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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

This is the sort of non-consensual change that is the hallmark of proprietary software and drives me towards using free and open-source software every chance I get.

I love WordPad's simplicity, and I'll miss it.

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There are many arguments for FOSS. This isn’t one of them.

Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.

Few users, if any, are depending on this app that hasn’t been getting attention for years. There’s plenty of replacement apps as good or better, including FOSS ones.

If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.

On the contrary, the difference is precisely that an abandoned FOSS program can be picked up by someone else; that this ability is not always used is beside the point.

Not always is a misnomer.

It rarely if ever is.

Anyone remember PhantomJS? It took years before a replacement emerged and nobody was willing to take in the project, and this was a critical piece of tech at the time

Rarely isn't a good term either. I use a fair number of open source apps that were picked up by a different maintainer after the original one got bored. I have no idea what the overall rate is, but it works well enough for me.

Maybe PhantomJS wasn't as critical as you thought it was? Or maybe the JS ecosystem doesn't lend itself towards this model because JS developers have the attention span of a goldfish

> It rarely if ever is.

It happens all the time. But when it happens it's so transparent that nobody even notices.

There are many 30+ year old open source applications still in use. How many of the current maintainers are still the original developers?

I had a copy and made changes to my fork when others stopped updating. Having a copy let me make changes that work for me. Running a replacement foss project is totally different beast and the time/effect involved is a lot different nevermind the marketing/rebrand required

> It rarely if ever is.

You can always pay someone to maintain it. Not every thing has to be free.

Let's try and bring this back to the original example. If WordPad cost money who would use it and not one of the much more robust competitors?

It does cost money. Windows licenses aren't free.

Electricity and computer hardware costs money so therefore no software is free and we can wrap up the whole discussion.

That's a false equivalency and you know it. When I pay for electricity and computer hardware, that money doesn't go to any software developer. When I pay for a Windows license, that money goes to Microsoft who maintain WordPad.

No, I don’t think it is. They’re throwing in something for free when you buy Windows.

AnythingJS is not a good example. There are as many JS frameworks as there are js developers.

Just because it can does not mean that is.

> Plenty of open source apps are abandoned. The maintainers get tired, too busy, or whatever.

Other people can pick up the baton. For example my window manager of choice is Window Maker which was abandoned for literally years (fortunately since the underlying tech doesn't change every other month, it still kept working) before someone else it picked it up and nowadays there are a few developers working on it.

> If it was open source, the odds are no one would care to take over maintenance (though they could) since it’s basically redundant at this point.

When Microsoft opensourced winfile[0] (the file manager from Win3.x/NT 3.x) some developers did flock to it (i personally even added a small feature to allow for multiple file masks which was merged), so i'm pretty sure the same would happen for an opensourced wordpad.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/winfile

Taking over write isn't really hard. It is not a complex app. The core is the rich text edit control from Windows. Writing a comparable application from "scratch" using the controls isn't a huge task and there are plenty comparable programs.

(The full OLE capability needs a bit tweaking to get it working right, if one needs it)

Just copy latest available wordpad.exe into your new OS. I'm 100% sure it'll work for the following century. It's Windows.

It seems strange to call it "non-consensual" for them to not maintain a now-little-used application in perpetuity.

They are actively removing it from existing installations, if I understand correctly.

But even if that was not the case, it is a change in a user's workflow that they did not request.

Is this a high bar I have set for the developer? Yes, perhaps it is.

And yet I believe in it and stand by it in my projects.

I consider it my responsibility to accommodate the user, and not the other way around.

Microsoft did choose to open source WPF a few years back [0], but I don't fully remember the situation there. I remember hearing discontent about the decision on /r/dotnet.

The opposing reactions (discontent MS did open source something, discontent that they didn't) are odd. I don't fully remember the details there though so can't make a meaningful comment.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-told-were-not-happy-...

WINE ships with a WordPad clone.

Source code: https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/tree/master/programs/wor...

This happens in opensource too, its just more rare. Terraform relicencing comes to mind, but there has been many, many other times too.

It happens, but there's a way out: forking.

With proprietary software, the option of forking does not exist.

ffmpeg had a schism just over a decade ago and the splinter group forked off into libav.

