[okfn-discuss] Sysadmin sessions on IRC + skype

Tue Jul 19 20:45:54 UTC 2011

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 9:29 PM, Donovan Hide <donovanhide at gmail.com> wrote:
> I guess I should have placed emphasis on my opposition to my original point:
>
> Gmail is a non-open source tool that everyone uses because it is
> convenient and works reliably. There are lots of great tools which are
> open source, which I use daily (python, gdb and gcc being obvious
> ones). The point is I don't care if they are open source or not as
> long as they help me get my personal open source work done without too
> much delay.
>
> It's like telling a programmer to use emacs or vi rather than the
> Textmate they are used to, just because it's closed source.
>
> Open source is great because you can read the code yourself and fix
> the bugs and contribute to a community. However, some services such as
> email and voice over ip require money to pay for servers and this why
> google/microsoft/whoever have to find ways of making income to
> subsidise these servers. Even Richard Stallman depends on DNS and SMTP
> servers to be funded for his communications to reach this mailing
> list.
>
> I think this argument is dogma over pragmatism.

Right.  Implicit then is that dogma (nasty word for 'ideals') is / are
of no account in deciding what tools to use.   As you imply, this is
in itself a (bleak) ideology.  I disagree with that ideology, and I
assert that to insist on it is damaging to the spirit of
collaboration.

Because of this - ideology - the debate is distorted by exaggeration.
 The proposal is not to use open alternatives even if they don't work.
 The proposal is to endure some degree of inconvenience in the support
of open source alternatives.

I'm a peripheral member of this community.  Maybe y'all feel that you
stand on the 'anti-dogma' platform, as a group. I doubt it - it's
fairly extreme.  But I might be wrong.

Assuming y'all aren't fully agreed on no-dogma (nasty word for ideals)
then we have this:

1) One factor weighing the decision of software to use it whether it is open
2) Another is how convenient the software is to use.

See you,

Matthew