If Microsoft truly loves open source, they'd open source #github upon acquisition.
@klaatu Haha, now I see you beat me to it by a day.
Someone elsewhere was pointing out the code is probably not that big a deal, it's really just the network effects.
I didn't have the heart to go all "but it's the principle" on 'em.
Plus, you know, if the code is crap, then that's something to work on, right?
@deejoe It's weird to me that people saying "oh Microsoft is OK now, they really do earnestly love open source" give Microsoft a free pass when it comes to following through on opening up source code.
Do we need to define a middle ground here?
Fuzzy source: for when you like open source, but not enough to share your own.
Yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to talk about that middle ground for a while now.
Like, I've had https://xkcd.com/1118/ in one of my .sigs for over 5 years, mostly for the alt-text.
I used to think it was too easy to propose metrics for these things that would be too hard to implement to be useful, but maybe just spitballing them is worthwhile.
With my students, I really drill on the four freedoms. This has left some dissatisfied with me because it doesn't get into all the open-source propositions around quality and community and so on. But those aren't unique or defining, which you can see now in any fauxpen source stuff that tout openness or community or sharing, but which lacks some or all of the four freedoms.
Another downside to wandering out into the fuzziness of "open" that it sets up false, utopian expectations about comity and collegiality. cf discourse about 'meritocracy'. That's a quality-related 'value' and so comes more from the open source side than from the free software side.
Quality and community, writ large, depend on freedom, but freedom doesn't guarantee either. Necessary, but not sufficient. People short-circuit the process, trying to skip over the tedious freedom stuff on the way to the quality and community goodies. Sometimes, it's more than impatience, it's malevolence, but it's hard to know which.
All the while, neither freedom nor its downstream benefits turn out to be so easy or so widespread to achieve and maintain.
And so I drill the four R's:
Freedom to *run* the software, anybody, anywhere, for anything.
Freedom to *read* the code, to learn what it's doing and how it works. But for any reason, really (as with all the freedoms--needing a reason is not one of the R's!).
Freedom to *repurpose* (or repair, or revise) the code, to change what it does and how it works.
Freedom to *redistribute* the code, to share downstream with anyone else what you got from upstream.
Anyway, I've got myself monologuing on this. Sorry.
Bottom line is, the 4Rs are sort of like microeconomics principles. We need a complementary, organizational or societal-scale framework for evaluating how well we're doing and where we need to go beyond "ok, what's the license on that one package".
That's what I find so good about
https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html
if only we could do this with every organization, every company, every school, every level of government ....
@deejoe
No worries, i'm definitely the target for this kind of monologue.
Well said.