"Come, try our new open-source product... Toefungus maps."

And, It’s not even unique.

On the iOS App Store, for example, there is:

• MyCOMAP
• COMAP
• ComAp Helpcentre
• MYCOMAP BALANCING
• and two apps from a company named COMAP S.A.

When you hold a vote you get suggestions like Mappy mcmapface. Actually, that could work....

I like the name too, but I tried searching for it and I got results for compass. Lol

Because if there is proprietary code that is compiled, but can't be read, it's hard to know if there is data harvesting that people can't opt out of. And proprietary code being added paves the way for more proprietary code. If this is an incorrect understanding, someone correct me.

I dont trust someone who has affiliate links in code to not be selling unique identifiers like ip adresses etc.

Linux has a great history of splitting hairs over philosophical purity and practical practices.

Honestly, a fork is a probably a perfect panacea. The project will become a pair; one procuring funding at the price of it's soul, the other persisting as perfect (and pitifully prehistoric, save the proactive pedestrian). For a period both will produce positive momentum, but the paid product will peak higher and sooner, and fall precipitously. After the pitiable putrid product performs as well as pious poop, the persistent one will proceed to provide.

Tl;dr: ppppppppppppppppppp

Well, the point is I don't want CoMaps to win out over Organic Maps, I want some open source alternative to win out over Google Maps. Which is why I'd hesitate to say that LibreOffice "won" over anything, Google and Microsoft seem to be doing most of the winning in that particular space.

In a healthy community public arguments about "violated principles" wouldn't be a frequent occurrence and wouldn't lead to atomization of projects. I'm not taking sides on this particular example (mostly because I can't be bothered to look up the drama). But I am saying that besides the confusion and negativity caused by seeing open source developers constantly bicker about their violated principles, it can be a major setback for the perception of reliability of open source software overall. For an app you install that mostly works no matter what it's one thing, but if you integrate a piece of software into a workflow and it suddenly spawns two different pieces of software with different splinters of the original team that can be a significant disruption and if you fear significant disruptions you may hesitate to rely on that particular thing in the first place.

So do I think there shouldn't be a right to fork? Not at all. That's the whole point of open source.

Do I think it's overall a negative for the open source ecosystem that major projects break up due to their contributors being unable to come to a decision about the direction of the project? Absolutely.

But it's a problem for the team, not the user, right? It's one of those things where in closed software it's either... well, the point of the thing, or if it isn't people would get quietly fired and move on trying to impact the perception of the product as little as possible.

Here it impacts the product in that you may have to learn about it, learn about the fork and transition to the fork. There's no separation between the HR/organizational issues and the software issues, and that's a bit of a problem, I think, and why it reads as frequent drama.

I don't know about that. I am not privvy to the internal politics of most commercial software developers and that's a good thing. I guess there is some drama about whatever layoffs, corporate business practices or enshittification those are deploying, but I am a big enough man to concede that, while objectively worse, it annoys me less. At least you get to be outraged and holier-than-thou with those instead of losing faith in the ability of smart people to be mature and collectively productive.

And no, production practices and usability aren't the same as coding, even if they are implemented in code. Unfortunately, I do think that confusion is... widespread in that community. It's a very engineer-driven space and that has downsides. I do get why, engineers don't like to be managed on top of contributing to things freely and there are fewer people in those capacities willing to donate their time who aren't programmers with a side skill, which in aggregate explains a lot.

Not necessarily what's happening here, but still.

That's depressing for different reasons, but still a bummer.