Topic: Curse of open source (Read 2396 times)

Most of the developer didn't give a shit about who use their code, although some of them may want to have a credit for it. It is the nature of open source to make anyone can make the good use of the code.

They are a volunteer who doing its job freely for the bitcoin ecosystem without forced they only want to make Bitcoin better. and in my opinion, the more a project being forked the more worthwhile the project is.

Indeed, everyone who be able to copy & paste all the codes can't really reach anything if they want to do something terrible like stealing the funds as there's one-two liners of codes which prevent it happen, as Op mentioned before.
If you want to develop your own wallet, go ahead.
If you want to develop your own coin, go ahead.
But, people will decide whether it's worth or not.


The software will still open source, and developers who contribute simply because they attracted to do so, not with an intention to gain incentive. Because the developers is a user or a holder as well, they want to hedging and developing something that really worth, such as bitcoin.

But, if want to create your own coin or wallet and have to provide an open source software, codes, nodes (whatever it is)
Make sure you eliminate one-two liners of the codes, to prevent any negative acts by others.
Talking about incentive, there's no incentive. Something worth because people decide it's valuable.

The curse is on you Sir and don't blame open-source if those coins that I'm sure you hold is not pumping to the moon.

Don't you think you are way too over-acting sir because some of your foremention are not the fault of the cyrptocurrencies it always varies on how use it and how you secure your coins. Simply curse starts with us not handling way our transaction and not ensuring the safety of every negotiations or deals we put through.

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The fun fact about open source software, is that this is software in which it is not required to have a business model built in. This means that suddenly completely different design choices are possible.

Forking an open source project is not a weakness, it is a strength: If the original version of some tool is wide-spread, then people know that version and will keep using it. If, however, it turns out to have some flaws that the original development team does not fix, then it is possible for people to move to their own variant.

If it is at all possible to reconcile, developers will by using Pull Requests. And if it is not, then it is great to create two versions, where each version is better suited for some particular requirients.

> IS THERE A WAY TO KEEP SUCH IMPORTANT SOFTWARE OPEN SOURCE (to be able to vet it) WHILE STILL PROVIDING MEANINGFUL FINANCIAL INCENTIVE TO DEVELOPERS?

Yes, there is. Companies like GitLab and Piwik do so with great success :-).



By the way, it is also possible to open-source paid software, and open-source software in such a way that you are the only party that is allowed to make money from it. Don't think that all projects have to go 'all the way' to FOSS (Free and open source).

~Wiebe-Marten


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I think as a developer it must suck, if your code is merely "copy & pasted" by a inferior developer and then used for their personal gain. Like we are seeing being done with Bitcoin now. Most of these forks are just a copy & paste job and it is not backed by good developers.

The fact that it is then pumped to replace Bitcoin, is actually a slap in the face to the developers who contributed the most to the original Bitcoin. Satoshi's code being raped and pillaged by people who says that they are protecting it. ^joke^

I do think opensource is the unstoppable trend. Openstack is one of very successful open source project, I think. And various license, MIT, GPL, LGPL BSD could also protect the author partially.

There are multiple big companies supporting openstack. still developers could benefit from it. Eventually decentralized autonomous organization/corporation could be the major final state.

Is it a curse yes..for those programmer which dosn't know how to think out of the box and always rely on customize library or code..for those who always think out of the box and wants freedom this is a blessing..

He's just probably complaining all of the no good applications he encountered that fails and doesn't met his requirements i guess. Why not make a possible thoughts about it? Not everyone is complaining about all of this open source codes but still failing but instead they ask someone for help to better improve their coding. I guess you were just looking on the dark side of it.

A quote from Coinomi summarizes best the frustration of developers that I tried to imagine (as I have not been in the situation myself):

Anything has it own advantage and disadvantage. When you use it, you should know about it. If you think you can not stand with it, so do not use. That's an advice from my heart. Open source help a lot of programmer reduce the time, and spread the technology every where. 

It seems a bit difficult to get out of the curse because it is integrated directly with the system
 

luka: These are good questions. Let me point you to a book that I think you will hugely benefit from reading - Against Intellectual Monopoly. Contrary to popular belief, intellectual property (patents, copyrights, and other forms of "closed source" design) have not accelerated human progress, they have slowed it down.

