[okfn-discuss] Open Knowledge Foundation Strategy slides

Sat Jul 20 21:47:35 UTC 2013

On Sat, Jul 20, 2013, at 09:51 PM, Tim McNamara wrote:
> > One of the trends I've noticed is that OKFN is moving away from open source software for much of its activities. These slides are hosted on Google Drive, for example. Code is hosted in GitHub. To me, this trend goes against the first slide, which is "Open as natural, open as good".
> 

I certainly wouldn't say that OKF is "moving away from open source
software." All software developed by OKF has been and remains open
source, typically under permissive licenses. That's unlikely to change.

Whether OKF and its staff use non-free software in the course of their
work is a different discussion, and -- as there has always been -- there
is a complex and unfortunate tradeoff between productivity and moral or
philosophical purity. To pick the canonical example (pun not
intended...): desktop Linux is more useable than it has ever been
before, but I still wouldn't be comfortable recommending it to people
who aren't comfortable finding their way out of a deep hole with bash,
awk, and sed every once in a while. And that just isn't true of everyone
who works for or with OKF, and perhaps won't ever be.

- Do we mandate that non-free software may not be used in the
commissioning of OKF activities? Because if we did, we wouldn't get an
awful lot done.
- Should we publish our software on Gitorious, or our own home-brew
Gitlab installation? Because if we did, nowhere near as many people
would be able to find it, or contribute back to it?
- Should we use only open-source groupware? Because if we did, our staff
would find it much more difficult to share documents, arrange meetings,
and manage their email.

I'm not saying that there aren't good open-source projects in any of
these areas. Perhaps there are, and I'm just not aware of them.
Certainly if there are compelling alternatives then we should have a
preference for the open-source options.

But if we're going to point fingers at GitHub, a company which (for
entirely pragmatic profit-boosting reasons) has done more for
open-source software than any other single organisation worldwide in the
last five years, and say we shouldn't use their product (despite it
being head and shoulders above any open-source competitor) because it
isn't open-source... well, I think we're consigning ourselves to

- lowered profile of our software projects
- lowered contribution rate to our software projects
- increased sysadmin burden

at the very least.

Similarly -- I can't stand Google Docs. Really, I can't. But what's the
viable open-source alternative? OpenOffice Impress? Really? And how
about hosting and sharing those presentations with others?

So, finally, to be clear: I don't disagree that if there are good
open-source alternatives, we should use them. But in many cases, the
open-source options are just flat-out worse than the non-free
competition, and we shouldn't cripple our ability to get work done by
refusing to use the latter.

-N