I do a minute amount of greenfield open source, but I can’t see myself doing PRs etc. seems too much like the 9-5 work! I might do if my main job wasn’t as a dev.
Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#32Does Wikipedia count?
Not too much. Mostly due to amount of work required and twice the amount to defend against the politicking about it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#33I used to but now I don't, for the same reasons I restrain posting on internet forums like these
What are these reasons?
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#34At my company, engineers dedicate 10% of their work time to open source contributions outside of our core products. They are quite free to pick any project they want, as long as it benefits our particular community. Why do we do this? * It's a great perk for engineers. They contribute under their "personal" profiles, improving their own karma. * Growth of the community we come from lifts everyone, including the compa…
Time to reveal the mystery and tell us how this magical workplace is called!
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#35I contribute to open source packages when I am allowed to do it during work time. I do not do it from home, and this is mainly because getting pull requests approved (especially in the larger packages) is a huge pain in the ass (weird contributor license agreements, people bikeshedding for absolutely no reason, questions about my contribution that make no sense, etc).
There is already more than enough social posturing and chest-thumping involved in getting through a work day and I'm not interested in having that be a part of my private life.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#36I use my own time to work on tooling I miss on my workstations/own servers [0]. I also have a knack for finding weird bugs in otherwise widely popular and stable software [1,2]. I spend some time on select subreddits (WireGuard for instance) and on IRC to help out when I can.
I do it mostly because it's fun, and I learn some new stuff. Not much is applicable on my day-to-day job though.
[0] https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro
[1] https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/ticket/580
[2] https://marc.info/?l=postfix-users&m=157324715117972&w=2
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#37For the most part, no I don't. Not entirely sure why, I guess it's just a lack of interest in the projects I've seen so far. Or perhaps the feeling there are people with skills better suited to it, or enough of a community there that my efforts wouldn't be necessary.
Still, I guess there is one project (a video game level editor/modding tool) which I indirectly contribute to, in the sense of coding the website and working to get the web APIs working. Just haven't found many others in that situation.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#38I'm not contributing to any free / open source projects. I think that that FOSS is fueling the technology monopolies, despite originally aiming at the exact opposite. I think it has driven many software markets in the ground like for example tooling. I cannot believe that we use absolutely horrible software like GDB in 2020. I think there is a lot of left learning ideology behind hte FOSS development and also these t…
In a competitive market, economic profit can be positive in the short run but will be driven to zero in the long run. FOSS is but one of many competitive forces. It just so happens that thee long-run state is when profit equals marginal cost, and for software that is zero ("free")
That is a hard theory to sell, since it happens only in places where the FOSS has established dominance and (for example) the state of the top contender is horrible. There is simply no economic incentive to pursue a better debugger.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on how foss fuels tech monopolies? I've never understood that argument and would like to hear more.
As a manager of a big tech company you are incentivized to increase profit and minimize cost. Might be slightly more painful to use a FOSS toolchain in your team, but your costs are zero. In comparison look at how much does a commercial IDE license like CLion costs per user. It is a zero resistance environment. It gives the opportunity of the small to grow without any costs, but it also doesn't limit how big the big…
So if I understand correctly, the argument is that it drives down costs as opposed to proprietary alternatives. But how does this lead to monopolies?
Is it something like was suggested below by tsukurimashou, that companies takeover foss software so that it is essentially theirs? But I don't see how that is functional ly different from them just developing that software themselves (apart from higher costs for them). In this model at least everyone can see the source and has the freedom to use and modify as they see fit. I feel like there is still a step here that I'm missing.
Re: Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not?
#40I'm not contributing to any free / open source projects. I think that that FOSS is fueling the technology monopolies, despite originally aiming at the exact opposite. I think it has driven many software markets in the ground like for example tooling. I cannot believe that we use absolutely horrible software like GDB in 2020. I think there is a lot of left learning ideology behind hte FOSS development and also these t…
I hope you walk the talk and don't use any open-source software.
But regarding your claim about fueling the technology monopolies. In what way is everyone running Windows or OSX because there are no open-source alternatives less a monopoly?