[ShadowAce]

[ShadowAce]

[rbg81]

Open source is not necessarily free. In many cases, it is not free. But the fact that someone who purchases it can just give it away to anyone makes monetizing it very challenging.

[Tell It Right]

An excellent point about open source. Open source can be very practical from a cost perspective. But in the end you don't really know what you're building your software from.

Yet at the same time if you build all of your software in house (which I've been part of multiple times, particularly on the lower tier or middle tier), you absolutely must require documentation of the work and code review so that the system can be maintained even after one or two key people leave.

[monkeyshine]

Maybe there’s a role for AI on this.

[martin_fierro]

[Myrddin]

During my years at PacBell, I used a lot of open source software, but I also did lots of fixes to it. I contributed the fixes back to the projects. In a sense, PacBell was both benefiting and subsidizing open source software in that model. My current employer is much more careful because we write software for customers under contract. The kinds of copyright applied to a particular body of source can make it a "no go" to incorporate in a product for hire to a customer. There is also the threat of CVE (common vulnerability enumeration) where a software defect in open source exposes your own software to a security breach.

[beef]

The biggest threat to open source software is DEI.

[daniel1212]

I certainly use and appreciate free and open source software (though there are differences btwn the 2) , and am glad when faced with the license for using such. One of my first programs (we did not called them "apps) way back under 9x was a superior replacement for MS word pad, TextShield, a word processor that even provided a media player with it. And the ability to auto paste, meaning it would paste any text or image into the document you were working on, which it can auto save as often as you choose. I corresponded to the author, a Christian from the Netherlands, who said he wrote it as a teenager, praise God. However, years later, he told me he lost the tools etc. he used and did not update it, though it still works in W/11, if making the taskbar jumpy at first, and I sometimes use it for its autopaste function - which no other word pro has, and he gave me permission to host it.

[Still Thinking]

Eron Wolf started FUTO to work on a model where open source devs get paid.