51–60 of 65 posts
Define "contribute". If you mean "write code for", then honestly I make very few code contributions. In the 00s, my employer was suspicious of developers contributing to open source, to the point of banning it contractually. I've since changed employer, but I have a legacy of that early experience. On the other hand, I contribute to open source projects in many ways - I give money to many projects I use, attend meetu…
As a developer I struggled writing functional tests. So my company sponsors a team to build and maintain two OSS projects https://gauge.org and https://taiko.dev that makes testing reliable and simple.
We are trying our best to listen to users and help them out. It's been the most rewarding part of my career.
I'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…
20 years ago I started using Delphi and it was great. The debugger then was much better than GDB is now; the form designer better than current ides; it compiles projects faster on 20 year old hardware than current languages compile on current hardware; with copy-on-write strings it basically had mutability xor aliasing for strings.
But no one wants to use Delphi anymore, because it is not open-source.
Unfortunately I made my projects open-source, and now need to keep maintaining them. But there is no advantage being open-source. There are almost no contributions, because no one knows Delphi/Pascal anymore. There are basically no maintained, working libraries to use. I have even ported my projects to FreePascal/Lazarus, the open-source Delphi alternative. But that made everything worse. Open-source is incredible buggy.
Things I had to deal with this week: Recent binutils versions have relro enabled by default, but their relro is not compatible with FreePascal. With relro enabled my apps do not start anymore. The string builder in FreePascal allocates buffers that are too small for its data. When GDB catches an exception in a GTK2 GUI while a menu is open, it freezes the entire X server. You have to leave the X server and kill gdb from another tty, before you can even move the mouse again.
Define "contribute". If you mean "write code for", then honestly I make very few code contributions. In the 00s, my employer was suspicious of developers contributing to open source, to the point of banning it contractually. I've since changed employer, but I have a legacy of that early experience. On the other hand, I contribute to open source projects in many ways - I give money to many projects I use, attend meetu…
For me all of that counts. Even a bug report is a contribution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Even in FOSS there is also lldb and edb. (And gdb can be made more palatable by a front end such as ddd.)
I have the feeling it's similar for UX people.
This way I stick to good bug reports and some small suggestions.
I'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…