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Written by Ben Cox on 2025-01-24 at 16:50

Why are FOSS tools always easier to integrate into your environment than closed-source paid ones?

(I know the answer. No need to explain.)

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Written by The Janx Devil on 2025-01-24 at 16:57

@ben I don’t know the answer. Is it because you don’t have to pay for the authors of the tools to make changes to facilitate integrating with your environment?

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Written by The Janx Devil on 2025-01-24 at 17:00

@ben Or is it because you might still be able to pay the authors of the tools even if they don’t hold the copyright?

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Written by Ben Cox on 2025-01-24 at 17:05

@janxdevil It's because the authors of the commercial tools want to lock you in and sell you services.

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Written by The Janx Devil on 2025-01-24 at 17:48

@ben Confused because I’m sure I know some FOSS tools that have authors who both want and can lock you in and sell you services. I mean, I’ve definitely been locked in and forced to buy services from FOSS developers.

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Written by Ben Cox on 2025-01-24 at 17:51

@janxdevil I've been pushed toward that, but if it's ever required, I choose different ones. (Sometimes my management chain disagrees.)

The specific tool I'm thinking of right now, I would have kicked the sales people out within 10 minutes of arrival, and yet.

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Written by The Janx Devil on 2025-01-24 at 17:58

@ben I think about this question a lot because I stopped releasing my hobby project as BSD 2-clause and I’m vacillating over how to self-publish it in the future. My current copyright notice says “All rights reserved.” and there is no license file included.

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Written by Alan Langford on 2025-01-24 at 17:57

@ben I have a related question. [And yes, to prefix this I know both can be minimally responsive, it's a question of relativity]

How responsive have developers of FOSS tools been to your feature requests/change suggestions compared to vendors of commercial software?

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Written by Ben Cox on 2025-01-24 at 19:08

@alan We've had a fair bit of success with contributing pull requests to FOSS projects. Vendors occasionally deliver on features that they tell us are on their roadmap.

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Written by Ben Cox on 2025-01-24 at 19:10

@alan OTOH, we probably keep closer relationships with the maintainers than a lot of shops do, so we probably have an advantage there.

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Written by Alan Langford on 2025-01-24 at 19:24

@ben I've had more luck with FOSS. More and more with commercial stuff it goes into their suggestion box deadpool and might get considered if a whole bunch of people vote for it, which sounds good except 99% of their user base has no idea that there's a place to request features so the sampling bias is absurd.

Meanwhile a responsive FOSS project will say anything from "no" to no with an explanation, or best case a discussion on the details and some kind of undertaking to put it in place.

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