[not entirely OT] proper terms for grades of freedom

[Shlomi Fish]

On Friday 11 Jun 2010 01:24:40 Oron Peled wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 בJune 2010 21:26:20 Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> > Even if you have the source code, it does not mean you can build it.
> 
> Exactly.
> 
> 2. How about "modified-in-house" software?
>    Initially, it looks different, but let me explain why it's
>    practically "read-only".
> 
>    I'll start with an infamous history, which was told many times by
>    Arie Scope (yes, the former chief of MS-Israel).
> 
>    Any time he wanted to attack FOSS, he repeated the same story
>    which goes like this (from my memory, not exact):
> 
>      "...many years ago we had a mainframe computer in Tnuva and we
>       had the source code for the system. During the years, a lot of
>       people in the company modified and adapted the source to their
>       needs. The result was a total mess. Nobody understood the code
>       and nobody could maintain/upgrade it etc..."
> 
>     The story makes perfect sense to anyone who maintains software.
>     That's the assured result of "in-house-only" source code.
>     Which mean it's crapware, but you get extra maintenance costs
>     as a bonus ;-)
> 
>     Obviously, Scope didn't see (or didn't wanted his audience to see)
>     the crucial difference between his story and FOSS.
>     In FOSS the modifications (or rather the good modifications) are
>     propagated upstream. This result in sharing of the maintenance
>     costs among all the conributing parties.
> 

Well, that's the ideal. In practice, deployed FOSS code (which can always be 
modified in-house, according to the free software definition), sometimes tends 
to divert from the mainline code and be . Some examples:

1. Back when I administered the linux.org.il and iglu.org.il E-mail domains, I 
was requested from the administrator of the Linux-IL mailing list at 
cs.huji.ac.il to remove the linux-il at linux.org.il and linux-il at iglu.org.il 
aliases, because they had problems dealing with them there due to the highly 
customised setup on cs.huji.ac.il. It was all FOSS, but they had many custom 
modifications and were afraid to upgrade.

2. whatsup.org.il's codebase is based on an old version of PostNuke, with some 
adaptations to support Hebrew, which were not accepted because they planned to 
do it properly using CSS, and since then has garnered many fixes and 
workarounds to security problems. Since then PostNuke seems to have been 
abandoned.

3. I know there are many companies out there who have still standardised on 
using perl-5.6.1 because they are afraid to upgrade to a more recent Perl 
version (there have already been the stable 5.8.x, 5.10.x, and 5.12.x 
releases) because something might break. Now, perl-5.6.x is still open source 
and someone can maintain it, but the world has moved on.

-------------

So there is still a risk of people writing inhouse changes for open-source 
code and not propagating it for public consumption with open-source code. So 
that does not make an availability of source code for in-house modification 
"crapware" and we might as well call everything that's not 100% FOSS 
"crapware" too. Furthermore, calling it "crapware" is not indicative of why 
this is the case.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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