@cameronh1403
Well, the Github desktop client already only supports mac & win, so I guess they've got a head start.

@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.

@klaatu

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.

@klaatu

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.

@klaatu

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.

@klaatu

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.

@klaatu

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.

@klaatu

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.

While I'm on the four R's I just want to note that they're deliberately derived from and meant to make reference to the four freedoms:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

from which one could directly pull "run, study, redistribute, improve". Later, an attempt to clarify something else muddled up that clear parallelism:

http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/www/www/philosophy/free-sw.html?r1=1.89&r2=1.90

Also, after starting to use these 4R's, I found there had been another 4R's in the context of open content and open education resources:

https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221

but fortunately that had expanded to 5Rs by the time I came along with my 4!

Now when the GNU project wants a pithy list of words, it uses these six: run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve.

Which is only a little shorter than the eight terms from the MIT license: use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell.

So, I like my 4, especially when asking someone else to remember it.

(wanders off muttering something about merging versus rebasing ...)

@klaatu @deejoe I also think it is useless trying to personify a company as large as microsoft. A company that astronomically large is structurally incapable of doing anything other than maximizing its profits, no matter the ethical implications,. Microsoft isn't for or against open source. Open source is just a pawn in the game. Sometimes it makes them money to support it, other times it makes sense to strangle it.

@alva @klaatu GitLab ticks less than half of those boxes and Gitea even fewer, maybe it's good those and other platforms got some more nerd eyeballs now from all the repos moving away to them.