GitDuck is a video chat built for developers. It enables developers to talk, share their code in real-time and do pair programming.
We built GitDuck because we were struggling to communicate and collaborate while working remotely. It allows us to collaborate as if we were in the same room so we can talk, share our code and learn from each other.
Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no support is available. Although such software is usually still under copyright, the owner may not be tracking copyright violations.
In intellectual rights context, abandonware is a software (or hardware) special case of the general concept of orphan works.
In September of 2009, a group of FreeHand users founded the Free FreeHand organization with the mission of saving FreeHand. The organization gathered over 6500 members, ultimately filing a lawsuit against Adobe Systems Inc. after many failed attempts to influence the company’s policy and desicion-making with regards to FreeHand. Following a long and challenging legal struggle, a settlement was reached early 2012.
While no stone was left unturned in the effort to bring FreeHand back into development and return it to market viability, in the end this proved to be an impossible goal. And so from the ashes, FreeHand Forum is born. With the new name come new direction and goals. We are pleased to share this new vision with all of our original members and those who have just discovered us.
…the original author of any FOSS package or application, by publishing it, would have to accept as fact that any misuse of said software would forever be their responsibility, or at least until that responsibility is, diligently and ceremoniously, transferred to someone else, hot potato style.
FOSS was never about trust in software owners.
It was about not needing to trust them to begin with.
You want to download thousands of lines of useful, but random, code from the internet, for free, run it in a production web server, or worse, your user’s machine, trust it with your paying users’ data and reap that sweet dough. We all do. But then you can’t be bothered to check the license, understand the software you are running and still want to blame the people who make your business a possibility when mistakes happen, while giving them nothing for it? This is both incompetence and entitlement.
Plus how is this any different from using proprietary software? If you’re not going to take full advantage of FOSS, maybe you’re better off spending your money on support contracts anyway. At least then, you are entitled to complain until you’re blue in the mouth. Maybe you can even take someone to court!
We must make software simpler. Much much simpler. And companies who base their service offering on open source software must become more involved in keeping this ecosystem alive in whichever capacity they can.
Software must be made understandable. The essence of FOSS for me can be reduced to one fundamental computing right: the right to refuse to run, on my machines, code that I do not have the option to understand. That is it.
I’m not fundamentally opposed to closed source software, so as long as it runs on someone else’s computer.
However, as we’ve seen, having the source code is not enough to guarantee understandability.
