sometimes the open-source sucks

[German_EE]

In Open Source you get what you pay for, I downloaded my copy of Linux Mint for free and I'm therefore not entitled to any support. If I had purchased a copy of Red Hat Linux with a support contract then I could get a number to call if something stopped working.

Open Source is however fixable. It's possible for someone to go into the source code of a program and correct an issue, the patches are then reviewed (the principle of many eyes) and then distributed amongst the community. Try doing this with MS Windows and see how far you go!

[legacy]

I fully understand your frustration.

Thanks. Appreciated 

I am seriously having bad days with opensource recently.

But that's a typical business model of open source businesses.

Life is full of new experiences. This is a sort of red-pilling on the real nature of some aspect of the opensource. Something completely different from expectation, hence frustating.

But! we have learned a lot, anyway. Which is always good.

They offer some fancy open source software for free and earn money by selling support.

Yup, exactly. Now I know how they charge for consulting. I supposed this only applied to Windriver when your business is about automotive, but, it seems that certain software companies applies the same rule to everything, including educational.

[Nominal Animal]

Was the original source released under GPL (or similar license)?
If so, you may legally be obligated to release your patches etc.

No.

If the codebase is licensed under GPL, and you provide binaries to someone outside your organization, you need to provide the sources to them as well.

There is no need to provide the sources to anyone else, not even the original developers (although that is considered poor manners of roughly similar magnitude as asking money for answering a simple question over email).

You can use modified GPL code inside your own organization, without releasing the sources to anyone.

If you disagree with this, go read what GNU says about using GPL, to see that they agree.

[Nominal Animal]

Be prepared to a shock: nobody will ever reply to you if  - what you ask is not mainstream - and - you are not willing to pay 50 USD / h -

Oh man, I can feel your frustration.  I've been there too.

it is not fair 

No, and a lot of people are assholes, even/especially when working on free/open source stuff.

I wish I knew of a solution, but I don't.

I do know that things exacerbate as the hardware becomes rarer; I guess that is one reason why I don't use legacy hardware much.

Before the first Raspberry Pi came out, I posted on their forum that I have lots of experience putting OSes together (I was quite active on Linux from Scratch, and was very up to date on the inner workings of Linux distributions), and would like to put together a minimal Linux distro for those who wish to integrate their own solutions on top -- and got promptly banned from those forums as a dirty greedy leech; an ugly, dirty, smelly Linuxie.
I only have a Raspberry Pi Zero, and that only because I know the foundation makes a loss on each sale.
If one knows the history of the founders, and the history of Qualcomm wrt. Linux -- basically, if Linux was a person, Qualcomm would probably secretly pay criminals to rape them daily, just because they simply utterly hate the rules Linux operates under --, it is nothing surprising.

The only way to deal with this that I know, is to keep a personal secret shit list of stuff you won't help with, ever again, and why; and to try and keep oneself to forums and groups where you can contribute positively, and where your contributions are valued. 

[Siwastaja]

Note that while spending "just 10 minutes" to help you in the right direction sounds trivial, multiply that by 100 similar requests from all the others.

They likely are not evil or trying to monetize your needs. They just simply don't have time to work for free, even for "just 10 minutes", because such requests accumulate.

In that situation, all they can do is pretty much copy-paste a standard reply.

[legacy]

Note that while spending "just 10 minutes" to help you in the right direction sounds trivial, multiply that by 100 similar requests from all the others.

They likely are not evil or trying to monetize your needs. They just simply don't have time to work for free, even for "just 10 minutes", because such requests accumulate.

In that situation, all they can do is pretty much copy-paste a standard reply.

This makes sense, but so why they want my patches back? Frankly this sounds rather sneaky to me.

[legacy]

I do know that things exacerbate as the hardware becomes rarer; I guess that is one reason why I don't use legacy hardware much.

Have you already seen the change-log made between OpenBSD 6.5 and 6.6?
Retired support for the SGI/MIPS platform.

PowerPC is the next on the death note, and my friend commented "End of line. It looks like most people don't really like to work with legacy hardware, and everybody seems to be ditching most machines like SGI MIPS and IBM 4xx PowerPC these days because they just couldn't find anyone willing to maintain them"

[legacy]

I wish I knew of a solution, but I don't.

