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Bad headline. Article is about identifying open source infrastructure tools as an overlooked category for venture capital funding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the record, I don't know who they are - I've seen them linked once before but I have no ties nor love for San Francisco and their work is very localized. So I don't particularly doubt their work but I literally just picked the top post on their front page. If they are doing phenomenal work, I'm not impressed :) And seeing as my previous post is predictably getting instant downvoted, I should also state that I rea…
I work at 18F, here's my hot take: It's been pretty well established that needlessly (male) gendered language makes people feel excluded. Actually, that's too nice. That kind of language excludes people. Period. It communicates that the speaker does not contemplate a non-male audience. I do not know about the communities that you moderate, but constantly assuming a male audience at a place like 18F is wrong factually…
If this bot isn't actually negatively affecting anybody, more power to you. I certainly won't be the one to tell you what you can and can't do within your company.
Putting myself in those shoes, I would personally find it incredibly rude, and I highly doubt I'm in the minority holding that view, which means in my mind it's highly likely that other people at your company hold the same view (loudly or silently), which will contribute to making communications worse.
Putting passive-aggressiveness aside (which is a real problem)... I never contemplate "male-only" audiences, regardless of what I say. A somewhat-recent example: I've had some insecure guy come up to me being offended at my usage of "us gamers", as if saying "gamers" somehow excluded women.
There is something that really bothers me in such cases: The person is assuming ill-intent on behalf of the speaker. To me, it is extremely discriminatory to assume I don't include women when I speak. Why wouldn't I include them? Because they're women? Isn't that exactly the type of backwards thinking feminists are against?
shrugs I better just stop here. Whenever political correctness gets brought up, people on here seem to forget all logic and act completely irrationally - feminism really is the "for the children!" of the tech sector. I see even your post got downvoted for whatever reason; I brought it back up...
First, understand the difference between social norms and market norms (I like this overview: http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%...) and how the introduction of market norms crowd out social norms (this is a good overview: https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/market-norms-a...).
Now that you have the necessary context, you can understand why I'm extremely doubtful that VC's can realistically have a large positive impact on the open source community.
Open source projects need donations in talented engineer time, not in money. There isn't enough money available to compensate for the man-hours invested in open source projects.
Open source projects are successful because they motivate contributors with social capital rewards of some kind and because they allow many different actors to combine human resources to eliminate shared costs/problems.
If some kind of wealthy supervillain wanted to destroy open source the best way to do it would be to inject a lot of money into the system, get everyone to start thinking in terms of how much they will be paid per hour to contribute to the project. It would be peanuts. Now the market norms would eclipse the social ones and they would mostly stop contributing. It would probably also be useful to use the funding power to steer projects towards architectures useful to you and less useful to others, if some of those others are your competitors then it may be your duty to do so.
This overlaps quite a bit with the existing naive view of the open source community as a big group of untapped future unpaid interns to exploit as well.
This, of course, doesn't mean that there isn't promise in funding infrastructure projects developed by paid contributors that are donated to the public on completion. Just that mixing the two models almost certainly won't work.
From the article: "But hardly any founder, VC, or big tech employee was aware of the issue, even when they used or benefitted directly from these projects." I just can't wrap my mind around this. As a former "big tech employee" and current founder I am constantly cognizant of the free software that shapes my working day and every solution I implement. From kernels and userspace tools to compilers and interpreters to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
sighs When I said "the work is very localized", I meant that neither it nor its effects reach beyond the US - there are other countries. I did take a couple of minutes to look them up further before commenting, but I was not aware it was completely forbidden to comment on first impressions on HN. You'll forgive the confusion, I see a lot of first-impression-driven comments around here. You seem to be aggressively def…
> You seem to be aggressively defending them - Why? I defend anyone who is attempting to effect positive change in the world, aggressively. For the record, I have no relation or affiliation to 18F, or the USDS.
So you defend their faults, too?
Or are you saying here that you don't believe I myself attempt to effect positive change in the world? With my open source history, I'd find that pretty offensive.
Bad headline. Article is about identifying open source infrastructure tools as an overlooked category for venture capital funding.
Ok, let's use yours instead. Thanks! If someone suggests a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
From the article: "But hardly any founder, VC, or big tech employee was aware of the issue, even when they used or benefitted directly from these projects." I just can't wrap my mind around this. As a former "big tech employee" and current founder I am constantly cognizant of the free software that shapes my working day and every solution I implement. From kernels and userspace tools to compilers and interpreters to…
I had to explain very slowly that if he couldn't compete against an open source project... perhaps his company with tens of millions dollars in VC funding didn't deserve to succeed. And, that the company's product depended on using dozens of open source projects for free.
Needless to say he wasn't pleased.
This is a type of discussion that comes up often. There are some very important things to consider to avoid causing unintentional harm. First, understand the difference between social norms and market norms (I like this overview: http://danariely.com/the-books/excerpted-from-chapter-4-%E2%... ) and how the introduction of market norms crowd out social norms (this is a good overview: https://natewkratzer.wordpress.com…
I'm willing to believe that most open source projects could make substantial improvements if they had funding. See how Patreon has made a huge difference for Youtube videographers.
Bad headline. Article is about identifying open source infrastructure tools as an overlooked category for venture capital funding.
Thank you for that spectacular TL;DR. No rational investor wants to invest in something that will absolutely not give them a return. Most open source infrastructure tools lack a business model to capture revenue from its users. So one of several things will have to happen in order for open source infrastructure to get funded: - Investors will part ways with their money, full knowing that they will not see a return. (…
Like youtube videographers? Who start off doing it for fun, and then later monetize it?
That evidence shows you're wrong.
Seems as though she undermines her whole point with the "Here’s what is true about the “open source is really well funded” myth" section. The open source projects that people/businesses really care about are funded. Isn't a non-funded open source project just one an open source project that no one really cares about? I think there is a really subtle line that she has missed by assuming all open source projects develo…
In recent years it has been discovered that OpenSSL, bash, and NTP (just off the top of my head) were critically underfunded for years.