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Fork My Code, Please (2012)

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Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#11

Post by jedieaston »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #9
BaptN wrote: post #6

Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.". Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ? (I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contribution…

I've seen that Stallman does consulting at $250/hr, which is interesting when you consider that I, a no-name from a no-name state school with 8 years' experience, am billed to my company's clients at more than 1/3 the rate of someone who's effectively a celebrity.

He probably doesn't actually work for that rate though, since he rarely programs anymore and mostly does evangelist work for the FSF.

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#12

Post by LukeShu »

jedieaston wrote: post #11
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen that Stallman does consulting at $250/hr, which is interesting when you consider that I, a no-name from a no-name state school with 8 years' experience, am billed to my company's clients at more than 1/3 the rate of someone who's effectively a celebrity.

He probably doesn't actually work for that rate though, since he rarely programs anymore and mostly does evangelist work for the FSF.

RMS was removed as president of the FSF in September 2019. He is still head of the GNU project, but is no longer part of the FSF.

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#13

Post by ericax »

While open source software really shines when lots of contributions work together and when everyone is polite, understanding, and well-reasoned, not every project is like that.

Sometimes it's hard or even demoralizing for the developer to handle all the feature requests that do not take into account the constraints. I've seen some GitHub issues like that and it's disheartening.

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#14

Post by btilly »

akkartik wrote: post #10
btilly wrote: post #8

This link was posted in the thread on Elm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447 It makes a nice contrast to the way that the core Elm team pushes back on forks and retains control for themselves.

I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post. But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. M…

It seems common to me for people to say, "Can you create a fork and make a pull request?"

But it does vary by project. The Linux kernel has tons of forks maintained by random people for random reasons. But Python not so much.

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#15

Post by akkartik »

btilly wrote: post #14
akkartik wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post. But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. M…

It seems common to me for people to say, "Can you create a fork and make a pull request?" But it does vary by project. The Linux kernel has tons of forks maintained by random people for random reasons. But Python not so much.

Ugh, I hate GitHub for polluting the terminology. There's two distinct senses of 'fork' here:

a) A short-lived branch hosted elsewhere for managing the merge process. This is a technical fork.

b) A long-lived branch that may never be merged back. This is a social fork. Like egcs vs gcc, or Vim vs Neovim.

It's the latter that seems to have stigma attached to it.

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#16

Post by richardjennings »

I am starting to wonder why Open Source became the standard as apposed to alternatives. Clearly a love/passion/aptitude/... puts people in a position where they contribute time and expertise for some/no reward that matches a cost/benefit. The article list the truth behind volunteering and the consequent constraints.

Why is it that way though?

The planet has public money advancing major scientific interests in an organised though potentially politically aggravated mechanism. Would a lack of action on a subject of possible national security be tolerated due to the rights of volunteers? How about international security?

Is it politics/government/non scientific interests that make open source the most successful answer to by the people for the people?

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#17

Post by franciscop »

BaptN wrote: post #6

Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.". Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ? (I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contribution…

While I'm not recognized, my OSS is on the way to reach 2M installs this year from npm. Usage from CDNs of a single project is already 1+M/year.

Mid-term (within 5 years) I am considering whether to go consulting or trying to sell software products (or both). What is the value you see from OSS developers? Assuming is not consulting for their own libraries ofc.

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#18

Post by boothby »

akkartik wrote: post #10
btilly wrote: post #8

This link was posted in the thread on Elm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447 It makes a nice contrast to the way that the core Elm team pushes back on forks and retains control for themselves.

I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post. But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. M…

> When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork?

It's probably happened. The closest I've seen was when Cython was forked from Pyrex* because Sage developers had needs that the Pyrex author wasn't interested in developing or maintaining. It was an amicable fork, and for quite some time Cython development cohabited with Pyrex and some patches were upstreamed as they fit Greg's purposes.

http://lists.copyleft.no/pipermail/pyrex/2006-November/00207...

http://lists.copyleft.no/pipermail/pyrex/2007-July/002480.ht...

* there was a brief period when the fork was named SageX, which was, regrettably, my sarcastic spitball. Fortunately, several devs were huge Battlestar Gallactica fans and they eventually settled on the name Cython around the time it was spun off to its own project.

Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)

#19

Post by sillyconvalley »

akkartik wrote: post #10
btilly wrote: post #8

This link was posted in the thread on Elm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447 It makes a nice contrast to the way that the core Elm team pushes back on forks and retains control for themselves.

I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post. But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. M…

It's basically a disingenuous thought-terminating cliché, much like people who say "if you don't like your job then just quit" to people who are being exploited at work. Sure, you technically can "just fork" a project, but everybody knows that projects aren't just the code: they're the community, the mindshare, the maintainers, etc. It's also a very political act with social consequences. You could divide a project's community if you fork and do manage to become big enough.

So yeah. People saying "just fork" are being disingenuous, and I think they know that.

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