nice qoute or sentence that you've used "Open source is just another name for Communisn". True!
Favourite line: Throw me to them wolves and close the gate up. I am afraid of what will happen to them wolves - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Whenever I have downloaded Open Source code, I have been shocked at its low level of quality! If anybody who works at my company wrote stuff like that, they would not last long in our employ.
Yes, we borrow ideas that we can glean from other people's work via looking at Open Source, like we do from stuff we look at on Code Project and reverse-engineering commercial code, but I would never, ever use that shoddy work in a project of importance. Besides, we would have to shoe-horn it into our projects, since it was written by other people with different needs and different approaches, and, often, to poor standards.
That is the problem with Open Source - who knows who actually is responsible? The answer is, of course, nobody. And do we know if it has been thoroughly tested, in multiple scenarios, for edge situations? As we have seen from the OpenSSL Heartbleed security problem, it is NOT A GOOD THING to assume that we can rely on others to have written good code. I looked at OpenSSL a few years ago and found it bloated and totally incomprehensible! No wonder a serious flaw went undiscovered for so long - how could anybody get to know that large a scale of project when it is so bloated? Of course, nobody did! And OpenSSL was used extensively out of pure laziness. We found that it was not all that difficult to write our own SSL code by reading the standards; and then we owned it and could fix it and improve it. (And its size was tiny in comparison.)
Isn't that what we good programmers are meant to be good at, writing good code? We are meant to be the smart ones - surely we should rely on our own work rather than wishfully hoping that some anonymous 'community' somewhere out there has done a good job. Our company's attitude is: "other code bad; our code good".
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Not sure if trolling or you really think you should spend hundreds of hours/thousands of dollars on home-grown/proprietary software that could be replaced with freely available components that have been better tested than most others.
modified 17-Jul-14 10:08am.
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Quote: Our company's attitude is: "other code bad; our code good".
So your code is running on your own Operating system with your all of your own drivers for every device you interact with? You guys are the tops!
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Richard Wyllie wrote: Whenever I have downloaded Open Source code, I have been shocked at its low level of quality!
Blanket statements are never true. I'm sure there is sloppy code out there, but not all OSS is written poorly. Keep in mind, they may be using a different style you're not accustomed too as well.
Richard Wyllie wrote: Our company's attitude is: "other code bad; our code good".
Sounds arrogant and unproductive to me. Sure takes a lot of man hours to reinvent the wheel.
Jeremy Falcon
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I love how Microsoft and so many developers are using BSD / MIT / Apache / CPOL these days. It is great! I love to contribute back too when I can, even though I don't have to. (I don't want to maintain a private fork anyway.)
But.... I am now trying to educate people of the perils of using the LGPL license. I have always thought it was fair enough: if you tweak the library, you have to release your changes. Fine. I can work with that! It sure beats the GPL!
But there are (relinking) provisions in the LGPL that as far as I can tell basically make it impossible to use LGPL software on mobile app stores or consoles, so I have been prodding library developers about whether they really want to limit their audience this way.
One lesser known license that may work better for some people instead of the LGPL is the Mozilla Public License 2 (MPL 2.0)[^], which works on a source code file basis, and is missing some of the limiting aspects of the LGPL.
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to answer that question maybe it should be asked how many people use code or some form of it where the original source came from online?? we all read and research (commonly referred to as googling) problems and I suspect that most of the code we find online is open sources to some fashion or another.
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... and the security.
Open source isn't really free. It takes many hours of evaluation from very smart technical and legal people to decide if it is viable.
I clicked "Yes, when there aren't any other sensible options". It comes down to a gamble... can we evaluate it cheaper than we can make it? Do we expect it will be viable?
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Agreed. Been using Firebird as my most common SQL language for 10 years now. It's amazingly good for anything open source.
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My answer: "In rare cases."
In my current job I have to access data from a number of sources (including MySQL) with SSIS, and for one source I use some software I got off CodePlex.
About ten years ago I found a bug in MySQL, but because I had the source I was able to implement a fix and report it. That certainly was convenient.
I try to avoid all third-party software when I can; open/closed source really isn't much of a factor.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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MySQL is being superseded in the Open Source community by MariaDB[^]
Same original guy that created MySQL and is a drop in replacement for MySQL.
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The risk of an IP-based legal challenge is too great to use GPL-licensed software in a commercial application. The only open source I've used in our products have been two libraries whose licenses explicitly state that they may be used in commercial applications, unencumbered by the viral source code distribution clauses of the GPL and its variants.
Just because Richard Stallman wants to steal my hard work doesn't mean I have to make it easy for him  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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That's one of the most asinine comments I've seen on codeproject.com in a long time. Richard Stallman and the rest of the OSS world aren't out there being IP trolls. Is that your world?
