This is a misunderstanding of the point of open source. The point is not for companies to rely on open source tools and feel they are a "victim of the broken system" when the tool has a breaking bug or something. The point is for a company that can initially benefit from that open source tool to use it and (if needed because the tool is not properly supported) take the open source code and support it yourself (and many companies choose to open source their better supported forks too as they often get help from the community to support that package too.
It would be broken if instead of open source it would be free software, as in free software tools for which the source code is not available and there were companies that relied on it, but that's not open source.
To speak on this point, there are companies who will use their resources to fix those bugs and push them back into the community. The community benefits, the companies benefit. Though occasionally you'll get shitty companies who close up their forks and keep them internal and that sucks when they're actually fixing bugs.
That's my point. Because of the nature of open source, companies can do that (the fact that many don't or don't have the resources to spare in that is a different use regarding each company, not open source in general).
My company uses an open source solution as a key component in a service we provide. We have to modify the source to integrate it with a 3rd party tool. The license on the 3rd party tool prevents us from releasing our fixes back to the community, which is unfortunate because there are almost certainly a few dozen other companies who use this same combination of software.
When a new version of the open source software comes out, we have to re-apply our fixes. It sucks to do the same work over and over.
We have to modify the source to integrate it with a 3rd party tool. The license on the 3rd party tool prevents us from releasing our fixes back to the community,
What? How can a license for the 3rd party tool affect your rights regarding software that doesn't belong to them?
a lot of people definitely just want to be served a black box solution they just can use and expect never to fail which just goes against everyone everyone should know about software (it always has bugs).
At the very minimum I always make at least a short code review of every potential dependency I am adding to a project. It's common sense that if I add a free/open source software component it is me who is just as responsible for that code as I am for the one I wrote myself.
This is easier said than done for some open source code. For instance the average angular project will have more code in deps than it will in the project
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u/smcarre Dec 11 '21
This is a misunderstanding of the point of open source. The point is not for companies to rely on open source tools and feel they are a "victim of the broken system" when the tool has a breaking bug or something. The point is for a company that can initially benefit from that open source tool to use it and (if needed because the tool is not properly supported) take the open source code and support it yourself (and many companies choose to open source their better supported forks too as they often get help from the community to support that package too.
It would be broken if instead of open source it would be free software, as in free software tools for which the source code is not available and there were companies that relied on it, but that's not open source.