One of the splinter group members happened to be the now-former ffmpeg maintainer in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories and switched them from ffmpeg to libav. Yes, this was done purely for ideological reasons.[1]

So this bullshit happens in the open source world just like in the closed source world. In a way, I would argue it's even worse in the open source world because when it happens the driving factor is oftentimes ideological dogma instead of something simpler like lack of money or interest.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libav#Fork_from_FFmpeg

The crucial difference is that with FOSS, unless a piece of software has some particularly gnarly and/or finicky dependencies, you can easily bypass whatever is in your package manager's repositories and just use the version you want (by compiling it from source, or by using a ready-to-use version provided directly by the maintainers of the software itself, which is often, if not always, a possibility), regardless of what the maintainers of the aforementioned repositories do. With proprietary software, you simply do not have this option.

"(by compiling it from source, or by using a ready-to-use version provided directly by the maintainers of the software itself, which is often, if not always, a possibility),"

This is fine for those of us who know how to compile the source or find a ready-to-use version. Trouble is, I've often been in situations without updated sources being available and or where maintainers haven't been contactable.

Ordinary users are in a worse position as most wouldn't know how to go about compiling code even if available. It's a significant problem.

It's a problem, and the solution is not free, but there is a way where otherwise there is none at all.

If ordinary users don't want to learn they have the option of paying somebody to do it for them.

That's why ordinary users they pay for Windows. And iPhones. They couldn't be bothered with "you should learn to compile arbitrary programs from source for the particular version of a particulr linux distirbution with particular library versions and available software".

In all fairness I, as a programmer, couldn't be bothered to do that either.

The fact this comment is getting downvoted speaks volumes to the degree of detachment a lot of the people here have from reality.

It is not detachment from reality. Those of us that are comfortable with compiling some of the programs we use from source don't by any means expect ordinary users to be capable of doing the same. It's an option that works for us and that's fine for many of us, though I personally would prefer if regular users had options as well.

It's also a straw man. Compiling from source is just one option (that is particularly relevant for the HN demographic), but many (most?) notable apps, the kinds regular users would be using anyway, seem to provide ready-to-use versions that can be downloaded from their site and run without even having to be installed. This is a very convenient workflow that even regular users would be capable of using, and is quite reminiscient of what people often do on proprietary desktop operating systems.

"...though I personally would prefer if regular users had options as well."

I must agree with that. Whilst I've written code and compiled it—even Assembler—when it comes to using compiled programs without source, MSO for instance, then I am essentially in the same position as the average user.

I've lost count of the times that I've wished I could change a program to alter a feature or provide one that was missing. Like the average user I'm powerless to change it in any practical sense as it'd be so difficult and timeconsuming (even with source, it could still be very challenging and not worth the effort).

I think that there is a lot of room for compassion and donated time and effort here. I have helped family and friends adopt foss on many occasions, and it has been worth my time.

> So this bullshit happens in the open source world just like in the closed source world.

The detail is what happens after this happens. In a closed source world, most of the cases, that's it. No more builds for any reason, it's dead. You want to change it? Then first reverse engineer it.

But if it's open source, I can if I must, pull down the source code myself and build it. It can continue to live, if someone wants.

I don't see this as "bullshit", but the opposite: Instead of going from one useful software to zero, we've gone from one to two.

Absolutely true. This is why we have hundreds of Linux distros, which is fine for us who can sort our way through but average users throw their hands up in desperation. I've the same problem in supermarkets when confronted with dozens of brands of an item in that they all seem the same.

> This is why we have hundreds of Linux distros, which is fine for us who can sort our way through but average users throw their hands up in desperation.

This is probably a good thing for those who want something very particular.

For example, something like Ubuntu for the desktop, but without snaps everywhere - that'd be Linux Mint. Or maybe something like RHEL, but without necessarily having to (or being able to) pay - that'd be Rocky Linux or Alma Linux.

On the other hand, this also means that the community's efforts are spread thin, there's lots of fragmentation and the whole experience is just way more messy.

Instead of writing install instructions for The One True Linux Distro, you now need to write those for many, deal with multiple packaging formats and repositories, or just live with the reality that something available in one distro won't be available in another. I even had that issue with WireGuard, where it worked in Ubuntu but not Debian for a particular use case, shortly after it came out.

For as niche the types of BSD OSes are, they feel more coherent. I wonder what things would be like if we'd have similarly focused efforts for Linux, even stuff like one audio solution that's made to always work everywhere, one display server/compositor, one desktop that scales back to run as fast as XFCE or be as pretty as KDE.

But that's not how humans work and instead we'll just get new packages replacing older ones, sometimes for the better, but not always.

The very same thing applies to many FOSS software packages out there, but in a sense it's still better than some closed source package being abandoned and nobody ever being able to do anything about it.

Users always have the option of doing what they already do: use the Linux that was preinstalled on the computer.

ffmpeg kept being available and developed. It is a good example that shows that whatever reasons are behind, it is never worse in the open source world.

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