zlacker

As discussed on another thread, the outcome is poorly tools glued together, due to lack of roadmap and polish that commercial software usually supports, instead of volunteers coming and going, only caring for their little ich.

>>pjmlp+(OP)
I’m not sure about that. I used to use LabView and its various libraries often. The whole thing felt scattered and ossified. I’d take a python standard library any day.

>>pjmlp+(OP)
Commercial software polish is lipstick on a pig. A pig that will never be anything else and will eventually die as a pig.

Ugly os software at least has potential to grow internally. Long lived commercial software is a totting carcass with fresh coat of paint every now and then.

>>wasmai+v9
Yet most EE engineers rather use a graphical tool like LabView or Simulink.

Not everyone is keen doing scripting from command line with vi.

>>scotty+cb
Yet, the Year of XYZ software seldom comes, the usual cheering of tools like Blender, often forgets its origin as commercial product and existing userbase.

Someone has to pay the bills for development effort, and when it based on volunteer work, it is mostly followers and not innovators.

>>pjmlp+jf
Maybe it’s different for those actually working in the profession and n=1 but in my (many) years of studying EE I never used these tools even once.

>>pjmlp+yf
There's nothing wrong with commercial software being the origin. What's a crime is that it can stay commercial. Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most.

>>scotty+xg
> What's a crime is that it can stay commercial. Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most.

In many cases, people are free to write their own implementation. Your claim "Source code should enter public domain in a decade at most." means that every software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand out their source code, which is something very strong to ask for.

What is the true crime are the laws that in some cases make such an own implementation illegal (software patents, probitions of reverse-engineering, ...).

>>scotty+cb
Worse than lipstick on a pig is lipstick all the way down, with no pork, like the user interfaces coming out of Apple.

>>aleph_+Ei
> every software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand out their source code,

Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern world as water, making people who deal with it disclose implementation details is a very small ask.

Access to the market is not a right but a privilege. If you want to sell things we can demand things of you.

>>pjmlp+(OP)
To be fair, "sundry tools poorly glued together" describes CAS and symbolic computation software in general, including Maple or Mathematica. It's surprisingly difficult to put a proper formal foundation (guaranteeing the absence of "wrong" or even outright meaningless results) even on very basic symbolic manipulations.

>>scotty+xg
Not everyone buys into FOSS religion, especially when there are bills to pay, and too many people feeling entitled to leech on work of others and being paid themselves, or companies for that matter.

>>scotty+do
You must design your own hardware too, since you can't get the blueprints of commercial products.

>>scotty+do
I think commerce between individuals is a right.

Infringing on that should be justified in terms of protecting the rights of those involved, such as ensuring the quality of goods, enforcement of reasonable contract terms and such. We are involved in the process as participants in the market, and that’s the basis of any legitimacy we have to impose any rules in the market. That includes an obligation to fair treatment of other participants.

If someone writes notes, procedures, a diary, software etc for their own use they are under no obligation to publish it, ever. That’s basic privacy protection. Whether an executable was written from scratch in an assembler or is compiled from high level source code isn’t anyone else’s business. It should meet quality standards for commercial transactions and that’s it. There’s no more obligation to publish source than there is to publish design documents, early versions, or unpublished material. That would be an overreaching invasion of privacy.

>>scotty+do
> Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern world as water, making people who deal with it disclose implementation details is a very small ask.

The analogy would be ever-so-slightly more accurate if you said "software is as much vital to the modern world as beverages".

It would also be more accurate if all water was free.

Neither of which is the case.

>>simonh+3A
So restrict the obligation to companies.

>>esafak+ey
Fortunaley hardware designs are routinely reverse engineered and cloned. Imagine the world where industrial designs were as hard to reverse engineer as clone in practice as software. Global GDP would be 10% of what it is. Largest economies of the world owe lion share of their development to cloned designs.

>>masfue+6D
On what justification? You just want to take their stuff, because?

People shouldn’t lose their rights to what they own, just because they do so through a company.

I do think reasonable taxation and regulation is justifiable but on the understanding that it is an imposition. There is a give and take when it comes to rights and obligations, but this seems like overreach.

>>pjmlp+jf
I once interned at a lab that used a piece of surely overpriced hardware that integrated with Simulink. You would make a Simulink model, and you’d click something and the computer would (IIRC) compile it to C and upload it to the hardware. On the bright side, you didn’t waste time bikeshedding about how to structure things. On the other hand, actually implementing any sort of nontrivial logic was incredibly unpleasant.