It is true that division-of-labor and specialization are an indispensable ingredient for human progress, including - or especially - in the development of new technologies, like Bitcoin. And in order for division-of-labor to obtain, people have to have a way to be paid for their labor in terms of a good that is directly valuable to them or can be readily exchanged for goods that are directly valuable to them. This is one reason why money is so important - it greatly facilitates the division-of-labor by allowing many different kinds of people with many different kinds of skills to be paid with something that has no use-value in itself (you can't eat a paycheck) but can be instantly exchanged for almost anything that does have use-value (you can use your paycheck to buy a meal or clothes or whatever).

Mozilla, the Linux Foundation, certain distributions of Linux, and many other companies work with open-source software as an integral part of their business model. Richard Stallman prefers the term "free software" but distinguishes "free" as in free speech from "free" as in free beer. Free software is really about the former, not the latter. If you really think about it, being able to copy and run an installer is not the culmination of a software business's product. Microsoft, Apple and all the old-school software houses work on this false notion that the software product is really the copy that gets installed. But then, their actual products put the lie to this notion with all their insecure, automatic, background updates that have to be run continually to prevent all kinds of catastrophic scenarios in their end users' devices. In short, software is not really the physical bits, it is the entire package of design that is sold to the end-user.

If you take the free software concept seriously, it will change how you think about software completely. All the individual tools that get packaged into a Linux distribution are provided to you free of charge, if you use a gratis Linux distro but, more importantly, they are free to use as you like (including for building your own software). You can build very powerful software systems just from these ingredients because these tools are all Unix tools or tools that follow the Unix philosophy. But suppose you want to write your own, custom factory management tool. You have everything you need right in front of you. But even if you have the requisite skills (software engineering), you do not have the time because you have a factory to run! So, what do you do? Well, you pay someone to use this free software system to design and build a factory management tool for you. Do you see that the free software does not hinder but only facilitates the division-of-labor, in this case? You might reason, "Ah, but when he has finished writing it, I cannot make any money off of it because when I release it on Github, it has to be GPL licensed because it uses GPL'd software." But that's missing the whole point. First of all, no one is compelling you to release it. If your trade-secret factory-management software is such a huge boost to your business, then you will simply keep it to yourself and not share it with the world. Profit! But if you do release it, then you should have designed it in such a way that other software engineers can build and extend on your work, that is, you should have designed it in a way that is consistent with the Unix philosophy. Now, someone can come along and re-purpose your code for something else entirely that you never thought of - perhaps it turns out that your code is super-useful in oceanography applications, something you had never considered in your wildest imagination. But closed-source software guarantees that this kind of innovation through repurposing of code can never happen. The free software philosophy boils down to this assertion: the public good created by the repurposing of code is so immense that the private good to any one individual of keeping their code closed-source is easily outweighed (in principle, they could be paid the difference out of the public good) so that the only sensible way to keep code closed-source is simply to retain it as a trade-secret (never to release the software to anybody and only use it yourself).

I understand that you can increase your user base by targeting the less experienced coders and providing them with support for all the previous applications,but how are you so supposed to improve your own product when you can’t get rid of the parts which are not as good.

Yeah. That is what I initially thought would be the case but whales of second largest coin by market cap prove me wrong.
They have done jack sit to improve end user experience. Half of the world uses myetherwallet.

What should we expect form micro-whales then?

Off the top of my head I can think of at least two sources for meaningful financial incentives that both are in play in the cryptocurrency scene:

1. ICOs
I know most of these are motivated by greed and the easier execution compared to traditional security offerings. However, they could theoretically
be used to fund development of projects. This is already happening with some Ethereum related projects that intend to offer an ICO to pay
for future development.

The most prominent example probably being Raiden:
https://www.coindesk.com/raiden-ico-ethereum-scaling-solution-launch-publicly-traded-token/

2. Incentive due to own coin holdings
Many Bitcoin or altcoin developers are sitting on a huge stash of their respective cryptocurrency of choice. This means that they are directly incentivized
to improve the protocol, because any improvements would likely increase adoption (or at least prevent the fall of adoption or people switching to a more
innovative competitor), which would increase the value of their coins. Let´s say Bitcoin Core developer X has been in Bitcoin for years and has accumulated a
ton of Bitcoins. He has a direct incentive to ensure the security of the Bitcoin code, because such a high percentage of his overall wealth is stored in Bitcoin.

This is basically the same concept that is responsible for Capitalism working so well - or at least better than other systems that have been tried in the history
of mankind. People following their own self-interest ironically creates effects that are beneficial for society as a whole.

Besides, donations are another source of potential financial incentives. However, these are not really meaningful for most projects, because of the low percentage
of people that actually donates to open source projects.

