New Site Makes OSS Development Easier

An anonymous reader submits "OpenSnippets is a fledgling online community for OSS developers. New members are welcome to submit articles and code of interest, and everyone can view/download the code! It's blog-styled with topics for most popular languages. How useful- I only wish it'd make my coffee..."

"Code for commercial software"

[aziegler]

I think that's a sideways swipe at my own comment regarding the poor choice of default licence.

I was quite specific that I prefer to source my own code BSD, MIT, or MPL -- none of which could happen if I used a single snippet from this resource. As I said: the GPL isn't "open" in the sense of most OSS licences; it is "free" in the doublespeak sense of the FSF. It's a licence that makes sense, from a perspective, but is most effective against other open source licences.

Commercial licensors are either going to use the code without reporting it, they have another way of making their money, or they're going to find other code that doesn't interfere with their licence of choice. It's the rest of the open source community that suffers when tiny but useful bits of code or libraries are put under the most restrictive "open source" licence.

So the submitter of the story is probably more at fault than you are (as I said, I don't like the name because it's not quite true) because this site won't help *open source* developers; it will help the so-called "free software" developers.

Make it easier by letting people select the licence as an attribute on the snippet itself, and make it so that any of the OSI approved but GPL-compatible licences are allowed. Then I think you'll actually have "OpenSnippets".

-austin

It is a good idea, but...

[wizs]

It is a good thing that there is a site aggreagting rich code seqment examples. The code segment is not necessary too long, therefore people can catch the point more quickly. OpenSnippets may be a good start. But it seems there are too many OSS developing sites in the world. Too many premuture sites may disperse the development power of OSS.

Re:Not "Open", but GPLed

[GigsVT]

After reading this story, I posted a GPLed snippet of my code on the site.

If someone emailed me and said they would like to put it in their BSD licensed application, I would grant them a specific permission.

I have a feeling most people that license their stuff under GPL would have similar feelings about small snippets of their GPL code. It can't hurt to ask, not everything has to be a huge political battle, we are all programmers here.

Re:Makes development slower!

[jesboat]

Take a look at MacOSXHints, it's thriving.