Est’s Blog

Original link: https://blog.est.im/2022/stderr-09

A few days ago, I chatted with people about international disputes and employment situation, and talked about exhaustion in all walks of life, and then turned to why the Internet and software industries are more in line with international standards. Everyone’s basic opinion is that the open source movement and Open-source Software have contributed to this. After all, before Linux came, WPS was done by MS Office, and the commercial software R&D group of National Software, facing hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D expenses, was unable to support it alone.

Suddenly I thought of an overhead scenario. If one day, Lao Mei suddenly made a contribution, making it impossible for the mainland to reliably obtain all open source software after a certain version number, what would happen?

Of course, some people will immediately say that the domestic gods will keep up with the progress. For example, the state can arrange a series of topics for a group of doctors to maintain open source projects. Indeed, Chinese people and Chinese companies have participated in many open source projects . There are also gitee and Gitlab supported by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China. In terms of funding, there are also the Mulan Protocol and the Open Atomic Foundation (registered by the Ministry of Civil Affairs). software, then it is really decoupled, and you don’t have to worry about it so much, just use it directly.

Some people even say that in fact, open source has been left behind. For example, Facebook’s React, the agreement is also buried in the agreement that it has the right to prohibit competitors from using it, and the final interpretation right belongs to them. In fact, when it comes to Facebook (now called meta), the latest news is:

He knew that licensing with patent terms would trigger negative discussions in the open source community sooner or later. He communicated with the lawyer in the legal department responsible for licensing open source projects, but the other party insisted that it was necessary to protect the interests of the company. When the open source community began to pay attention to this matter, he asked the vice president of the infrastructure department, the big boss on top of him, for help. As a result, the vice president held a meeting with both parties and chose to stand with the lawyer, “Look. The professional advice of other lawyers is like this, you just follow it.” After a few months, the lawyer left, and the legal department assigned another lawyer to take charge of the matter. The director of the front-end platform department ran to the new lawyer and told the new lawyer to change the MIT agreement, but the new lawyer did not try to refuse at all. Then it became the MIT license…

Back to the topic of open source itself, suppose a scenario, if at a certain moment, such as Chromium V20, the country cannot continue to follow the latest version, assuming that independent improvement is required, how much effort will it take to integrate H.264, CSS3, H5, WebRTC and a lot of new stuff to fill up? If you can only get the 2.6 Kernel code, how can you magically change a 5.10 kernel?

Even if the sky falls, it does this thing, but if the sky falls 3 fierce people, Xiaomi does one set, Huawei makes another, Oppo makes a third, and they are incompatible with each other, what should we do? ? For example, the Soviet Union also has its own complete set of tube-based software and hardware systems.

In fact, there are also projects independently developed in China, such as the unified push alliance

From the point of view of huxiu and zhihu ‘s keyboard analysts, it’s cool. . . Not even the official website

Another example is that Tencent has developed a set of mini programs by itself, and Alibaba has also developed a set of mini programs. Every bank has its own mini programs, and various Android ROM manufacturers have also launched a ” quickapp.cn “. The ground wave DTMB+CMMB has been developed, and there is a corresponding MPEG-4 AVS1 video encoding format. If the formats captured by the camera apps of each mobile phone manufacturer are incompatible with each other, will Kuaishou Douyin’s video upload and CDN transcoding will not work? Make it very complicated?

In fact, in the world of open source projects, each contributor pulls the project in different directions, and there are many foreign examples, such as ” How k8s Fucked ” written by CMGS recently.

Writing here, I suddenly want to understand that the advantages and disadvantages of open source software, in addition to the technology can be continuously promoted and improved, there is also an important “community” and “direction”

This is a very subjective thing, Firefox is also open source, more standard than Google, but it just can’t play Chromium. Why is Linux more popular than BSD? pg is more advanced in all aspects, but MySQL’s share is higher. There are all sorts of coincidences and money, but the community atmosphere and the right goals are what counts. Personally, if we do open source independently in China, the problem may not be the technology, but the atmosphere of working together in one direction.

The conclusion of this deduction suddenly reminded me of an article I saw on princeton.edu before: A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you

The English word meritocracy literally seems to be “virtueism”, and is often translated as “elite leadership”. In fact, this does not translate the connotation. The original meaning of the word is “whoever has the ability is the best”

government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability

Intuitively, what’s wrong with the able? In terms of open source software, many are project sponsors, or people with the most technical skills lead a project. I think this is a very typical meritocracy. This article actually points out several meritocracy issues:

  1. A person’s achievement or success is often luck. The so-called tuyere is coming, and a bunch of pigs are blowing up
  2. Talent, and level of effort, are often selected by luck to the sperm that likes to work hard, so it is determined by genetics and upbringing environment.
  3. Meritocracy ultimately leads to a person being selfish, or conceited.

Of course, this article also hides private goods. Bad meritocracy? Just be grateful. Be grateful! Well, it is estimated that everyone has sin. . . 2333. In fact, the contradiction of meritocracy is easy to solve in Chinese philosophy. The greatest hero is for the country and the people. The highest ability is the ability to help others.

The same is true of the open source movement. The highest ability is that he uses the mature and rigid copyright system in Europe and the United States to spread freedom contagiously. This is where he transcends his software engineering abilities the greatest.

(Finish)

Postscript: The knowledge I only learned recently, GPL allows modification, use of source code, and non-disclosure of source code. Provided you are not public.

The GPL does not require you to distribute your modified version or any part of it. You are free to modify and use it without having to publish it. This rule also applies to organizations (including corporations); organizations can make modified versions and use them internally without distributing them to other external organizations.
But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to provide the source code of the modified version to users.
For internal use within a company it is only the company making copies for itself. Therefore, a company or organization can develop its own modification and deploy it internally, and its employees have no right to publish it externally.

However, when a company sends copies to other organizations or individuals, it is a release. Specifically, making copies for contractors to use offshore is publishing.

This article is reprinted from: https://blog.est.im/2022/stderr-09
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