ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities
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@JaredBusch said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
Frank's personal blog hints at some not good things to come, IMO.
http://karlitschek.de/2016/04/big-changes-i-am-leaving-owncloud-inc-today/
I got that vibe from the OwnCloud people here on ML. If you aren't paying for support, you aint shit. Maybe I am the only one that got that vibe, but they almost seemed to get mad if you brought issues up if you weren't paying for support.
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I think the company is doomed. They are wishing they didn't go the open source route. You can read between the lines on Frank's blog and you can see the attitude with it's employees.
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@IRJ said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
I think the company is doomed. They are wishing they didn't go the open source route. You can read between the lines on Frank's blog and you can see the attitude with it's employees.
This is my take on it.
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@JaredBusch said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
@IRJ said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
I think the company is doomed. They are wishing they didn't go the open source route. You can read between the lines on Frank's blog and you can see the attitude with it's employees.
This is my take on it.
I think it's going to happen fast, too.
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Well the good thing.. since it currently is open source.. it can be forked and someone else who does believe in open source can take over and keep it going.
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@Dashrender said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
Well the good thing.. since it currently is open source.. it can be forked and someone else who does believe in open source can take over and keep it going.
I think even if a company doesn't have open source software, when it folds, instead of deleting everything or letting it sit on a shelf, they should release it. There are cases where parts of it may be patented/copyrighted/whatever by some company and licensed, so those parts maybe not include and make that clear, but the rest, why not?
Not just regular ol' software, but web services as well. So many .coms are gone and their stuff is just lost forever, all the work serves no purpose, and may not even exist any more.
If my company ever folds, I certainly plan on releasing whatever we have, but that's not even a big deal because they're web services. When it comes to operating systems and other forms of classical software people depend on, it really seems almost criminal to keep it locked away forever, for no damn reason.
tl;dr: I agree.
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That would be awesome, but is that even legal? I'm guessing that if a company is in bankruptcy, there might not be any way for them to do it..someone else buys it and decides where it goes.
But if you're just closing your doors, sure.. that would be awesome if they would publish it to GNU.
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@Dashrender said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
That would be awesome, but is that even legal? I'm guessing that if a company is in bankruptcy, there might not be any way for them to do it..someone else buys it and decides where it goes.
But if you're just closing your doors, sure.. that would be awesome if they would publish it to GNU.
It really depends, but certainly when there are situations where older things could still be released. Let's just say, for example, if Microsoft went bankrupt, it seems silly they couldn't release the source code for Windows 95 or whatever.
MIT/X11 would probably be closer to what they'd release it under instead of GNU, especially because the new version of GNU is so draconian when it comes to hardware, and especially systems it is contained within, not just modifications of the software itself. Linux doesn't even use the new version of the license. I don't think anyone should promote the license in any manner; there are better, less obnoxious options out there. The GNU license is more of a political statement rather than a decent license, which explains why 99% of the software written under it is garbage; there are a few that shine through big time, but for the most part... and a lot of things people think are under GNU are actually under other licenses.
If we look at the case of Netscape which when open source became Mozilla (under the Mozilla license), the problems they had were mostly related to removing code which they had licensed from other companies such as Apple, and creating replacements, so it caused a long lag for stable release. So, in the case of a company disappearing forever with basically no chance to license some ancient software, I don't see why they can't release it, and if it has licensed stuff inside it, just remove it.
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@tonyshowoff said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
If my company ever folds, I certainly plan on releasing whatever we have, but that's not even a big deal because they're web services. When it comes to operating systems and other forms of classical software people depend on, it really seems almost criminal to keep it locked away forever, for no damn reason.
Operating systems are some of the biggest ones. CP/M, OS/2, AmigaOS, all of the 8bit machines... all worth not a penny yet no one released their code.
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@Dashrender said in ownCloud Founder and CTO Leaves to Pursue Other Opportunities:
That would be awesome, but is that even legal? I'm guessing that if a company is in bankruptcy, there might not be any way for them to do it..someone else buys it and decides where it goes.
If someone buys them, then it is that new company that should decide. And they should do it immediately. Tons of stuff is bought and lost over time. Very sad.
Video games this is huge. How many 1980s games are abandonware. But someone still owns them all.
