I don’t open source because the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles.
When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”
These freedoms are vitally important. They are essential, not just for the individual users’ sake, but for society as a whole because they promote social solidarity—that is, sharing and cooperation. They become even more important as our culture and life activities are increasingly digitized. In a world of digital sounds, images, and words, free software becomes increasingly essential for freedom in general.
Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. Most of these users, however, have never heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community, because nowadays this system and community are more often spoken of as “open source,” attributing them to a different philosophy in which these freedoms are hardly mentioned.
Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software’s practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear. Other supporters flatly rejected the free software movement’s ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for open source, they neither cited nor advocated those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of open source have come to it since then, and they make the same association. Most discussion of “open source” pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success; here’s a typical example. A minority of supporters of open source do nowadays say freedom is part of the issue, but they are not very visible among the many that don’t.
The two now describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand.
I switched to gitextensions, sourcetree had so many bugs that it was getting on my nerves. Gitextensions has a similar layout, it also has the history view. It’s not prefect (recently they removed the dark theme because they upgraded some dependency and it didn’t work anymore) but it’s the best alternative I’ve found
Tower is pretty nice for mac user too. I paid for it for a few versions back when I was coding full time. Now I just stuck to source tree for occasional freelance and personal projects.
The princess is saved, but all you can think about is rescuing another, with an entirely different plan. Which is just as well because you have no fucking idea how to explain the one you just wrote and executed.
Random question… RPI, in my jargon, stands for role-play intensive, and it’s a category of MUD engines… are you working on such a project? Because I’m probably in the commit history, and that’d tickle me.
I don’t care how much you think your code is readable, plain text comments are readable by everyone no matter the proficiency in the programming language used. That alone can make a huge difference when you’re just trying to understand how someone handled a situation.
There’s nothing keeping the comments up to date with the code. Comments should be sparse and only on sections that aren’t obvious why they’re being done
There’s nothing limiting what a comment should be as far as I know.
As an example of what I mean, I’ve seen in a 10k+ lines python code a few lines of bit manipulation. There was a comment explaining what those lines did and why. They didn’t expect everyone to be proficient in bit manipulation but it made it so that anyone could understand anyway.
Then someone needs to change something about the code and doesn’t bother updating the comment. Now you still have uncommented code but with a comment that confuses instead of helping.
IMHO the issue in this situation is not the comment but that the person updating the code didn’t do his job properly which shouldn’t be an excuse not to do it from the start.
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