So how do we get non-sucking-developers to do it?


I agreed already with that in my second extended post in this thread but it does not answer the question.

But how do you know that their closed source counterparts are not substandard?


That is the idea. The open source philosophy encourages you to share your knowledge. Once you "fork" the code you are under the license of the GPL and any changes and improvements you make should also be shared for others to see. It makes improvement and development faster.


It is not because they are open source. It is maybe because those developers suck.


It is a blessing.

Maybe the open source developer has to be in a both altruistic and narcissistic mood. Some call it idealistic. Could also happen if the developer does not need financial incentive because they already have a comfortable life, and their incentive is cerebral.

I doubt Satoshi Nakamoto and early adopter Bitcoin devs needs any more wealth and Bitcoin works fine as open source as it is. Making it closed source now or stopping development however could vaporize that wealth.

While I appreciate the difficulty of developing for multiple platforms no one would prevent an incentivised developer to create software for one platform only, receive compensation and if successful port that software to another platform.
I received an onslaught of criticism but when the question got rephrased suddenly there are not many responses.

Which makes me wonder:
1. How does anything open source gets done (a miracle in and of itself given effort put in and cost/benefit ratio)?
2. Is there a way to 'open source' critical aspects of your application (like handling of private keys for example) without revealing the rest or still retaining license to use that code?

I think its more a function of the fact that most implementations of wallets are designed to work across both Linux/Mac and Windows. If you've ever tried to develop for all three platforms simultaneously you very quickly realise that the GUI toolkits aren't very good. The best one is Qt (the same gui as the KDE desktop I believe) but it isn't as developed as many of the native GUI toolkits because it has to work across all platforms so is only as good as the most basic platforms.

When you consider that you wouldn't even have these frameworks if it weren't for open source then you'll realise its not actually a curse

I got multiple of answers but none that I expected.

Maybe I have not expressed myself clearly.
I did not mean that open source is a curse. What I meant is that there is a huge unmet need for development of various software in the space of crypto that is not being met due to the fact that developers can not be financially incentivized because they are "forced" to do it in an open source manner.

Let me address some answers and try to convey what I was really asking.


Agree. 100%.


Will not debate that either. Again agreed.


Topic of its own. Will not go that rabbit hole. Tech is something you can try in a sandbox, I am not sure the same applies for Pharma. Open source pharma is an interesting and untried field which would presumably lead to a lot of deaths, invalidity and backlash in contrast to losing claim to digital bits in crypto space.


I would expect to have multitude of tools developed if a financial reward were tied to it.


I am sorry but I call bs on this argument.

A bit of background on me first.
I am someone who is old enough to remember things like:
5.25" floppy disks
GOSUB
GOTO commands in basic
Commodore 64 loaded from a cassette and so on.

And I have no problem buying Raspberry Pi, taking a Python course, wading through Python package nightmare installing pybitcoin libraries, reading a ton of stuff, burning Tails CDs and list goes on... only to understand properly how this stuff works.
I find it fun and rewarding.
But you can not seriously expect that every lay person jumps through the same hoops.
Time constraints, financial constraints, intellectual constraints and simply comfort constraints are all in place.

It is the same as if I told you:
You need a road transportation machine - go engineer you own car.
You do not want antibiotics in your cattle - go raise your own herd.
You are struggling between sideeffects and complications of operation A vs. operation B. Go to med school, chose that field and CONTRIBUTE to the technique and technology for that particular operation.

Division of human labour is a wonderful invention.

Even if I reached the stage of 'contributing' (not so likely) I doubt that my code will ever reach the elegance of a professional coder (not to mention security, resource need., portability etc.).
I would rather excel in my field and let coders excel in their field in exchange for a 5$ Android wallet that supports Segwit address.

I consider myself of an OK intelligence (OK defined as able to grasp most concepts with reasonable effort) and I have struggled and still am struggling with a lot of stuff in this crypto space.

Point me to how many people can really prove or explain to you why SHA-256 is safe when it comes to Bitcoin. What would it take to crack it, what processing power, is there a backdoor built in that you can not spot? I bet 99.99% of the public and 90% of math majors will never reach that stage. So you are still relying on 'authority' of others.

To summarize, what I wanted to ask is the following:
IS THERE A WAY TO KEEP SUCH IMPORTANT SOFTWARE OPEN SOURCE (to be able to vet it) WHILE STILL PROVIDING MEANINGFUL FINANCIAL INCENTIVE TO DEVELOPERS?

