Kitaab

open source

computing culture

published 2024-03-16 23:21

updated 2024-03-16 23:30

Personally, I'm finding lower case open source more important than Open Source as defined by the OSI, or Free Software as guarded by the FSF. Depending on your point of view, either they accomplished their goal spectacularly, to the point of disappearance or have failed miserably to the point of irrelevance. Either way, I am no longer convinced of their specific importance.

What matters is if I can run the code for myself and my community, without too much problem. Licences are weakly enforced anyway, and unless Amazon is coming to eat your lunch, I highly doubt it's going to get settled in court. I've even considered starting a business as a managed hosting provider, and even then I think it's great that you're both giving me the code, and restricting business application of it (I clearly don't know what's involved in most Enterprise agreement licences.)

It's why I have a hard time with using Obsidian (besides my love for vim), and have no problem running Grafana. Code can always be forked, if it was once Free Software, and can always be archived and run later on in the event the company fails. Openness is the only shot at longevity. Share widely.

Now, if it was commonplace to release the source of abandonware, I'd feel differently.


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