It’s so unfortunate that so much of the software we rely on is unmodifiable, inscrutable code running on some company’s servers. It really does not inspire confidence in their reliability and long term dependability, especially how they can just axe the project if they don’t feel it’s profitable enough. Open source should be the way to go. Ideally, it should be the bare minimum.
It also contributes to a kind of illiteracy of code in laypeople. I see this sometimes in the way video game players talk about a game’s code, being like “the spaghetti code teehee” etc., as if this explains every bug and design problem in a long-standing codebase. Since the code is hidden, it’s hard to correct them. Maybe it really is spaghetti code. But odds are its problems are more complex than that. And if modding communities tell us anything in games where modding is feasible, it’s that players are perfectly capable of fixing or creating workarounds for some bugs, even when constrained by the limitations of modding. And the company is just kinda mediocre at actually addressing issues. This is one of the annoying consequences of it - the NDA’d nature of everything means companies can hide behind “development is hard” narratives to excuse their institutional failures.
Open source not only furthers knowledge, but also enables some degree of accountability.
It’s so unfortunate that so much of the software we rely on is unmodifiable, inscrutable code running on some company’s servers. It really does not inspire confidence in their reliability and long term dependability, especially how they can just axe the project if they don’t feel it’s profitable enough. Open source should be the way to go. Ideally, it should be the bare minimum.
It also contributes to a kind of illiteracy of code in laypeople. I see this sometimes in the way video game players talk about a game’s code, being like “the spaghetti code teehee” etc., as if this explains every bug and design problem in a long-standing codebase. Since the code is hidden, it’s hard to correct them. Maybe it really is spaghetti code. But odds are its problems are more complex than that. And if modding communities tell us anything in games where modding is feasible, it’s that players are perfectly capable of fixing or creating workarounds for some bugs, even when constrained by the limitations of modding. And the company is just kinda mediocre at actually addressing issues. This is one of the annoying consequences of it - the NDA’d nature of everything means companies can hide behind “development is hard” narratives to excuse their institutional failures.
Open source not only furthers knowledge, but also enables some degree of accountability.