I think is a wise decision too. As an OSS collaborator is hard to explain how important/demanding this work is. I really understand his feeling, and I hope that more people like him could collaborate in OSS projects. Thanks for everything!
PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
141–150 of 236 posts
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#142Open source software has to be one of the least efficient markets out there. If you sum up the very real value PhantomJS has delivered to very real companies over the last several years, napkin math tells me we wouldn't have the project being abandoned for being a "bloody hell" to work on.
Hopefully the author will be able to parlay the street cred generated from PhantomJS by selling future employers or customers on the same napkin math.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#143Thank you for your work Vitaly, it's truly inspiring, you've made a difference for the community. Good luck on your next project.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main problem for developers is that getting your company to pay for something like developer tools can be very hard and a long project. Ideally every team gets a budget and a credit card to do as they see fit, but in practice a lot of (especially bigger) companies have a whole acquisition process. It's not uncommon for the hours spent in getting a license for e.g. an editor to be far more expensive than the produ…
Why do you think open source tooling has no such hurdles? At these same "larger" companies, they're going to have an open source review board, and legal involved for each open source product you want to use. Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.
A good way to address this is have a tools budget.
Product Manager has $X per team member. Is encouraged to coordinate purchases and pool purchases together for licenses. Licenses can be proprietary or Open Source licenses X, Y and Z.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#145IMO it'd be a really smart move for Google to hire Vitaly to help with the launching of this feature and things around it. He has done a great job with PhantomJS.
Even an acquisition[1] of PhantomJS would totally make sense, then let him keep working on it but based on headless Chrome and with real resources.
[1] Careful how you spin it for this route, learn from TJ/Express https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/strongloop-express-40b8bcb...
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think open source tooling has no such hurdles? At these same "larger" companies, they're going to have an open source review board, and legal involved for each open source product you want to use. Just because you can download and use it on your local machine, doesn't mean you're not violating your corp policy and procedure.
Whats more surprising is the company I work for does have a support agreement with Oracle, although when we've run into problems that do need a technical expert from Oracle such as crash dumps and stack traces we're told to figure it out our-self. Kind of defeats the whole reason to have a closed source system when you're still on the hook and charging out $500 per hour to clients.
This problem was well demonstrated at my shop the other day. There's a lot of fear of open source here. We needed to run a simple FTP process. I said I'd write a short script.
"You've gotta be careful with those free tools though... Never know what will happen when they break. You can't get any support. Besides, we need logging and alerting too."
"Oh, $currentTool does logging and alerting?"
"Well, yes... But it's currently not working. We've got a ticket in to fix it."
That was months ago. Yesterday it broke and there was no alert. There's also still no logs.
Gotta be careful about that "open source" stuff though.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
thank god. I was afraid we will be back in the grasp of the google's moloch.
Curious what "moloch" means in this context. I can google it, of course, but I get "Biblical name relating to a Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice". Which doesn't help me much. End users are children that Google is sacrificing? Or?
To give a shorter answer: Scott Alexander (at the slatestarcodex link), through the poem, associates Moloch with negative-sum games, where no one comes out better than they went in. In extreme cases they force us to sacrifice the things we love in order to survive. You throw your children to Moloch to help you defeat enemies; otherwise, you die. Your enemies do the same thing. It would be better if nobody sacrificed their children, but nobody is in a position to bring that outcome to pass.
In this context, I would interpret "google's Moloch" along the lines of: Google is net-bad for the world, because of privacy issues and problems with centralisation and so on. Using Google's software (and services) makes them more powerful, so people don't want to use Google's software. But because everyone else is using Google's software, the world is optimized for Google users in a way that it isn't optimized for non-Google users, and so it's difficult to escape. And so Google grows yet stronger, and it becomes more difficult to escape.
(To clarify: this is my interpretation of grandparent's use of the phrase. It's not my own position, and there's a decent chance that I'm completely off-base and it's got nothing to do with grandparent's position either.)
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which makes me wonder why governments don't give more grants for writing open source code. They do it for research, which is another thing that would otherwise probably not pay for itself. I guess if they started doing it a lot of commercial companies would complain to them about the competition.
I think that in the US, we've been fighting for some long about how much to cut government, the idea of proposing to create a new category of spending just doesn't occur to Democrats. The closest they can come to imagining something new is free college (which is the same what we have now [free high school, college scholarships] but more so) and free daycare (which is like free preschool but younger).
You're kind of in a bubble, there is a lot of U.S. government support for open source and most agencies use it. See https://code.gov for a starting point. There's never going to be a huge multi-billion dollar grant program because it is unfair to closed-source companies (who pay taxes) but you are imagining a debate or hangup that doesn't exist.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#149IMO it'd be a really smart move for Google to hire Vitaly to help with the launching of this feature and things around it. He has done a great job with PhantomJS. Even an acquisition [1] of PhantomJS would totally make sense, then let him keep working on it but based on headless Chrome and with real resources. [1] Careful how you spin it for this route, learn from TJ/Express https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/stronglo…
This is an excellent idea.
Re: PhantomJS: Stepping down as maintainer
#150> Chrome is faster and more stable than PhantomJS. And it doesn't eat memory like crazy. Wait, can someone tell me where to download this doesn't-eat-memory-like-crazy version of Chrome? Activity Monitor is showing me 2GB of Chrome processes right now and that's even with The Great Suspender having paused almost all my tabs.
I saw a trick where you can run Chrome and give it less memory, and it uses less memory. This is done using cgroups. The blog post is somewhat old[1] and not in sync with the version that is in Git[2], you might find a way to do this without Docker (I was using an old version of Docker and kernel that couldn't get it to work. But I need the old version of Docker for reasons.) Chrome will aggressively consume any memo…
You can just use cgroups on their own without docker