Give away your code, but never your time • Hacker News Board

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#11

Post by rcfox » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:59 PM UTC

cabaalis wrote: post #9

outoftacos wrote: post #5

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

Nor have I. As a manager/co-owner I can't think of a reasonable business-friendly way to allow my developers to spend work time on OSS. I would love to, of course, but our systems really do not facilitate community involvement.

The majority of my contributions have been around projects I use for work. Bug fixes, extending functionality, performance enhancements, etc.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#12

Post by badminton1 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 10:59 PM UTC

I disagree.

By using a small project and reporting bugs you are helping to test it, giving feedback and allowing it to grow.

Also, reporting a bug sometimes saves the maintainers the effort of finding the bug themselves... something that actually takes time.

A better policy is to encourage people to help fix the bugs they report, with a test case or a pull request if possible... something actionable.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#13

Post by ef4 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay.

The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them.

Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks.

One or two good PRs is enough for me to give you commit bit on my repos. This has never yet resulted in abuse, and has brought in a many helpful co-maintainers.

Bad commits can be easily reverted. Whereas giving people a bit of trust often inspires them to help more.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#14

Post by LeoNatan25 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:03 PM UTC

outoftacos wrote: post #5

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

This smells like a small-minded startup-bubble nonsense to me. If you have time to use open source software, you should make time to also submit fixes and open some of your work.

That’s not to say startups don’t contribute, but my experience is that a lot of startups—usually led by inexperienced managers—see contribution as giving something for free instead of charging. Small-minded nonsense indeed.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#15

Post by LeoNatan25 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:05 PM UTC

postnihilism wrote: post #10

outoftacos wrote: post #5

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

Your company almost certainly makes use of multiple pieces of open source software. What do you do when you need a feature that doesn't yet exist in one of them?

He probably opens an issue and then complains why the project maintainers don’t give it priority. He is too busy to do privileged OSS work.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#16

Post by asdfasdfasd333 » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:07 PM UTC

ef4 wrote: post #13

Color me deeply skeptical of the suggestion to try to lock people out of community participation unless they pay. The real secret to not burning out is to scale up the set of maintainers in proportion to the users. You do that by lowering the barriers to involvement, not raising them. Most maintainers err on the side of controlling too much. Which makes them into bottlenecks. One or two good PRs is enough for me to g…

Absolutely this.

This applies to engineering at software companies as well.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#17

Post by richardknop » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:07 PM UTC

outoftacos wrote: post #5

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

A lot of open source work gets done outside of regular jobs. And it also contributes to burn outs. In order to maintain my projects I am spending a subtstantial amount of my free time and it takes its toll.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#18

Post by 5_minutes » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:07 PM UTC

I always wonder where coders find the time to significantly contribute to Opensouce projects - which many seem to do - after their day job, having played and eaten with their kids, and were an attentful husband.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#19

Post by davidgerard » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

> When I say “open source”, I mean code licensed in a way that it can be used to build proprietary things.

This redefinition of a basic term should have been at the beginning, not the end.

Re: Give away your code, but never your time

#20

Post by adekok » Sun, Sep 10, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

outoftacos wrote: post #5

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

I'm not sure why the downvotes, other than you express an unpopular opinion.

My experience has been two extremes:

1) companies that use open source, modify it (to the extent that it's largely proprietary), and deride the open source community that competes with them

2) companies that use open source to leverage non-core functionality they need... and move on with their real value-add

Companies in the style of (1) never contribute back. They see open source as the competition, even though they use it themselves. They don't understand that proprietary extensions are just that... proprietary software in a non-expertise area, that no one else in the world knows anything about. Instead, they spend more and more money "fixing" things which were already fixed in the upstream releases years ago.

Companies in the style of (2) contribute back minor bug fixes or features which are pain points for them. They sometimes pay for other people to write new features.

I say this as someone with 20 years experience working on both sides (corporate / open source) for companies doing both (1) and (2) above.