On Sat, Jul 20, 2013, at 09:51 PM, Tim McNamara wrote: > > One of the trends I've noticed is that OKFN is moving away from open source > > software for much of its activities. These slides are hosted on Google > > Drive, for example. Code is hosted in GitHub. To me, this trend goes > > against the first slide, which is "Open as natural, open as good". >
I certainly wouldn't say that OKF is "moving away from open source software." All software developed by OKF has been and remains open source, typically under permissive licenses. That's unlikely to change. Whether OKF and its staff use non-free software in the course of their work is a different discussion, and -- as there has always been -- there is a complex and unfortunate tradeoff between productivity and moral or philosophical purity. To pick the canonical example (pun not intended...): desktop Linux is more useable than it has ever been before, but I still wouldn't be comfortable recommending it to people who aren't comfortable finding their way out of a deep hole with bash, awk, and sed every once in a while. And that just isn't true of everyone who works for or with OKF, and perhaps won't ever be. - Do we mandate that non-free software may not be used in the commissioning of OKF activities? Because if we did, we wouldn't get an awful lot done. - Should we publish our software on Gitorious, or our own home-brew Gitlab installation? Because if we did, nowhere near as many people would be able to find it, or contribute back to it? - Should we use only open-source groupware? Because if we did, our staff would find it much more difficult to share documents, arrange meetings, and manage their email. I'm not saying that there aren't good open-source projects in any of these areas. Perhaps there are, and I'm just not aware of them. Certainly if there are compelling alternatives then we should have a preference for the open-source options. But if we're going to point fingers at GitHub, a company which (for entirely pragmatic profit-boosting reasons) has done more for open-source software than any other single organisation worldwide in the last five years, and say we shouldn't use their product (despite it being head and shoulders above any open-source competitor) because it isn't open-source... well, I think we're consigning ourselves to - lowered profile of our software projects - lowered contribution rate to our software projects - increased sysadmin burden at the very least. Similarly -- I can't stand Google Docs. Really, I can't. But what's the viable open-source alternative? OpenOffice Impress? Really? And how about hosting and sharing those presentations with others? So, finally, to be clear: I don't disagree that if there are good open-source alternatives, we should use them. But in many cases, the open-source options are just flat-out worse than the non-free competition, and we shouldn't cripple our ability to get work done by refusing to use the latter. -N _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list okfn-discuss@lists.okfn.org http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss Unsubscribe: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-discuss