Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

A more precise term for those in the know: open source software that also has a liberal license, for some definition of liberal.

Ciro Santilli defines liberal as: "can be commercialized without paying anything back" (but possibly subject to other restrictions).

He therefore does not consider Creative Commons licenses with NC to be FOSS.

For the newbs, the term open source software is good enough, since most open source software is also FOSS.

But when it's not, it's crucial to know.

Ciro Santilli's raison d'etre, one of his attempts: OurBigBook.com.

The outcome of closed knowledge is reverse engineering.

Not everything is perfect.

One big problem of many big open source projects is that they are contributed to by separate selfish organizations, that have private information. Then what happens is that:

Another common difficulty is that open source maintainers may simply not care enough about their own project (maybe they did in the past but lost interest) to review external patches by people they don't know.

This is understandable: a new patch, is a new risk of things breaking.

Therefore, if you ever submit patches and they get ignore, don't be too sad. It just comes down to a question of maintenance cost, and means that you will waste some extra time on the next rebase. You just have to decide your goals and be cold about it:

Writing documentation in an open source project in which you don't have immediate push rights is another major pain due to code reviews. Code code reviews tend to be much less subjective, because if you do something wrong, stuff crashes, runs slower, or you need more lines of code to reach the same goal. There are tradeoffs, but in a limited number. Documentation code reviews on the other hand, are an open invitation to infinite bike-shedding, since you can't "run" documentation through a standardized brain model. Much better is for one good documenter person to just make one cohesive Stack Overflow post, and ping others with more knowledge to review details or add any missing pieces :-)

Open source development model in which developers develop in private, and only release code to the public during releases.

Notable example project: Android Open Source Project.

This development model basically makes reporting bugs and sending patches a waste of time, because many of them will already have been solved, which is why this development model is evil.

Ciro Santilli can accept closed source on server products more easily than offline, because the servers have to be paid for somehow (by stealing your private data).

The opposite of open source software.

Nutrient that a given species cannot produce and must ingest in its diet.