Author Topic: Why isn't this project open source?  (Read 13581 times)

hiccup

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Those are completely unrelated things.
I disagree.
The sole purpose of open source should be to improve the user experience.
Improving MusicBee plugins is improving the user experience.

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First, many people aren't aware that some of the plugins are open-source. Before it was brought to my attention a year ago, I didn't even know there were open-source plugins, because when you look for the source code of MusicBee you don't automatically find the source code of the third-party plugins. Also, when you type "UPnP/DLNA MusicBee" on Google the repository does not even appear on the first page of results on Google. You have to actively look into some of the pages to find it.
Both you and the other advocate of 'open source' seem to be heavily relying and depending on what google can do for you and if you know how to use it or not.
I think that dedicated MusicBee users that have a true interest in progress and improving things have at least some notion of what has been going on for the last few years or so. You and the other one don't seem to have 'a pulse' on things here.

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Fourth, some people people may want to look at the source code to understand how the program was made and how some of the tricky parts (e.g. sending processed audio directly to drivers through WASI & others) were done, how they where optimized, and so on.
I'm pretty sure MusicBee was never intended to be a teaching school for others to learn how to code.

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just saying that because no one maintained a few plugins that only a very few people are even aware of the availability of their source code, is plain stupid - and I'm sorry if this seems offensive, but I'm also tired of giving the same arguments again and again while you seemingly don't understand them.
I will take the hint and will assume you are much smarter as I is.
I was giving an example of a very popular plugin with a high demand by MusicBee users to get improved and contributed to.
For a long time.
And not one talented coder has ever stepped up.
I was under the impression that most users that carry MusicBee a warm heart and are following up on things would know this.
Sorry for my stupidity for assuming you were one of such dedicated MusicBee users.

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'…I hope you'll understand the things that bother me in the current situation…
I think I already understood.
You are not offering to do any factual work to contribute to MusicBee.
(can you actually code yourself? Do you have interesting suggestions for improvements?)
You are enthusiastic about 'open source' because you are using some nice software examples where that works well.
But can you give one example of an open source music player/manager for Windows that is 'better' than MusicBee?
Or even one that has potential and an active base of developers?

So concluding, in my opinion the notion that you seem to have that MusicBee and it's dedicated group of users would benefit in any way by just 'publishing the code' is unfounded, unsubstantiated and very naive.

BoraBora

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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.
Last Edit: March 09, 2022, 12:06:47 AM by BoraBora

ClementNerma

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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.

hiccup

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…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.
I do, BoraBora probably read the preceding posts, where for example I asked Leonader:

"Are you a coder?
And if so, would you be able and willing to contribute with quality coding that would add value to MusicBee?"


No answer.


I asked you:

"You are not offering to do any factual work to contribute to MusicBee.
(can you actually code yourself? Do you have interesting suggestions for improvements?")


No answer.

So I'll repeat the question: do you have interesting suggestions for improvements on MusicBee that you are personally willing and able to put the time and effort in?

You now say you are a coder and have contributed to dozens of open source projects.
Out of interest, can you give a link two one or two open source projects that you have contributed to, that require coding talents that would be relevant to an audio player/manager such as MusicBee?

(direct links to some of your commits would be nice)
 
Last Edit: March 09, 2022, 09:03:09 AM by hiccup

BoraBora

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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.
You're not answering my rhetorical question and your "not true" is followed by a lot of nonsense (Foobar not popular because it's too old? lol). Why is 13 years old MB better than any open source audio player, whatever its age? According to your open source zealotry, the "community" should have coded a much better player. Here's a list of the supposed "best" 25: https://listoffreeware.com/free-open-source-music-player-software-windows/ . Here's a not rhetorical question: why don't you contribute to one or several of them to improve them and add missing features that you love in MB?

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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.
I'm not into the broad generalizations you're using to avert the questions, I'm talking about people coming to a forum and saying first : "your software is the best, I love it" (which I, too, think of MB) then "you should free your code".

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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.
So if it was true (which is not), you make my question even more relevant: why using MB and asking Steven to free his code instead of having contributed to one of the hundreds of open source audio players with the help of a whole world-wide community? Which according to your open sourcing arguments should have produced a much better player than MB for years, isn't it?

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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.
No, it only happens with some open-source projects. We're talking about a hobbyist program, a Windows desktop audio player in which no corporation or administration has any interest. Most hobbyist open-source progs are a one-man operation and they become abandonware the day the dev lose interest.


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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?)

Yeah, I've known about Linux since last century and I know about Firefox and FLAC and Apache, all big projects with a huge appeal and/or fundations/corporations/administrations backing. You won't stay on the subject, are you? Which is a desktop audio player among hundreds of them.

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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.


How do I know those people are useless? Easy: for 20 years I've always read "open the code so others can improve/continue it". I've NEVER read "open the code so I can help on this or that, I'm a developer and I have some good ideas for your program". If these numerous devs supposed to help Steven (or Peter for Foobar) exist, why don't they announce themselves as such? But no, it's always "let them help". So where are "they"?

You're no exception, even if you suddenly remembered you contributed to dozens of projects. Actually, you've been using MB for 2 years and never even helped someone on the forum which is strange for such a willing contributor. Hell, I can't code and english isn't my native language so I'm mostly useless here but at least I'm helping some MB users on a french forum: https://forum.hardware.fr/hfr/VideoSon/Traitement-Audio/musicbee-lecteurs-windows-sujet_155375_1.htm .

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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.

You know very well what'll happen: MB will become abandonware, by the way not different from ten of thousands of open-source projects. If you know for a fact that MB will never die if its code is freed, I want to buy your crystal ball.

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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 -

This whole thread and your posts are exactly that and nothing else: trying to make up his mind on the subject.
Last Edit: March 09, 2022, 11:43:12 AM by BoraBora

jasongnome

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I realize now that I'm being a bit pushy on this question,
A bit?

If I was the developer, I might have answered your question after the first post and I might not. Given that I'd be incredibly busy it might have taken me a few days to get round to it.

However, if I was that developer, I certainly wouldn't bother to answer it after you ask over and over again, that would just annoy me.

HTH

hiccup

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I realize now that I'm being a bit pushy on this question,
A bit? If I was the developer…
Are you aware that you are responding to something that was said in 2020?
Let's not refuel this discussion by challenging old quotes.

Zak

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The thread that just keeps on giving...  8)
Bee excellent to each other...