Could the Gizmoplex be open source?

For anyone who feels like opening the open source door would lead to “any ol’ goon making whatever changes they want whenever”:

Standard practice is to make changes on a “clone” of what’s currently in place and then submit it for a “peer review” (however that manifests; that part’s sorta contextual). Nothing just gets changed and pushed out the door and made live immediately. Or, well, it shouldn’t. Anyone making that mistake usually runs into that one, big accident that becomes a learning opportunity and the agent of change that ensures never doing it that way ever again.

And open source would really only pertain to the weird nuts and bolts that operate way, way in the back. It doesn’t pertain to, in the case talked about here, any of the visual elements (although these could get the equivalent of open source, if elected) or viewable content (i.e., the episodes).

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Excellent explanation.

Apple people: your operating systems are BSD at their core, which is FOSS.

Microsoft people: If you enjoy PowerShell, CBL-Mariner, Azure, .NET, or the current incarnation of Power Toys then you’re enjoying FOSS. I’d also call out Github but Microsoft didn’t make it (they bought it in an already completed and utilized state).

Anyone who has owned a PlayStation console (from the PS2 forward) is in that overlap where FOSS and proprietary coexist. That goes for the consoles, network play, and nearly every software title.

Like @LadyShelley said, we’re reaping FOSS benefits daily even if we’re not aware.

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The .NET foundation is a HUGE example for Microsoft. I still remember when they announced their big push towards open source.

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Also, I love your point about repositories and the approval process. The reality is, companies often times do REALLY bad practices by bypassing a tool like git and pushing changes live without a care for a staging environment or an approval process. That doesn’t get fixed avoiding open source, it’s just you know the team to blame if someone pushed a bug to the main branch.

Although, I say “team” as a whole because using an FTP to push code changes directly to a server instead of a pipeline and approval process means that you don’t REALLY know who pushed unwanted code to the main branch, because there is no real history of the code changes.

The fear pushed here that is assumed, is that there would be a wild wild west of code changes if the project was opened up to the general public. But the reality is, if that were the case the issue wasn’t that the team chose open source, but that they were not practicing best practices to begin with. And that’s a MUCH bigger fish to fry. That more than likely means tight deadlines, minimal resources and just a “push it if it seems to work” attitude that causes a cash cow of an app that costs more to maintain than it did to build.

However, I get a sense that isn’t the case for the Gizmoplex. Just the sheer transparency and pushing features one at a time, while maintaining that they want to spend the most of the funds towards actual content is impressive. I just want the honor of being able to contribute to a really neat project.

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Yup.