Regarding u-boot, my friend commented "PowerPC isn't our problem, that ancient crappy Promise chip in combination with a firmware that doesn't setup PCI in a sane way are", therefore, since modern Linux Kernels relies on the firmware for the correct initialization, it seems u-boot is the problem, and it will be less frustrating writing the firmware from scratch than having something to deal with Denx's people.

[Karel]

Open-source sucks... but the alternative sucks more. So, I'll stick with open-source...

[GlennSprigg]

Is it just me?... or do I sense that 'someone'  likes 'everything' for FREE, and thinks that
there's a whole support team waiting on-line just to help 'them'

I wholeheartedly support & use Open-Source software, with the peace of mind that the
VAST MAJORITY of such 'quality' ware is 'Globally' supported/followed, and with virtually
unlimited help from numerous sources/people. OK... They may not be Microsoft, or the
like, but I would not be as trusting of them for help/solutions if it was !!

Look at 'Open-Office', or 'Inkscape' etc. Totally Free, and put together by a vast conglomeration
of Global experts, with no other interest than sharing knowledge. Questions are fine. However,
making demands of them, without Contributing anything, is a slap in the face to them.

[bd139]

For me I find it sucks when:

1. I find a bug
2. I respectfully submit a bug report as requested in the README
3. Nothing happens for 6 months
4. I pop on the mailing list asking if I can submit a patch.
5. I get told yeah go ahead
6. I submit the patch via PR or directly.
7. Nothing happens.
8. I give them a nudge.
9. My PR and ticket gets closed by someone on the team.
10. Issue not solved
11. Ask what happened politely.
12. Don't get a response or at worst get a fucking mouthful back.

This is why I don't submit bugs any more to projects which don't have commercial backing.

One of the above bugs ended up a CVE

[Syntax Error]

  Yep, Github/Slack in a nutshell.

Closure of a ticket (Point 9) is often because there is "not a bug" as the maintainer meant the bad behaviour "by design". Frustrated, the bug hunter, tells them to go fork their project, and moves on.

Open source can often mean a restrictive bro-clique on Reddit.

[bd139]

Yeah been there with the "go fork it" thing.

The answer was "fuck you comic book guy from the simpsons". 

Edit: I got into a massive argument with Lennart Poettering once over systemd behaviour and was shouted down. So when they opened the CVE "not a bug" thing I wrote an I told you so essay on github. The fucking cowards deleted it.

[Jeroen3]

I don't know what you all expect, but it's above all files and in all installers:

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

Or something similar.

Thinking it is not fair is also not fair. You got 28 years of development for a kernel, for free.
Then you think 50 USD/h for a few hours of work is wrong.

Go try and license something with IBM or Oracle, or even better... Microsoft.
And then ask them to do something not mainstream.

 

[bd139]

I had a neighbour once. He had a nice garden. Let the kids play on it, with no warranty expressed or implied. Then he bought a dog which left dog eggs all over it. People volunteered to pick the dog eggs up but he shouted "no, I want the dog eggs as they are" from his ivory tower. Some people spoke to him personally and he called them all the names under the sun. Everyone slowly left the garden because their kids were not wanting to step in dog shit. The grass yellowed as the heaps of shit piled up. Turns out he wanted people to know he was such a good person but no he wanted an ivory tower to speak from so people could see him in a different light to reality.

And that's where about 75% of open source is. Not through altruism, not through ideology but to promote ones ego via the ideology. This serves no purpose but implosion, self destruction and merely contributes to the heat death of the universe and the destruction of the ideology.

I don't mind picking up the shit myself. I don't mind paying the guy to pick up the shit. Having shit everywhere is bad. I go out of my way to help people with things I have done and released into the wild.

There are a lot of piles of shit brewing.

[mansaxel]

Yeah been there with the "go fork it" thing.

The answer was "fuck you comic book guy from the simpsons". 

Edit: I got into a massive argument with Lennart Poettering once over systemd behaviour and was shouted down. So when they opened the CVE "not a bug" thing I wrote an I told you so essay on github. The fucking cowards deleted it.

