- Nov 2017
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mfeldstein.com mfeldstein.com
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Let's imagine a world in which universities, not vendors, designed and built our online learning environments.
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mfeldstein.com mfeldstein.com
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Moodle Pty—more widely known within the Moodle community as Moodle HQ—does most of the development of the core Moodle code and maintains tight control over which code submitted by third parties gets accepted into the code base
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- Feb 2016
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blog.medium.com blog.medium.com
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What makes this more difficult to resolve is that GitHub is — surprise! — not open source. GitHub is closed source, meaning that only GitHub staff is able to make improvements to its platform.The irony of using a proprietary tool to manage open source projects, much like BitKeeper and Linux, has not been lost on everyone. Some developers refuse to put their code on GitHub to retain their independence. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git himself, refuses to accept pull requests (code changes) from GitHub.
That's why I have advocated tools like Fossil to other members of our Hackerspace and other communities like Pharo or decentralized options to Mozilla Science (without much acceptation in the communities or even any reaction from Mozilla Science).
Going with the de facto and popular defaults (without caring about freedom or diversity) seems the position of open source/science communities and even digital activist, which contrast sharply with their discourse for the building of tools/data/politics, but seems invisible in the building of community/metadata/metapolitics.
The kind of disempowerment these communities are trying to fight, is the one they're suffering with GitHub, like showed here: https://hypothes.is/a/AVKjLddpvTW_3w8LyrU-
So there is a tension between the convenience and wider awareness/participation of centralized privative platforms that is wanted by these open/activist communities and a growth in the (over)use of the commons that is bigger that the growth of its sustainability/ethos, as shown here: https://hypothes.is/a/AVKjfsTRvTW_3w8LyrqI . Sacrificing growth/convenience by choosing simpler and more coherent infrastructures aligned with the commons and its ethos seems a sensible approach then.
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Technically, if you use someone else’s code revision from Stack Overflow, you would have to add a comment in your code that attributes the code to them. And then that person’s code would potentially have a different license from the rest of your code.Your average hobbyist developer might not care about the rules, but many companies forbid employees from using Stack Overflow, partly for this reason.As we enter a post open source world, Stack Overflow has explored transitioning to a more permissive MIT license, but the conversation hasn’t been easy. Questions like what happens to legacy code, and dual licensing for code and non-code contributions, have generated confusion and strong reactions.
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The free software generation had to think about licenses because they were taking a stance on what they were not (that is, proprietary software). The GitHub generation takes this right for granted. They don’t care about permissions. They default to open.Open source is so popular today that we don’t think of it as exceptional anymore. We’re so open source, that maybe we’re post open source:But not is all groovy in the land of post open source.
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