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The GPL and its variants require that you publish your source code if you include GPL-licensed code in your application. You therefore have no means of securing your investment of time and money (not to mention blood, sweat, and tears) in developing your product.
How can you sell your product for a profit if you have to distribute the unique means of manufacturing that product with the product itself?
Stallman and his cohorts would have you believe that profiting from your work is somehow immoral, and that you should be willing to give it away for free. He must think we're stupid.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Hi, Gary - thanks for your reasoned response.
In my small forays into product development I usually find that an OSS component is not bound into the whole product but is rather one of several procedural steps. Perhaps if we are talking about binding objects/link libraries your point makes sense for me.
I've also found, as have other commenters, that the OSS versions of many software components is superior to that offered by commercial firms, it comes with source code, it usually has a willing and able support group (authors, contributors, forum participants.)
What I have seen with close-source/commercial offerings is usually the opposite. Support takes a long time, usually costs money, and the commercial company does what it can to limit open discussions on its usually moderated message boards.
Personally, I gladly spend the $s to buy a product that is open source - not always GPL/APL/MIT - and have the ability to see how things work.
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True, there is an obligation to make a product using GPL code iteself GPL. Where's the problem with that? If you don't like the license, just don't use it.
To accuse them of trying to steal your IP is just silly. The idea is that by contributing you volunteer your IP. I think their problem is when you try to profit from their work, after they give it away - that seems fair enough to me.
You may also note that some of these OSS folks somehow earn a decent living in spite of giving away their code. They just do it through other avenues - consulting, publishing, etc.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Rob Grainger wrote: True, there is an obligation to make a product using GPL code iteself GPL. Where's the problem with that? If you don't like the license, just don't use it
Not true. The GPL is invasive. It requires that applications that incorporate GPL-licensed code are licensed implicitly under the GPL themselves. This is the legal opinion of one of our lawyers, who I consulted a while back when we were thinking of using open source in one of our products.
Rob Grainger wrote: To accuse them of trying to steal your IP is just silly
Perhaps. I always wonder why Stallman insists that everyone make their source code available to him for free.
Rob Grainger wrote: You may also note that some of these OSS folks somehow earn a decent living in spite of giving away their code
I'm not faulting open source. My problem is with the notion that you can 'freely' use it in commercial applications. You cannot, if you intend to protect your intellectual property.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I may be really naive, but I thought that as long as you're not "taking" the code and using the source in your app you're good. If you just import the libraries, you're fine. Like using a NuGet package. I'm not distributing the code, I'm not modifying and I'm not incorporating the lines of code into my project, only a reference. Am I under the wrong impression?
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The assumption is that you take the source and incorporate it into your application. The technological means of doing so (using the source directly or a compiled library) doesn't really matter.
Our lawyer opted for a conservative interpretation of the license, given that you can't depend on having a court that is technically sophisticated enough to understand the differences between source code and a compiled library.
Software Zen: delete this;
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deanofharvard wrote: I may be really naive, but I thought that as long as you're not "taking" the code and using the source in your app you're good. If you just import the libraries, you're fine. Like using a NuGet package. I'm not distributing the code, I'm not modifying and I'm not incorporating the lines of code into my project, only a reference. Am I under the wrong impression?
Yes, if the code in question is GPL, you would be naive and wrong.
Fortunately, virtually nobody in their right mind licenses libraries and Nuget packages as GPL.
There are many different open source licenses (LGPL / Ms-PL, BSD / MIT style) that do not want to force you to open source all your code in exchange for linking against a GPL library.
When I see an article on CodeProject, or some fancy open source project, I often scroll down to the license, check whether if it is GPL. If it is GPL, my response has to be "you're dead to me." And I move on, pretending the software doesn't exist. Maybe it helps some people who live in the hippie communes of the world, or people who write command line utilities for Linux, but unfortunately it's not useful to me.
I am now trying to educate people of the perils of using the LGPL license. I have always thought it was fair enough: if you tweak the library, you have to release your changes. Fine. But there are provisions that basically make it impossible to use LGPL software on mobile app stores or consoles, so I have been prodding library developers about whether they really want to limit their audience this way. One lesser known license that may work better for some people instead of the LGPL is the Mozilla License, which works on a source code file basis, and is missing some of the limiting aspects of the LGPL.
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Gary Wheeler wrote: intellectual property
There is no such thing as "intellectual property".
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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Source code, design drawings, notes, schematics - call it what you will. The GPL requires that you surrender your rights to protect that material.
Software Zen: delete this;
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