> FireDucks is not a open source library at this moment. You can get it installed freely using pip and use under BSD-3 license and of course can look into the python part of the source code.

I don't understand what it means. It looks like a contradiction. Does it have a BSD-3 licence or not?

BSD license gives you the permission to use and to redistribute. In this case you may use and redistribute the binaries.

Edit: To use, redistribute, and modify, and distribute modified versions.

"Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met..."

https://opensource.org/license/bsd-3-clause

Such a crazy distortion of the meaning of the license.

Imagine being like "the project is GPL - just the compiled machine code".

This is pretty common for binary blobs for where the source code has been lost.

From the above link:

> While the wheel packages are available at https://pypi.org/project/fireducks/#files, and while they do contain Python files, most of the magic happens inside a (BSD-3-licensed) shared object library, for which source code is not provided.

They provide BSD-3-licensed Python files but the interesting bit happens in the shared object library, which is only provided in binary form (but is also BSD-3-licensed it seems, so you can distribute it freely).

Since it is under the BSD 3 licence, users would also be permitted to decompile and modify the shared object under the licence terms.

Nice insight!

Wouldn't it be nice if GitHub was just for source code and you couldn't just slap up a README that's an add for some proprietary shitware with a vague promise of source some day in the glorious future?

> Wouldn't it be nice if GitHub was just for source code

GitHub always been a platform for "We love to host FOSS but we won't be 100% FOSS ourselves", so makes sense they allow that kind of usage for others too.

I think what you want, is something like Codeberg instead, which is explicitly for FOSS and 100% FOSS themselves.

You'd slap that in a comment then?

>proprietary shitware

Is this shitware? It seems to be very high quality code

I think the anger comes from the fact that we expect Github repositories to host the actual source code and not be a dead-end with a single README.md file.

How can you tell?

I mean, based on the claims and the benchmarks, it seems to provide massive speedups to a very popular tool.

How would you define "quality" in this context?

High quality code isn't just code that performs well when executed, but also is readable, understandable and maintainable. You can't judge code quality by looking at the compiled result, just because it works well.

That's certainly one opinion about it.

One could also say that quality is related to the functional output.

> One could also say that quality is related to the functional output.

Right, I said nothing that contradicts that ("High quality code isn't just code that performs well when executed, but also ..."). High quality functional output is a necessary requirement, but it isn't sufficient to determine if code is high quality.

Sure, I guess it depends on what matters to you or to your evaluation criteria.

My point was that it's all subjective in the end.

It's not really subjective if you're at all reasonable about it.

Imagine writing a very good program, running it through an obfuscator, and throwing away the original code. Is the obfuscated code "high quality code" now, because the output of the compilation still works as before?

Again it depends what you mean by "high quality code".

Do you mean how well it was written, or do you mean how well it performs? Or do both matter? Equally, or one more/less than the other?

It probably depends on whether you're the developer taking over the codebase, or the customer running the code in production..

Take video games.. A lot of it is messy spaghetti C++ code, not modular or well structured, full of hacks and manual optimizations, to give the best possible performance on available hardware.

It might be impossible to parse or maintain, but it does the job about as well as possible, which is really all that matters to the end user. I would call that high quality code.

So again, subjective...

Written so that it's easy to maintain, well tested, correct in its handling of edge cases, easy to debug, and easy to iterate on.