> And even if we do spend the time to track down and fix a bug, there's a political and diplomatic game to convince the maintainers to incorporate your fix.
That's why forking is one of the Four Freedoms. It's written into the licenses.
Granted that you need to be dedicated to even attempt to fix complex software. However, Open Source can draw from a larger pool of potential talent, and it's more likely that someone out there will care than someone in a company. What's that saying? "If you're one in a million, there's three of you in New York."?
> And, not least, the real world is much simpler than any piece of software, which is effectively completely ad-hoc: knowing how Chrome works will not help you fix this Firefox issue, whereas if you can fix the carburettor on a Honda car, you probably can do the same on a FIAT.
Aside from the difficulty of finding a carburetor on a modern car, this is about software complexity, not Open Source/closed-source per se. Fixing problems in a badly-architectured codebase is always difficult, time-consuming, and likely to introduce more bugs. Closed source doesn't make it any better.
I have never said that closed source makes it better. I don't know how to make that more clear.
You're focusing too much on politics, I'm focusing on Stallman wanting the source code of his printer to be available, so he could change it to better suit his needs. I'm just saying that in 2023 even if your printer is open-source, ain't nobody got time to dive into hundreds of thousands of line of code to change it.
> I'm just saying that in 2023 even if your printer is open-source, ain't nobody got time to dive into hundreds of thousands of line of code to change it.
I disagree. I disagree wholeheartedly, based on both practical projects and the retrocomputing world.
This is a repo for the Incompatible Timesharing System operating system, ITS to its friends. ITS ran on 36-bit mainframe hardware from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which went out of production in the 1980s. DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998, and Compaq ceased to exist as a company in 2002. Commercially, ITS is dead. It is dead-dead. It is old-university-project-with-no-grants dead. Doornails evince more metabolic activity than ITS, at least in the commercial world. Developing on ITS means reading and writing assembly language, TECO, and a Lisp dialect that only runs on ITS and a few other OSes of similar vintage and commercial utility. However, it is still under active development because people are interested in it.
Besides: Digging into a codebase to fix a dumbass printer? People will do that out of spite. People will do that for the blog post and Hacker News thread.
