271–280 of 375 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
It just seems disingenuous to me to give out your work for free, with little to no strings attached, and then expect companies to either give back or pay you money.
This isn't really what the open source movement is all about. I've contributed to and release many libraries as open source. There are many companies using it, for free, and not giving me anything in return. I really don't care, because I just wanted to release something that anybody could use.
I feel like the movement is starting to turn from giving code away for free to all..to giving code away to only be used in the way I see fit.
I always liked this post by Erik Naggum: The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not suc…
> The whole idea that anything can be so "shared" as to have no value in itself is not a problem if the rest of the world ensures that nobody _is_ starving or needing money. For young people who have parents who pay for them or student grants or loans and basically have yet to figure out that it costs a hell of a lot of money to live in a highly advanced society, this is not such a bad idea. Grow up, graduate, marry, start a family, buy a house, have an accident, get seriously ill for a while, or a number of other very expensive things people actually do all the time, and the value of your work starts to get very real and concrete to you, at which point giving away things to be "nice" to some "community" which turns out not to be "nice" _enough_ in return that you will actually stay alive, is no longer an option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can assure you that the overwhelming majority of people building open source software, even very popular software, are not being paid for it and it offers little value for their careers. Like most things, the top couple of percent are being used to project an upside that does not apply to everyone else.
> I can assure you that the overwhelming majority of people building open source software, even very popular software, are not being paid for it and it offers little value for their careers. Can you give an example of a very popular project whose maintainer is not employed in a related field?
I'm personally in an interesting spot, as part of why I got my current job is that I have demonstrated proficiency with various sets of tools through writing open-source software (even there it's not my open source work itself, just my understanding of the stuff I'm writing it against). But I'm also aware that I'm very much the exception on that one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's generally not a problem until the big companies start asking for features, asking for bugs to be fixed, etc., expecting anything more than what the maintainers choose to donate. If someone from Amazon reports a bug it's kind of scary, you feel like you've broken Amazon. You might even try to set aside time you weren't planning to set aside. It's hard to remember/enforce that you don't owe them that time (especia…
If a project starts having large companies relying on it, traditionally there have been 2 mechanisms to address this: - start a company around providing enterprise support services; - ask for the large companies to provide some resources such as a part (or all) of an employee's time to work on the project, for the parts that are more dear to that company. If a company is unwilling to pay, either in the form of a supp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a chair, you have a single chair. 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 infini…
I’m just pointing out that in open-source-as-a-hobby its very common that large corporations, who may or may not give back to the community themselves, derive profits off of hobbyist work while this is less common with other hobbies. Even if it doesn’t financially hurt the hobbyist, it can be demoralising (although others love it, so to each their own, I suppose — that’s why we have different licenses)
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 you can make a sweeping generalization like that, because "employer" is not some omnipotent figure sitting in an ivory tower. It's other developers, and managers who are (typically) technical and can appreciate individuals who contribute to open source.
If I see someone is an active contributor on Scikit-learn, numpy, etc. that is a certainly a strong signal for me. Yes I'm not making the hiring decision, but I can assure you the HM is going to be influenced by those who interviewed the candidate.