Week 8

_posts/2023-03-17-week08.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Week 8 - Article Review and a Flame War
+---
+
+# Today's intro
+
+This blog post looks at the article [The Life and Death of Open Source Companies](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2023/12/25/life-and-death-of-open-source/), it's a good read so check it out after this if the premise seems interesting and you want to read the source.
+
+Armin Ronacher, the author of the article, is the guy who made the Python Flask framework. He has a blog where he posts ramblings and whatnot, and I found this very article while scrolling through Hackernews after I noticed that it had 'Open Source' in the title. A bit of a funny fact I found when I looked up his credentials is that he made Flask as an April fools joke where he turned all of his little microservice libraries into a monolith and it turned out to be insanely popular so he just went with it.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+# Getting into the details
+
+In his article, Ronacher's main point is that Open Source Companies that seek to do good in the world by making good stuff and making it open source kind of just get dunked on in the ruthless world of business. Other parties see them doing a good deed, and they take the good deed and commercialize it an order of magnitude better than the open source company can muster, blowing do-gooders out of the water and taking all the winnings for themselves. A very apt example of this is between the 3D printer companies Prusa and Bambu. Prusa is an open source company that made a cool open source 3D printer and put it out to the market, and Bambu is a closed-source, regular old company that swept up the learnings from Prusa and made a better product that is one third the price, faster, and flat out does more. As Ronacher says, "There is absolutely no reason to buy a Prusa MK4 today unless you want to support Open Source or a European company". 
+
+This real world example brings up some sobering talking points; are open source companies forced to stop their open source ways if they want to make it in this world, and how can they adapt? The open source ideal of having things be free and accessible to all is noble and empowering, but how do you stop people who know how to take what you give and protect themselves with the rules to drive you out and eat the whole pie without caring about sharing? The people have access to open source stuff and benefit from it, but a lot of them don't care about the open source aspect that much. Ronacher's ending takeaway is that Bambu is whipping open source companies into shape and forcefully telling them that their user experiences and business models don't work and can be exploited, but I find that this take that it 'benefits' the open source companies and that they should feel appreciative to be absurdly cynical. While I agree that a lot of people providing open source software and hardware could work on these things (I have seen many fair shares of horrendous UI so I agree with the user experience part), there ought to be a middle ground where open source companies work on having a good user experience and efficient/viable business model while also having *some* sort of protection since they are quite literally doing a service for humanity and trying to help elevate the bottom line of what's availible to people without trying to juice as much benefit as possible from it.
+
+# The flame war, the Bazaar is on fire!!
+
+Looking through the links on Ronacher's article, I found this interesting argument between people lambasting the Cathedral and the Bazaar in the Hackernews comments section [here](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38331173).
+
+![alt text](../images/flamewar.png)
+
+This guy is very clearly a hater of Eric Raymond and anything he has touched, and I am not anywhere near qualified to comment on any of that stuff. What is interesting to me, though, is the conversation on how the Bazaar cannot completely phase out the Cathedral in the real world even though it is desireable on paper because the open nature of the Bazaar attracts just as many competitors as it does helpers. I feel like Gitlab has done a great job of balancing its Cathedral-ness and its Bazaar-ness with the open core model, where the corporate business model stuff is closed off while the outward-facing stuff is open to the public. I imagine the setup like an evil wizard tower that touches the sky surrounded by a giant market city, the wizards do their dark deeds in the shadows and protect the city with their grand spells while random adventurers are free to come and go and slay monsters as well as do remodeling if they feel like it. 
+
+![alt text](../images/airplaneBoarding.png.png)
+
+When coming up with solutions of how to balance the Cathedral with the Bazaar in terms of ethics and trying to make something open source, the above image sums up my gripes with the issue pretty well. Is trying to optimize the Cathedral and Bazaar sliders to make the optimal open source project even correct, i.e. are there other variables that come into play? I don't have an idea that will revolutionize humanity's course of development if I make it open source at the moment, so I'll think about it later.

contributions.md

@@ -32,5 +32,5 @@ Replace the first row with your own contribution.
 |  May 2   |  [link](https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/150804259)   |  Open Street Map   |   Add daycare near my house   |
 |   May 2  |  [link](https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/150804628)   |   Open Street Map  |   Add establishments in mall near my house   |
 |  May 2   |  [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Riot_Games&diff=prev&oldid=1221904713)   |  Wikipedia   |   Add new litigation from March 7th 2024 on Edwin Garrison et al v. Riot Games, Inc. et al   |
-|  May 2   |  [link](https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2064665)   |   Calibre  |   Add issue that requests more intuitive UI navigation for new users who haven't read through the documentation to find the answer   |
+|  May 2   |  [link](https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2064665)   |   Calibre  |   Add issue that requests more intuitive in-app UI navigation for new users who haven't read through the documentation to find the answer   |