canpolat

canpolat, 16 hours ago

I believe you can replace start with the command that is suitable for your system (e.g., xdg-open for linux).

canpolat, 10 days ago

If you are thinking about transitioning an organization to open source, pricing and vendor lock-in are generally good arguments.

If you are thinking about helping individuals transition, that’s a bit more difficult. Pricing could still work, but is not always that effective. It boils down to the willingness to try something new.

In both cases projects with good documentation and a healthy community also helps, but if the open alternative lacks features, it’s a though sell.

canpolat, 10 days ago

The only such transition I was involved in was switching from TFS to Git, and there was no discussion. It was the obvious thing to do and for a while we needed to support some developers who are new to Git.

So, it all depends on the type of change you want to implement. Most people don’t think much about a piece of software being open is significant. That’s why the main selling point should be the product itself. Especially in organizations openness alone is not a strong enough argument.

But with individuals, it may help to inform people about FOSS instead of just suggesting alternatives (“Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Stallman/Torvalds?”). If the individual doesn’t understand or subscribe to the values, the switch may be temporary. My 2 cents. Hopefully others will come up with better tactics.

canpolat, 12 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Not having any personal projects is perfectly fine. Don’t worry about it. Not everyone has to have their job as their hobby. Try other things (music, trekking, cooking, etc.). Try to find a hobby that makes you happy (if you don’t already have one). That’s way more important than having a public GitHub profile. And if a company didn’t hire you because of that, you basically dodged a bullet.

canpolat, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Here is my understanding of author’s position: Stay away from companies like Redis and ElasticSearch. They are building software with a proprietary mindset (the fact that they have tight control over product strategy and development demonstrates this) only to realize that they are being devoured by bigger fish. It’s a business model problem, not an open source problem.

canpolat, 1 month ago

I don’t think that is relevant from author’s (and OSI’s) point of view.

canpolat, 1 month ago

Sorry, I don’t follow your reasoning. Why would a company not making money be a relevant problem for the advocates of FOSS? FOSS is about freedom. It never had an opinion about money. Money has always been irrelevant. Some people may not like it, and they are free to not use non-free licenses. And FOSS advocates will warn users about that (as they did in the past). FOSS doesn’t have an obligation to offer a solution to every problem in the software industry.

canpolat, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

That’s an unnecessarily strong reaction. Money clearly matters for some things. But that’s not all that matters. There are many people releasing FOSS without any financial expectations. Clearly, money doesn’t matter to those people on that context. Trying to argue that “money should matter also for those people on that context” doesn’t make too much sense to me. Nobody is forcing anybody to release FOSS.