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General Discussions / Re: Why isn't this project open source?
« on: March 09, 2022, 07:32:28 AM »To be honest, that last paragraph was mainly me taking out my frustration because it is highly unlikely that there is an open-source alternative that is anywhere near being anywhere near as good as musicbee. It is truly a shame.
That has been said about Foobar2000 for more than 15 years too. Which begs the question: "why are free closed-sourced Foobar and MusicBee (I could add AIMP which own its niche of Winamp orphans) better than anything open-source?" Since open source software is supposed to be improved by a crowd of talented volunteering devs from all over the world, why are Amarok, Clementine, Audacious etc. still inferior to Foobar or MusicBee?
Amarok is 18 years old, Clementine 12, Audacious 16, the community of devs had plenty of time to improve them to the point of replicating each and every feature, including the UI, of any closed source player, with forks if needed.
The answer is probably because open sourcing harassers on the forums are not planning to improve or carry on any project. They can't code (I don't blame them for this, I couldn't either), they're waiting for others to do it.
The sad irony is that the devs harassed by these zealots are the most generous: the ones that don't ask money for their work. Sell your program 5$ and nobody will ask you to open your code. The other irony is that asking for this or that on open source forums will expose you to the dreaded answer "if you're not happy, code it yourself, you know where is our repo, right?".
Sorry for the rant but I'm sick of these people harassing the devs of some of my favorite programs, year after year. Some are whiners, some are bossy, all of them are useless. Everybody knows about open source software, the devs better than anybody else, so there's only one reason you need to know why a developer doesn't open his code and that's because he doesn't want to. End of story.
This is again not true. Foobar and other software aren't more popular specifically because they're too old. An old piece of software usually (not always, but usually) means that it has an old design has well (not talking about the UI but the overall system itself). Also, the most important developers of most open-source projects are the top contributor, which are usually the creators of the said projects.
If a system is well-designed from the start and appeals many users, and suceeds in maintaining this position for years, then it's not a matter of being open-source or not ; it's just a question of being a software that keeps itself up-to-date with the current users' expectations.
You say "Sell your program 5$ and nobody will ask you to open your code", to which I reply "obviously", because if you make a project open-source it's immediatly harder to sell it (even though some projects succeded doing so).
You also say "The other irony is that asking for this or that on open source forums will expose you to the dreaded answer "if you're not happy, code it yourself, you know where is our repo, right?"."
No, this is not how it happens on most forums. I've contributed to dozens of open-source projects in the past, and if you want a feature usually there will be people willing to implement them - notably because most people asking for features aren't developers. In fact it's harder to find a project that does what you say than the opposite.
Now about the question of "To be honest, that last paragraph was mainly me taking out my frustration because it is highly unlikely that there is an open-source alternative that is anywhere near being anywhere near as good as musicbee. It is truly a shame."
As I have already said multiple times before, closed-source has its advantages: you don't have to deal with other people making pull requests to your code, you don't have to look into that, you gain a lot of time from this, and you can focus on what you actually want to do: develop your own software. You also miss a lot of things, like code review by other people, contribution by other talented developers, refactoring and optimization and bugfixes from other people without having to do anything - because yes, that's also what happens with open-source projects.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, there *ARE* reasons to not make a program open-source, and again I agree that Steve don't have to justify himself for that - it's his software, he does what he wants with it, it doesn't owe us anything as other people have already said on this thread. This doesn't mean it's not frustrating though.
And, again, making a program open-source doesn't mean accepting contributions, even though that's the main reason to it, it also allows to contribute to the community by bringing up new ideas and algorithms other people can build on top of. And even if you don't want to accept PR for new features, it can still help when other people fix some bugs and make some optimizations in your place. You save a lot of time, it allows to get these fixes more quickly, and you still get to decide weither or not the proposed code will be added to the codebase.
There are tons of huge and successful open-source projects in the community, and the bigger a project is, the more it usually gains from being open-source (do you know about Linux?)
Quote from: BoraBora
Sorry for the rant but I'm sick of these people harassing the devs of some of my favorite programs, year after year. Some are whiners, some are bossy, all of them are useless. Everybody knows about open source software, the devs better than anybody else, so there's only one reason you need to know why a developer doesn't open his code and that's because he doesn't want to. End of story.
This is more of an insult that a constructive argument. How can you even know those people are useless? Many of us are asking for the program to be open-source because it can benefit the community without costing anything to the main developers as long as he doesn't accept PR - now I can still understand he doesn't want to do that, but it doesn't make us "whiners" or "bossy" as we are actively trying to improve the software as well.
Also, I have a side question: what would happen if something would come to happen to Steve? Does anyone else here have an access to the source code? Or will the project suddenly die because no one can access it? It's another problematic with closed-source software which I hope has already been solved.
Quote from: BoraBora
The answer is probably because open sourcing harassers on the forums are not planning to improve or carry on any project. They can't code (I don't blame them for this, I couldn't either), they're waiting for others to do it.
How can you say that? What are your arguments? Do you have examples of that? I don't see how you could come up with this conclusino.
There are people who are actively trying to contribute to the project's source directly (which is not the same than contributing to plugins, if you ask why please read again my previous posts). Saying these people "can't code" is straight up an insult - developers who cannot code? Why is that? What makes you say that? How can you be so sure? Please explain me because I don't understand this point.
Also, if people (like me) speaking about the open-source benefits wouldn't like to contribute to the codebase, why would we even bother to do all of this? If we don't want to contribute to the project nor use the existing pieces of code inside it to improve other tools or plugins with the knowledge we can get from MusicBee's software, why would we like the project to be open-source? It simply does not make any sense.
Now I'll conclude this by thanking again Steve for his amazing work on MusicBee, telling again for people who don't seem to understand that that we aren't trying to make up his mind on the subject - it is what it is, although unfortunate in my personal opinion and in other developers' as well.
And for people who are contributing to this thread, please don't straight up insult people by saying they "can't code" or they're "whiners" without giving any argument towards that. Thank you.