Was it the "username starts with digit" one? Anyway, you're my hero for arguing with the Lennart.

[madires]

Edit: I got into a massive argument with Lennart Poettering once over systemd behaviour and was shouted down. So when they opened the CVE "not a bug" thing I wrote an I told you so essay on github. The fucking cowards deleted it.

Neither do I like poetteringware. Unfortunately it's popular despite being a PITA. I call it "the dark side of open source".

[jadew]

Don't you just love it?

When someone complains that opensource sucks, you get a ton of people setting that person straight because: "Well, it's free, so what do you expect?"

When someone says commercial software is better, you get a ton of people setting that person straight because: "That is not true, opensource is the best."

[bd139]

Yeah been there with the "go fork it" thing.

The answer was "fuck you comic book guy from the simpsons". 

Edit: I got into a massive argument with Lennart Poettering once over systemd behaviour and was shouted down. So when they opened the CVE "not a bug" thing I wrote an I told you so essay on github. The fucking cowards deleted it.

Was it the "username starts with digit" one? Anyway, you're my hero for arguing with the Lennart.

Not that one. It was "DBus crashed and now I can't reboot my fucking server" related.

[james_s]

Some software is garbage, some is quite good. I have seen very little correlation in recent years between cost paid and quality.

[magic]

Edit: I got into a massive argument with Lennart Poettering once over systemd behaviour and was shouted down. So when they opened the CVE "not a bug" thing I wrote an I told you so essay on github. The fucking cowards deleted it.

Should have posted it on medium together with screenshots of revelant correspondence and submit it to lamer news

[bd139]

Edit: I got into a massive argument with Lennart Poettering once over systemd behaviour and was shouted down. So when they opened the CVE "not a bug" thing I wrote an I told you so essay on github. The fucking cowards deleted it.

Should have posted it on medium together with screenshots of revelant correspondence and submit it to lamer news

He was too busy getting a Pwnie award for lamest vendor. Didn't think I needed to rub it in any further. 

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/28/black_hat_pwnie_awards/

[Sal Ammoniac]

More commonly encountered as Open source coded by broken sours. Half finished stuff in perpetual state of flux encumbered by religious wars between vi vs emacs and gnome vs kde. Total anarchy reigned by (pitch)forks.

You forgot to mention that there's often no documentation at all. If there is any, it's poorly written and often assumes the user already is familiar with the usage of the software. Looking at the code is frequently frustrating because much of it is poorly commented (I've seen files with thousands of lines of C with zero comments). What comments there are are often out of date or flat out wrong. It's chaotic anarchy. 

[bd139]

Even worse, if there is documentation, it's in GNU info!

[Karel]

When someone says commercial software is better, you get a ton of people setting that person straight because: "That is not true, opensource is the best."

Which is more true than false:

Based on static analysis defect density, in the 2013 report, we found that open source code outpaced commercial code in quality.
This trend continues in 2014;

Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of code) of open source code and commercial code has continued to improve since 2013:
When comparing overall defect density numbers between 2013 and 2014, the defect density of both open source code and commercial
code has continued to improve. Open source code defect density improved from 0.66 in 2013 to 0.61 in 2014,
while commercial code defect density improved from 0.77 to 0.76.

Linux continues to be a benchmark for open source quality. By leveraging the Scan service,
Linux has reduced the average time to fix a newly detected defect from 122 days to just 6 days.
Since the original Coverity Scan Report in 2008, scanned versions of Linux have consistently achieved
a defect density of less than 1.0. In 2013, Coverity scanned more than 8.5 million lines of Linux code
and found a defect density of .61

https://news.synopsys.com/2014-04-15-Coverity-Scan-Report-Finds-Open-Source-Software-Quality-Outpaces-Proprietary-Code-for-the-First-Time

https://news.synopsys.com/2015-07-29-Coverity-Scan-Open-Source-Report-Shows-Commercial-Code-Is-More-Compliant-to-Security-Standards-than-Open-Source-Code

http://go.coverity.com/rs/157-LQW-289/images/2014-Coverity-Scan-Report.pdf