I may get b& to oblivion for raising this, so if this is the last you see of me I love you and will never tell your wife about us.

BUT you guys (AusGamers ? Mammoth peeps) seem to personally be so massively pro-OSS that I was surprised on review of your website that your software packages appear to be closed source.

Like anytime I'm a little bit stumped by something I ran to QGL to make a thread.

Personally, I think that the OSS business model is really f***en hard for a small company to pay the bills with. I 100% empathise if this is a motivation - I appreciate the ideal and I'd love to run an OSS shop myself, but just can't make the equation seem sensible...

Please don't kill me trog, I'm just a curious cripple

I wouldn't open source the code that runs my website either, their primary focus is not the forum
there is no benefit to them opening the code base up, only pitfalls from people that have nothing better to do than exploit code

http://www.mammothmedia.com.au/resources/ is where we (planned to) put stuff that we open sourced. There's also the source for wackget v1.2.3 which we worked on ages ago floating around somewhere that I should add to that page.

Basically almost all the software we've written for the last several years has been specific for clients and it's a) theirs and b) basically irrelevant for anyone else anyway.

We've been talking about releasing a few things as OSS though and I expect that over the next few months we'll have more bits and pieces flicking up on that OSS page. For example a couple weeks ago we identified a need for a plug-in for our video player; I talked to term and suggested we build it and then just release it open source. Only reason we didn't was that we found someone else had already written the exact plugin we needed, heh.

Pretty much everyone here is a big OSS advocate but we also realise that there's a time and a place for closed-source software (almost all of us run Windows for example). Right tool for the job, basically, and atm the (tiny few) software things we've written there's just no advantage for us to open source them. Yet.

humm being pro-OSS doesn't mean you can't distribute closed sourced products either though. OSS doesn't forbid you from making monkey it just stipulates that if you use OSS in your products you must put it out. But since I suspect they (Mammoth) doesn't then it's their rights to make it closed source.

Who knows though.

there is no benefit to them opening the code base up, only pitfalls from people that have nothing better to do than exploit code

Security through obscurity?

unless you've got the budget to have full time staff fixing security threats, sure

Its just funny that I brought up that argument in a previous OSS thread and got smashed in the face for it! The argument IIRC was that 'many eyes' on the code would be more beneficial for security than the obscurity of a closed source programme.

This is just devil's advocate stuff so don't take me seriously - I happen to agree with you generally. For example I change the SSH port on my LAMP boxes for this reason.

yeah don't get me wrong, I wouldn't use a closed source implementation of anything *SSL*
but, in the real world it all comes down to the scrilla

unless you've got the budget to have full time staff fixing security threats, sure

Exactly. I could point out 1000 things wrong in my software, but I'm not exactly going to tell my customers am I? Especially while I don't have time to fix them.

it just stipulates that if you use OSS in your products you must put it out

Not necessarily. You're talking about GPL here. There are a lot of other licenses that are far more flexible for commercial development like MIT or ZLIB licenses.

And in fact, you can even resell GPL'd products - e.g., the d******* that sells GIMP and so on on eBay (no joke!) - as long as you provide the source code.

http://unix.org.au/~brett/images/gimp.jpg


a lot of routers (linksys wrt54gl for example) ship with a closed source image
they get around it by saying the gpl bits are freely down-loadable at source forge and that anything else is their proprietary code

Exactly. I could point out 1000 things wrong in my software, but I'm not exactly going to tell my customers am I? Especially while I don't have time to fix them.

can't tell if you're having a dig or not, writing perfect code 100% of the time would be nice but we know it's not really possible when you have deadlines etc
that's why we have revision control and "minor" version releases isn't it? :]

last edited by tequila at 21:10:08 22/Dec/09