231–240 of 375 posts
“The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions.” And the catastrophic Specter and Meltdown bugs show that private code doesn’t prevent this sort of thing either...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most hobbies don’t provide potentially large financial upside to some corporation who is unwilling to give you something in return. If my hobby is to bake cakes, there isn’t typically some corporation making money off my cakes.
If your hobby was making cake designs and you share them on the Internet to whomever wants them with a license that allows even businesses to use your designs then we are right back where we started. That's still a perfectly valid hobby. P.S. You give away your designs because everyone else does and you get this big collection of free cake designs to bake. That's worth more to you in your cake baking hobby than selli…
> That's still a perfectly valid hobby.
Of course. There are many hobbies which can financially support you, but there are lots of hobbies that don’t. Most hobbyist sports for example wouldn’t make anybody any money, but that’s fine, you do it for yourself. But the point I was making in my previous comment is that corporations aren’t making profits off the back of your hobby either.
Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…
I don't think that's true. The software itself doesn't benefit their bottom line because it's free for everyone. You can't charge a premium because your business runs on Linux.
All open source software does is provide a base-line of technology that all companies and all individuals can use. You can't directly or even indirectly profit of it -- you can only profit on the value you can provide on top of it.
As technologists, that's what we want! We want companies and individuals to stand on the shoulders of giants and peek a little bit higher. We don't need anyone to re-invent the wheel over and over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Charging money to fix something because of who they are seems unethical to me... Maybe it's just capitalism, which is usually antithetical to open source free software... If they want it fixed, let them add resources to the project like submit a pull request, donations or charge people support fees for urgent bugs, which many OSS projects do...
Well at that point it isn't buying for getting it fixed but for attention and fast response. Anyone else could just do the fix themselves and submit it. The lack of gatekeeping is what keeps it ethical essentially - like the difference between "only Apple technicians" and "anyone capable".
There aren't a lot of totally free, open-source, end user products. In the 90s FOSS devs though one day GiMP would surpass Photoshop, we'd see Linux on at least 8% ~ 10% of laptops at coffee shops, Inkscape would be better than Illustrator, etc. Today, a lot of FOSS is corporate sponsored. But it's not end-product. It's all middleware. Hophop/Hack, Lightbend libraries like Slick, React, etc. It's all to help you buil…
In the 90s we thought open-source was countercultural. It was something you did to be part of a community, to be elite, to show those big dummies at Microsoft you didn't need them. Today it's something you do to show Microsoft they need you, because today Bill Gates is the world's nicest old man, big companies are safer than the state, and nobody needs any individual person anymore. It's happened with many other thin…
There aren't a lot of totally free, open-source, end user products. In the 90s FOSS devs though one day GiMP would surpass Photoshop, we'd see Linux on at least 8% ~ 10% of laptops at coffee shops, Inkscape would be better than Illustrator, etc. Today, a lot of FOSS is corporate sponsored. But it's not end-product. It's all middleware. Hophop/Hack, Lightbend libraries like Slick, React, etc. It's all to help you buil…
My perception was always that the FOSS hopes of GiMP, Inkscape, etc flopped mainly because nobody in FOSS put work into UI/UX. So, it kind of makes sense that FOSS found a niche somewhere that UI/UX didn't matter.
> So, it kind of makes sense that FOSS found a niche somewhere that UI/UX didn't matter.
I wonder if there can be a push for UI/UX designers to contribute to open source Projects, I'm sure there's people out there who want to contribute...
Perhaps most egregious are companies who profiteer from open source, without contributing back. Amazon comes to mind.
Copyleft licenses were created for a reason. If you want companies to either contribute back or fuck off, use copyleft licenses.
A rational actor never works for "free", they derive some perceived benefit (not necessarily money) from their action, like reputation or self-satisfaction or warm fuzzies. I think it's brilliant that we can use these carrots to get good work out of people that can be shared on the internet. All the same that's no excuse to abuse people who are acting far from rationally.
Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…
> I think that no potential or current employer has ever given a rat's ass about open source contributions, and do not consider that work as valuable when making hiring decisions. We do care. We're hiring for backend engineers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20871478