Exactly, M$ can eat a double dick sandwich.

Which means that they are exploiting open source. Which is admission of defeat. They are not exactly the pioneers. So why worship the Microsoft copy cats. When all they do is copy the open source concepts invented by the volunteers.

Microsoft has changed a lot over the past few years. Today they have "the largest number of the top 500 open source projects for any one entity" (1)... even more than Google and Redhat.

1. https://thenewstack.io/microsoft-shifting-emphasis-open-source/

If you're forked with a one-liner... so what? If that one-liner ends up improving it... why not?
The organic growth of an open source project backed by the vision (and foundational guidance) of a few initial contributors trumps any closed source project. Heck, that even sounds somewhat familiar... Bitcoin?
And after sifting through a lot of projects to find one, and if it's not exactly what you need, fork it

Studies I've seen which compared open source products like mozilla firefox to proprietary closed sourced analogues such as microsoft's internet explorer concluded open source software, on average, contain fewer software vulnerabilities with oftentimes higher levels of innovation and new features. Maybe of the "new" and "exciting" contained in closed source products like microsoft windows are things that were developed in open source software which microsoft "borrowed".

Without veering too far off track there are many open source projects which represent good quality work. Open source is where many new ideas and features are implemented.

If you're criticizing software projects associated with ethereum, it might help to remember that ETH is affiliated with microsoft, JP Morgan and other large closed source entities. The same might be said of those other things you mentioned.

One other factor is Intellectual Property or Patents.

Open Source provides the disclosure that invalidates patents.

In this space, it stops the Big Tech and Big Finance behaving like Big Pharma and locking away useful technology for their own profit.

just do some digging on what values it brought forward and you will be surprised.

Being able to fork an existing project, ie. build on it, is one of the positives of open source that drive innovation. If Bitcoin were closed source we'd never even have the plethora of alt coins and wallets in the first place. This whole ecosystem of crypto-currencies would not even exist if it weren't for open source.



None of which has anything to do with these projects being open source.

What do you expect would improve if those projects were closed source instead?



Contribute.

Linux/Android and tons of projects are open source. There is no way you could trust a distributed trestles network if you can't look at the source code. There is nothing stopping people from doing a closed source wallet, but then you won't know if it will steal your money.

If there's a curse of open source then there's also the blight of closed source.

How about being stuck with outdated, vulnerable and unsupported proprietary software with data stored in proprietary format when the developer calls it quits?

How about having to install countless programs to convert one proprietary format into another, resulting in a house of cards?

How about not knowing what the heck your closed source program is doing behind your back, peeking through your hard disks and uploading your private data to who knows where?

How about hacking groups selling zero-days for Windows and Flash to governments who use them to jail journalists and dissenting citizens?

OP, I believe you're just being paranoid. The problem you mentioned above is not yours, is it?

Part of the beauty of open source is the possibility of collaboration with other programmers, and it can only happen if they can work with and insert improvements to the code you've written.

The "risk" of being forked (if you can really call that a risk) is present only if you prove to be 'unworthy' in leading the direction of the progress of your software (i.e., you're not that good of a programmer, or your vision for your software sucks); and other, more-forward thinking programmers disagree with you and have better ideas as to the direction the software should go.

Otherwise, think of it as something you're doing to benefit the community, not something that will make you rich (since that is not a guarantee, but it sometimes does happen).

That is the mantra of Microsoft and Mac Fanboys. Open source is weak. So how about your antivirus. It is not open source but most of them even anti-malware are crappy to say the least. Nobody is even sure if they are really removing what they are suppose to remove. Nobody is bold enough to sue this fraudsters. Most microsoft oriented softwares are frauds but nobody is complaining.

yes, start coding! Don't prevent others from doing so by posting "your thoughts" - contribute is much moreeffective. Go, go, go!

There is no curse, you're just being a drama queen.

You're finding cause-effect relationship where there is none. Open source is a gift to mankind.

Usability, safety and ergonomics of most cryptocurrency products is brutally substandard compared to any other software.

The course of open source is obvious.
If you do not leave your code open source you gain no trust.
If you do you risk being forked with an one-liner, so what is the point?

That is why billion plus projects like Neo, Ether do not have a decent wallet.
That is why Neo which is supposed to be the next best thing to sliced bread displays your private key and saves it unencrypted in a file.
That is why Mycelium can not implement Segwit addresses for months under HD wallets which probably requires two lines of code.
This is why there is no decent Android bitcoin wallet and the list goes on.....

Is there a way out of this curse?