AutoCAD. Nothing open source that I've seen comes anywhere close for user ergonomics. Reverse engineering the full product is of course a big ask, but it would be a great day in the history of open source software if someone could graft onto one of the open source CADs the point selection features of AutoCAD, namely osnaps, relative coordinates, and especially the .x type point selection where you can combine (say) the x-coordinate of an osnap point with the y (and/or z) coordinate from a point input some other way (direct numeric entry, a different osnap point, etc.)
"Libre might have been a better choice but I suspect that the full ramifications of "freedom" as Richard would view it is still unacceptable to many people in the industry. I regret that state of affairs."
I don't. If anything I recently find myself left-of-Stallman on the copyleft-copyright spectrum. I've taken to using the term "nonproprietary" and even "noncommercial" and "antiproprietary" to describe my own software-related activities, and even more so to describe activities I wish more people were involved in.
"Free as in beer," while a distraction from the more important "free as in speech" is not necessarily irrelevant. The fact that much of free software is also "free as in beer" may be the single greatest contributor to open source adoption. I think of myself as a volunteer. Voluntary, like free, has two connotations, one political ("voluntary means you're not required to") and one economic ("voluntary means you don't get paid"). Both of these (as well as both senses of "free" as in software) are prerequisites for the sense of nonproprietary technology that I seek to promote. If programmers must be paid, then at some point, software (including open source software) must be monetized, and I've largely come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as a non-cynical monetization model. At best you end up in a world in which all the open source software titles are "community editions" of decidedly proprietary and decidedly closed-source titles.
The reason I may have rolled my eyes a few times around the turn of the century hearing "open source" in IBM commercials (while watching golf, of course) is that there must be something wrong with the open source concept if it's that corporate-friendly. The concept of source code is not software-specific, and I'm actually delighted that it comes from a non-programmer. Use of the term "open source" (if we're doing it right) forces us to consider not just source code, but source documents in a more general sense. For hardware that may mean blueprints. For products and services in general it should (in my opinion) mean supply chain data being nonproprietary, business models (and even strategies) that don't rest on trade secrets, and so much more. As delighted as I am to learn that open source software was coined by a programmer, I'm even more delighted to learn that "open sources" is an expression from the intelligence community. It reminds me of my undergraduate years in the halcyon eighties, when often the more activist members of the faculty would petition the administration for guarantees of their right to conduct "nonclassified and nonproprietary" research. I always looked forward to signing those petitions. Nothing made me more proud than seeing the name of a math professor whose class I had taken on one list of professors making such demands. Not surprisingly, the movement was most popular with the arts and humanities crowd. It was heartening to see someone from what today is called "STEM" going to bat for the cause.
Another big inspiration for my particular brand of open source philosophy was the late Ursula LeGuin. The character Shevek in The Dispossessed (published way back in 1974) is my open-source hero, for reasons I won't get into because those who approve of courtesy to living readers don't post spoilers. In fact, that's the only legitimate use of secrecy that I can think of. XD
Authored Comments
AutoCAD. Nothing open source that I've seen comes anywhere close for user ergonomics. Reverse engineering the full product is of course a big ask, but it would be a great day in the history of open source software if someone could graft onto one of the open source CADs the point selection features of AutoCAD, namely osnaps, relative coordinates, and especially the .x type point selection where you can combine (say) the x-coordinate of an osnap point with the y (and/or z) coordinate from a point input some other way (direct numeric entry, a different osnap point, etc.)
"Libre might have been a better choice but I suspect that the full ramifications of "freedom" as Richard would view it is still unacceptable to many people in the industry. I regret that state of affairs."
I don't. If anything I recently find myself left-of-Stallman on the copyleft-copyright spectrum. I've taken to using the term "nonproprietary" and even "noncommercial" and "antiproprietary" to describe my own software-related activities, and even more so to describe activities I wish more people were involved in.
"Free as in beer," while a distraction from the more important "free as in speech" is not necessarily irrelevant. The fact that much of free software is also "free as in beer" may be the single greatest contributor to open source adoption. I think of myself as a volunteer. Voluntary, like free, has two connotations, one political ("voluntary means you're not required to") and one economic ("voluntary means you don't get paid"). Both of these (as well as both senses of "free" as in software) are prerequisites for the sense of nonproprietary technology that I seek to promote. If programmers must be paid, then at some point, software (including open source software) must be monetized, and I've largely come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as a non-cynical monetization model. At best you end up in a world in which all the open source software titles are "community editions" of decidedly proprietary and decidedly closed-source titles.
The reason I may have rolled my eyes a few times around the turn of the century hearing "open source" in IBM commercials (while watching golf, of course) is that there must be something wrong with the open source concept if it's that corporate-friendly. The concept of source code is not software-specific, and I'm actually delighted that it comes from a non-programmer. Use of the term "open source" (if we're doing it right) forces us to consider not just source code, but source documents in a more general sense. For hardware that may mean blueprints. For products and services in general it should (in my opinion) mean supply chain data being nonproprietary, business models (and even strategies) that don't rest on trade secrets, and so much more. As delighted as I am to learn that open source software was coined by a programmer, I'm even more delighted to learn that "open sources" is an expression from the intelligence community. It reminds me of my undergraduate years in the halcyon eighties, when often the more activist members of the faculty would petition the administration for guarantees of their right to conduct "nonclassified and nonproprietary" research. I always looked forward to signing those petitions. Nothing made me more proud than seeing the name of a math professor whose class I had taken on one list of professors making such demands. Not surprisingly, the movement was most popular with the arts and humanities crowd. It was heartening to see someone from what today is called "STEM" going to bat for the cause.
Another big inspiration for my particular brand of open source philosophy was the late Ursula LeGuin. The character Shevek in The Dispossessed (published way back in 1974) is my open-source hero, for reasons I won't get into because those who approve of courtesy to living readers don't post spoilers. In fact, that's the only legitimate use of secrecy that I can think of. XD