Give a bug a hug

[Richard Gaskin]

Pi Digital wrote:

 > Forgive me for saying but, except the bounty idea, wasn’t this the
 > whole point of it going open source - so that the community would
 > fix bugs themselves!!!!!

Personally, I try to avoid making claims about other people's internal 
motivations.  Since I'm not them, such information is unknowable to me. 
I find it better to focus instead on what can be observed.

Maybe it's just a byproduct of having an audience in which such a large 
segment got started decades ago, in a time when dev tools were mostly 
proprietary, but I find the limited familiarity with what's happening in 
the world outside of LC may contribute to these frequent kvetchfests.

In this second decade of the 21st century, with very few exceptions 
nearly all infrastructure and dev tools are open source.

See the list of languages on the TIOBE list, and you can count on one 
hand the few that remain there which are proprietary.

In this modern world, most devs won't even look at a dev tool unless 
they know they can have access to its source.  That doesn't matter to 
consumers, which is why proprietary apps continue to thrive in consumer 
segments.  But devs demand open source.

So looking at this clear preference in the dev world, the choice to move 
LC to open source seems far less sinister than your presumption implies:

Without open source, any dev tool is at serious risk of becoming inviable.

What may seem exotic to those more familiar with closed-source tools is 
just how things work in open source.  User contributions, bug bounties - 
none of this is contentious in communities experienced in open source 
process.

And to be clear, in terms of actual usage LC is very much an open source 
project: More than 3/4 of its users are using the GPL-governed Community 
Edition.

I wrote this yesterday, and I have no reason to mislead you, so please 
consider it as a key to understanding LC's place in the modern world:

    From an early-90s perspective, we can think of LC as a proprietary
    product that offers an open source option for evangelism.

    But in terms of actual usage in the here-and-now, LC is more
    accurately an open source project in which a subset of the
    development costs are subsidized by an optional proprietary license.

    New world, new ways....

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com