Transifex has become proprietary

[Michael Scherer]

Le jeudi 03 juillet 2014 à 18:22 +0400, Peter Lemenkov a écrit :
> 2014-07-03 18:09 GMT+04:00 Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com>:
> > Hi
> >
> > Unfortunately it looks like Transifex has become proprietary and Fedora
> > moving to using Transifex.com has been cited as one of the reasons why it
> > wasn't important anymore for them to maintain a open source version.
> >
> > https://github.com/transifex/transifex/issues/206#issuecomment-15243207
> >
> > Should we consider alternatives?
> 
> Why should we? A vast majority of us are happy GitHub / Facebook /
> Twitter / Google users and it's a happy marriage so far (at least for
> GitHub). We should clearly distinguish between a service / API and a
> data - an openness of a service is entirely different from an openness
> of a data or source code.

It would feel wrong to see Fedora endorsing the move from open to closed
by staying there and acting as if this was normal. It is one thing to
not have the ressources to have code being usable outside of your
installation. it is another to say that because this is too much effort,
you must close it.


If you have the API but not the code, that's like if you have a .so with
a ABI, but not the code. You can use it, but you cannot modify and fix
bugs there, forcing to work around stuff. And in the case of a hosted
platform, it is even worst since you depend on the upgrade schedule of
the platform. 

So you can work on supporting the API and a gateway. But having this as
our primary platform feel quite wrong, and send the wrong message about
our values. If we cared only about API and not the code, we would ship
binary drivers and flash.

-- 
Michael Scherer