181–190 of 228 posts
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Are you sure? If what you're saying is true, wouldn't that mean it would be impossible for any business to have a "sense of community" around it?
To be part of a community you need to have the same stake as everyone else. Businesses don't have communities, they have customers.
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…
http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
> Whenever somebody sends you a pull request, give them commit access to your project.
I agree with requiring more accountability before granting the ability to create official releases.
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…
A gitlab feature I miss on Github is "protected branches" and being able to add contributors that can only push to unprotected branches. This way you can give people access to the main repo while still being able to check code before it goes into master
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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) nev…
I think both of your "extremes" are flawed, but for a lack of time I'll just add the big one you missed entirely: 0) Companies funding the full development of large OSS projects. Examples: MySQL, Postgres, nginx, Chrome, Tensorflow, React, (Most of) Linux, Redis etc. etc.
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 is something I've been thinking about for a while as well. All these companies with regularly updated blogs, super active social media feeds, employees sent to present/attend every week or so and open source project development being done in house... Do they ever do any actual work? Because every company I've seen or worked for has wondered just how they have the free time to do all this stuff with bill paying c…
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As a coder, it also means I don't have to code everything myself from scratch. Surely that's better than having to reinvent the wheel for every single project, especially where larger requirements like a full site CMS or framework are concerned. It also means new coders can join in without having to learn a new codebase for every role, that we're not paying a fortune for software licenses for every project and that w…
I'm sure you'll find it harder to get help for a project than you would with open source, spend far longer on every project than you would by merely using an existing framework or end up at the whims at a large corporation with no interest in letting you make your own modifications to the code. If you're employed, why would you care? You're getting paid the same, the extra time is your employer's problem.
And I still stand by the 'easier to get help with' part. Unless you're the sole web developer or software engineer on a product, you're going to have to get someone else involved further down the line. If you use an existing piece of software, that's easy. Hire someone with experience in it, and they'll probably figure out what to do.
If it's bespoke, you'll need to either train them yourself to work on the software (and do the same every time someone new comes in), or hope they can figure out what your code is doing without any assistance. This will then take more time and effort every time someone gets hired.
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I'm sure you'll find it harder to get help for a project than you would with open source, spend far longer on every project than you would by merely using an existing framework or end up at the whims at a large corporation with no interest in letting you make your own modifications to the code. If you're employed, why would you care? You're getting paid the same, the extra time is your employer's problem.
Well I guess it depends on whether your employer is simply paying by the hour or giving you a typical monthly/yearly wage. If its the latter, the company probably wants the project done as quickly as possible, not just whenever you feel it's 100% finished. And I still stand by the 'easier to get help with' part. Unless you're the sole web developer or software engineer on a product, you're going to have to get someon…
Right, but if there was no OSS to use, it would be as quickly as possible.
And I still stand by the 'easier to get help with' part.
Right, but again, that extra time and effort is still the employer's problem.
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Don't know about duty but I think everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help. It makes for a better world where these rights are regularly exercised.
I upvoted you because I think it's an interesting position, but you should realize that adding duties will discourage people from doing any contributions at all. It starts to feel like a case of "no good deed going unpunished".
The alternative brought to it's logical conclusion is Shkreli and rasing medicine prices by thousand percent.
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Don't know about duty but I think everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help. It makes for a better world where these rights are regularly exercised.
> everyone has a right to expect help and a right to give help This might make sense when asking a stranger for directions or for someone to help with your car problem, because the relationship is 1:1 . But this breaks down in contexts where scale is a factor. When assisting users of your project, the relationship is 1:many . And if the project is popular, it is unfair to expect the author to be helping so many peopl…