WONDERFULLY STATED! I have been agonizing on whether to decloak and
write something similar to your essay, but you said it very well. I'd
only add one more point to ponder.
Many of us developers don't lean toward open source code simply because
of time constraints. We'd rather take our time and work on the code and
the functionality than to take that same time (and more) to explain
what's already been done, why it was done that way, why another way is
(or is not) better, and to review the proposed changes to consider
adopting them into the baseline. And, if the implication of "thousands
of eyes" interested in my pet project is true, that could easily swamp
all available time for the original developer to the point that s/he
throws up hands and walks away from the project because it's just too
demanding and nothing is actually being DONE!
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll continue to be open to suggestions (and
sometimes insistence) for new features/functions to be added to my own
project, but that's about the extent of it. When I die or become no
longer interested or capable of continuing development, I plan to find
another dedicated developer (if any are available that are willing to
put up with G4ILO's picture of such development at
http://blog.g4ilo.com/2010/10/advice-to-amateur-programmers.html) or
I'll be posting the whole enchilada to a source code repository and let
it be Open.
So, it's not quite "Open Source over my dead body", but almost.
Lynn (D) - KJ4ERJ - Author of APRSISCE for Windows Mobile and Win32
On 9/29/2011 8:17 AM, David Moisan wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: amsat-bb-boun...@amsat.org [mailto:amsat-bb-boun...@amsat.org] On Behalf
Of Thomas Schaefer
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 10:53 AM
To: Simon HB9DRV
Cc:<amsat-bb@amsat.org>
Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: HB9DRV
I have to say the statement about people not having the experience, time and
patience to maintain it is pure egotistical nonsense. Plus it completely
misunderstands the idea of maintainers of the source tree. Open source code is
always better because no matter how clever ones thinks they are as a
programmer, there are always better coders. If HRD was open sourced, I
guarantee the satellite tracking piece would work perfectly for all radios
because we would have fixed it.
-----
I've been lurking this thread for some time. My day job is in IT and I am
familiar with Linux. The devil is very much in the details. There are several
caveats I'm obliged to point out.
1) Depending on the problem domain, "thousands of eyes", could be just "hundreds of eyes"
or even "tens of eyes". And that is only if these eyes are able to take the time to look at the
code. That can be the hardest thing to do unless you are very experienced and can see the bug jump right out
at you through intuition. There have been a number of security bugs in open source code that have been only
found years later. I don't pretend I can download Apache source and understand it enough to make a change,
and try to commit it--and Apache is a very widely used and successful project in a very well understood *and
well documented* domain; most open source projects are not so fortunate. There is much, much more to
understanding a project than by just reading the source, and many, if not most open source projects seem to
fail at this.
2) I said problem domain in my first point, and that can mean rig control. Or framework
design, libraries or even lower-level drivers. We don't know what code Simon has used
under license, but if it is only just rig control, I would be very surprised. More
likely, it is the framework he used and the terms he had to use it under. That is a very
important decision that a developer must make early on. Usually, developers just use
what's "out of the box", like .NET or another common framework like Qt. That
can affect everything, including the licensing. Everything.
3) The GPL that many people advocate is a viral license. By itself, the GPL
requires that if you change the code, you have to publish it. Plus all the
other parts, which can include libraries, at least in some interpretations.
Other licenses like the BSD or the LGPL don't have this condition, but they
also don't require (by themselves) that the changed code be public. Some code
repositories, like Codeplex, will not allow GPL'd code for this reason.
There's been much controversy over the use of such code in libraries and
whether the license terms apply to the main code that calls them.
4) If you get through these points and you do change the code, no one is obligated to accept your
changes. Going back to my first point, of all the users and potential developers that can see the
source code, there are historically only a small number of those that propose, and commit, code
changes. Sometimes, if there is a dispute between factions on a project, the code gets
"forked". Imagine seeing HB9DRV and HB9DRV-2, though it would probably be called HRD and
"HR Super Betterer Deluxe" or something like that :) . That can be a bad thing to
happen, particularly in a small community like ours. I believe this, and other related issues,
have crippled Linux badly enough to affect its long-term future.
The best chance that the group holding HRD would have towards the goals of open
source, or at least what most people here seem to be asking for, would be to
publish an API (Application Programming Interface) and ABI (Application Binary
Interface) to its control interface. That limits the scope of the developer,
but makes it much more likely for him or her to succeed. In other words,
publish the specifications of the rig control interface. That is still a big
job not to be underestimated. But it is much more feasible, and it may lead to
a genuine standard in our field.
73, N1KGH
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