Yet sometimes that is exactly what the world needs — smack-down, called to the mat, black ‘n blue upside the face, called-me-out-cause-I-deserve-it bitchin’!!!!

Still, that crazy balance of life often let’s us accomplish even more with tact and being polite; or better yet: tactful politeness.

Balance. I suspect as time goes on that you, Chris, will increasingly weild that balance like a sword — to all of our benefit!!!! Bitchin’ included!

Keep on rockin’ dude!

Yet sometimes that is exactly what the world needs — smack-down, called to the mat, black ‘n blue upside the face, called-me-out-cause-I-deserve-it bitchin’!!!!

Still, that crazy balance of life often let’s us accomplish even more with tact and being polite; or better yet: tactful politeness.

Balance. I suspect as time goes on that you, Chris, will increasingly weild that balance like a sword — to all of our benefit!!!! Bitchin’ included!

Keep on rockin’ dude!

– Steve Repetti
http://www.radwebtech.com

Thanks for sharing your change of heart. It really gives me hope. Sorry if I came off as too direct before…my message was partially a reaction to your post and partially a result of years of pent-up frustration at the OSS circular firing squad.

For what it’s worth, Kragen is right. I no longer am a “true believer” in the OSS cause, but I’m still a big fan of the effects that well-practiced community software development can achieve. I think most folks who’ve done OSS for a while will agree that licensing is a small part of what makes a project truly open — a point that your original post gets at. Part of my personal shift in perspective stems from a realization that choices are neither free nor do they always represent statistically positive opportunities. If the art of UX design seems diametrically opposed to OSS development on some fundamental level, this is the reason. Making “good” choices requires context and information that, as often as not, isn’t widely available. For end-users, the ability to make changes in a C/C++/Python/Ruby/JS code-base is no choice at all. It simply doesn’t represent an enfranchisement at a level which is distinguishable from paying somebody to fix something. Now, it might *make a market* for changes (which is one of the things I like about OSS), but that’s not always the case either. Put another way, the more you empathize with people who are less like developers, the less that something being OSS “matters” in any instantaneous sense. Good governance and market forces, though…those things transcend licensing but are affected by it. So OSS in my view matters, but not as a question of good vs. evil.

Kragen suggests that the endpoint I work towards may be “less desirable”, and I suppose that from his perspective as an enfranchised part of the OSS world — a developer who can make “good” choices when handed source code — that might be true. What I care about are the larger social levers of change that OSS helps to drive: better allocation of capital to problems that matter, the ability to change the world for the better with information faster, etc. That’s about enfranchising people who *aren’t* developers…a view that doesn’t point a bright path towards an absolute good. Instead, it helps distinguish progress from back-sliding by answering the broader questions of “for who?” and “at what price?”.

In that world, I’m happy to be “right-ish” and will gladly debate anyone on the mechanics of progress. In that sense, Kragen’s also right that there’s stuff left to talk about WRT the Adobe announcement.

Regards

I wish I could be as open and transparent about trying to change my style. This post is inspiring to me personally, coz of that.

Alex is a great guy but, at least at the moment, he’s not buying into the vision of a fully-open-source Web platform, where the users really have control of their own software. And it’s possible he’s correct: as I understand his position, it’s that end-user, mass-market software usability requires a level of centralized control that’s incompatible with the kind of unfettered user freedom to fork that open-source licenses necessarily provide. It’s a plausible position, and I could be wrong when I work toward a goal including both high usability and high autonomy.

But it’s important to remember that *Alex’s* reasons for supporting openness may not be the same as yours, *either*. His vision of where to go may not be the same as yours. It may be something that’s more clearly achievable, but less desirable.

If the implications of your post are actually *correct*, and Adobe is in fact leaving itself scope to sue Mozilla if Mozilla incorporates code and codecs from Adobe’s supposedly MPLed work, then that’s something that needs to be brought up and kept continually in view until it’s resolved. It doesn’t need you to make accusations of bad faith, but it needs to be discussed. Don’t apologize for that.

I’ve always thought that rants were the best offensive, but now have come to realize that rants rarely get things done beyond irate others and breed negativity. I love the fact that more and more people are realizing this and am hoping that such positive affirmations would make the internet a place for open, rational and thoughtful discussions as opposed to the vitriolic diatribes that it often ends up being.

All the best to “new” factory joe.