Tommy Hodgins

CSS & Element Queries

Jul 3, 2017

There is definitely an observable difference. In the most broad terms:

Both types of software feature innovative solutions to problems, have the full range of code quality (from awful, to state of the art), and have slow support.

The biggest difference I see between Open Source Software and Proprietary Software is that the OSS tends to be available long after the availability of the proprietary software from the same era has disappeared.

Another difference - with OSS you are able to review the code and avoid using software that is horribly made, but with proprietary software you often have no way of even knowing what the state of the code looks like. Much software (regardless of license) is duct-taped together, at least with OSS you have the means to verify this for yourself.

If I was going to try to get support for a 10-year-old piece of OSS I would probably have better luck than trying to get support for a 10-year-old piece of proprietary software.

If I was going to try to re-download a piece of software from 15 years ago, I'd probably have a much easier time finding and acquiring OSS compared to finding proprietary software.

So, having said all that - if you needed to pick a solution to use today and you wanted to be able to still get support for it in 10 years, or still use it at all in 15 years, I would think OSS would get you farther. Not all OSS is going to survive, but it seems virtually all proprietary software has a very short life.

Also - what happens to support for proprietary software when the company who made it goes bust (even if it's brand-new). Suddenly you're going from 'commercial support' to 'no support' instead of 'slow support' with OSS.

Now, from a developer's standpoint I will choose OSS licenses for my own work every time, and if I'm going to be using another tool in my work I pretty much only will touch OSS. The reason? A number of times in my career already, the owner of a project I have done work on has come to me with legal paperwork for me to sign stating that 100% of the code I submitted to the codebase I own, and that I accept FULL liability for any claims made against the codebase in the future.

Once you've had to sign a few of those papers you start sweating, double-checking that every plugin, every snippet, every library you used is indeed free for you to use (and sell) in another piece of software you're working on.

Because of this, all of the software I produce is open-source, just so I can be sure I (and everybody else) can easily legally re-use the code in any new projects without having to worry.

Tommy Hodgins I appreciate your response. Another interesting thought that crossed my mind concerning the open-sourceness of free software...

I agree with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation in that I love software where the code is open so that there is community review and checks on the code that way the company cannot hide, for example, code which violates the user's privacies or does things that were not part of the agreement.

Another component of the Free Software license, much like open-source, is that code modifications can be made and redistributed. Stallman's argument here is that an organization or individual should be able to have their programmers modify the code to suit their specific needs. This is an interesting point because while it makes much sense on the surface, I feel like having 209492 different modified versions of a program floating around could also spell trouble and create a lot of security holes.

In fact, I would argue that the fact that Microsoft has XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and now Windows 10 floating around and actively being used, is a chief reason why today's malware is thriving.

I know this is slightly off the main subject and I also used the word "free" in an ambiguous way here because my original use of the word in this topic was referring to cost, however, my usage in this comment is in reference to the FSF's "free", meaning "not hiding anything from the user and respecting his/her privacies" and is similar to open source.

Just wanted to hear your thoughts on this. I love Stallman's stuff but I think that is actually a sticking point that perhaps he has not considered so much. In fact, the controlled "Store" environments of Apple Store and Windows Store, which restrict most users more, have proven very effective from a security standpoint.

The difference is in the ownership of the software, and that's the big sticking point too!

When I download an app-store app like Evernote from the App Store, I don't own that code. I may have a license to use that software (for free) but that software belongs to Evernote.

When I download an open-source app like Chromium, I actually own that code, when I run that program, that program is actually mine not the Chromium project's.

So when it comes to using open-source software you can get it for free, but owning open-source software is very similar to maintaining it as if you had written it. As long as people are updating it upstream you're always welcome to grab a fresher code, but when you run it yourself it's yours.

I don't think there's a problem to there being thousands of versions of a piece of software floating around that might have started as an open-source project, because you only own your own code and what you're built on top of it - you don't own (or need to maintain) anybody else's fork :)

Personally I choose MIT for all of my projects now which basically mean: I retain copyright, but am giving the work away for free - pretty much the only right I retain is that you can't sue me because of damages you incurred because you used my code.

From the moment anybody pick up my code it's their code, not my code at that point :D

Once you begin to see the ownership of open-source software in that light - why would you ever want to run software somebody else owns as you use it?

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