Oddbean

Choosing not to use open source is still a choice made in the free market. Forcing everyone to only use open source is not freedom. Is it a bad choice ? In most cases yes, terrible. In some niche cases, without me approving of OCEAN, it makes sense. Like in house softwate for a competitive business. I'm not sure i want my national electricity regulation software to be open source...

I want those who build it to learn from open source, but to open source it is to invite a bug with the type of failure that ends nations. There are alternative ways to build resilient software. Domain appropriateness.

Which nation has been ended by a foss bug? Sounds too dramatic. All centralized systems are single points of failure. Resilience imo can only be achieved by decentralization, especially for crucial infra. What is the point of a national electricity regulation software except for government crooks to abuse it, errrr sorry, "for it to be hacked by chAina"?

It's funny, i'm a militant Foss, but i can't even begin to imagine how open sourcing electricity management software on github would even start. Imagine the PR's from hostile nations. There are ways to do it, in a way where the OS community improves the grid while reducing hostile risk. But just a regular open source realease cycle ? How ? There are also legacy concerns. The system is itself subject to inter agency norms, generational release cycles, local political concerns. Its not running on a singular software base, like ASOP, software projects, or more recent monolithic power grid projects like Mexico, african countries, ect. Each state has had its own home grown , often incompatible ecosystem, since the invention of electricity. This is a good thing. There are several things you want air gapped and in house. Your wife, your money and the national fucking power grid software. Seems obvious. Imagine a library fault upstream the way nodejs spazzes out every few years. Except its grannies dying in winter. open to better ways of thinking about it though