241–250 of 375 posts
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I believe redesign is the single largest contributor to Reddit's decline. It went from text-based site (like HN is at the moment) to image-based site.
You can get around this, though via https://old.reddit.com and, in Preferences, disable thumbnails, image previews, and "allow subreddits to show me custom themes."
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Nobody's saying it has to be, uh...what's the name of a profitable internet company that isn't Facebook? But making demands on people who are working for free is bad manners . I don't care if you think the internet changes everything, it's still possible to be an asshole. My off the cuff solution is for project owners to add a status flag to their issue trackers: PAID. Anybody can submit a bug as PAID, but it costs $…
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...
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 can’t see anything wrong with that, it’s like people doing favors every day for other people without asking for money
> I now am starting to rethink this sentiment because the vast majority of the benefit of open source contributions on github, be they to languages, runtimes, application frameworks, databases, etc, go towards increasing the bottom line of for-profit companies, not to developers. And the vast majority of the beneficiaries of open source will never support the project even when they are fortune 50 companies saving millions of dollars by using the work of one volunteer.
Yes open-source improve computation as a whole, companies as well as individuals
> There is also the idea that contributing will be great for your career development. I have found that not to be the case at all, 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. The work you are paid to do is the only thing anyone cares about. I'm not saying that that shouldn't be the case, but just that that is the case.
Not my experience, have never stumbled upon a recruiter that doesn’t value OS contributions
> Given then, that there's very little upside to doing open source, and most/all the benefits go to profit-making corporations, it is puzzling why do we even push for greater involvement in open source at all? It seems we shouldn't be, we should be warning people who want to contribute to Open Source that they should probably spend their time doing their own studying and personal/skill development which will allow them to succeed in the roles that they have with their current role or a role they'd like to obtain one day, for money.
Since all previous assumptios was wrong, conclusion doesn’t follow. But I agree that people should not do Open Source for money
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It basically boils down to whether you think people are really being altruistic, or whether it's simply reciprocal altruism.
sure-- but the main difference is that the community pretends to be super altruistic under the guise of doing god's work for the good of all developers. it comes off as super fake. at least thats sort of the vibe i get from it. i also dont have a huge sample size of repos so maybe im talking mostly out of my ass in this case i would honestly rather it all be backed by corps and people get paid for it without any hint…
Isn’t that true of most industries? The shirt on your back cost only $10 because it was made by a kid in Bangladesh for pennies. The tunnel under the city cost millions more than planned, and somebody will have to eat that cost. Your theatre program has a page of 6-digit donors because ticket prices don’t cover half the cost of producing a show. Nobody likes to admit the true cost of anything.
I guess this makes software, on average, much more costly...
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> most of these contributions aren't worth enough individually to charge for I agree with your general thrust but on a tangent, this isn't true and isn't the right way to think about software contributions, even 'trivial' ones. A trivial change seems low value to you because you wouldn't have to spend much time at all doing the same thing yourself. To see its market value, you have to view it from the perspective of…
I actually completely agree with you; the value isn't how long it takes or how much effort goes into it -- it's how much it's worth to the user. The problem is that most contributions, individually , just aren't worth that much to a users individually . For example, how much would I personally for a fix to a graphical glitch fixed in the Dolphin emulator? Think how hard that is to quantify! Is it worth $20? It it wor…
Sure, but that article mentions business (you do too in your comment) that expect something from the OSS project. The alternative for that business is certainly much more expensive than paying for that fix, thus it does seems to be worth that much to them.
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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…
Sure, but that’s a rather different hobby which may or may not be something you’re in to. > 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 a…
If you build some software, you can share that an infinite number of times.
That chair has value. Maybe you can sell it, but maybe you just wanted to make a really nice chair.
That software has value. Maybe you can sell it, but maybe you just wanted to make a really nice piece of software. But just because the software is infinitely copy-able doesn't make it worth infinite dollars.
That last point is really the only important one and it makes no difference, to me, as the developer. I just want to make cool software. It just so happens that software is infinitely copy-able and chairs are not. The production side is the same.
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I have found the exact opposite actually. Firstly, the reason I open-source most of my libraries is because, when I was a kid and learning to code, I couldn't afford or convince my parents to buy the expensive proprietary software I wanted to play with. Open source let me have access to this technology ( and to inspect how it worked ) without having to buy anything. This is simple stuff like having GCC to compile C p…
>Firstly, the reason I open-source most of my libraries is because, when I was a kid and learning to code, I couldn't afford or convince my parents to buy the expensive proprietary software I wanted to play with Just saying, software can be free without getting open sourced. I agree that OSS gives raw access to technology, but in larger projects, I would prioritize a good documentation/reference book over source code…
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…
How is software unique in this? Tons of museums around the world are visited by the kids of people who make 100k a year even though the average worker there is an unpaid intern. Do you read any news? Listen to NPR podcasts? I think NPR does pay interns, but they don't pay them millions of listeners * 50min a week of listener time * $60 an hour of average listener earnings. What about science? If you ever benefitted f…
"If you want to get rich, start a religion" - L. Ron Hubbard
prediction: 2020's will be a decade of hyperactive cult growth, accelerated by proliferation of private alternative currencies, loneliness and the decline in traditional religious affiliations. Patronage of the ambitiously famous will be direct and recurring, without need of branded material maguffins to mediate the transaction loop.
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Copyleft licenses were created for a reason. If you want companies to either contribute back or fuck off, use copyleft licenses.
This is, unfortunately, less and less true, when companies like Amazon will take some GPL'd software and make modifications internally and never distribute it. Copyleft licenses only apply if Amazon is going to distribute the software outside the company (such as by selling the software, or giving away binaries).