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The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

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Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#81

Post by shp0ngle »

ehwhyreally wrote: post #45
shp0ngle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much disagree. Bootstrap is good and makes making websites quickly easy. The ideas of Bootstrap now live in Tailwind and other CSS frameworks. I haven’t used Bootstrap proper when I switched to Tailwind in new projects though.

Bootstrap is nothing like tailwind. nor their ideals. You look at 2 websites made in tailwind and they look completely different. Look at bootstrap and its the same bloody site.

The ideals are same - the CSS classes are not named by the semantic content, but by what they actually do. Tailwind just take it more to the extremes.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#82

Post by noncoml »

allenu wrote: post #37

There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous "Why don't you just...?" where the person making the request doesn't have the full understanding of the system as a whole and may see their request as a simple one-off that can be done quickly. To answer them fully,…

This is not unique to open source. If you are writing any kind of code that somebody else is using at your work you get this questions ALL the time.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#83

Post by marcandre »

techwizrd wrote: post #4
pmoriarty wrote: post #2

How much better the world would be if open source was fully funded by some of those tech billionaires whose fortunes were made by sitting on its shoulders.

I agree. I would love to see more things like Summer of Code or grants towards open-source software. Is there a sustainable way to fund open-source work apart from corporate benefactors who "own" the software?

The three main players imo are Github Sponsors, Tidelift and Open Collective.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#84

Post by YousefED »

What about automatically "crowdfunding" open source projects? Idea: would it be possible to design a system where we distribute a membership fee to open source projects used?

Let's say NPM would cost $10 / month per end-user. This would be redistributed to all the packages you use. (Or, similarly, cumulative membership fees will be distributed according to # of projects that re-use your package).

Have there been experiments like this? Any thoughts?

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#85

Post by noncoml »

There are TONS of people out there writing code and opening the source. These people don’t do it for company sponsorship or money or to improve their CV. They do it purely for the pleasure of someone else using it.

It’s just that only a very tiny fraction becomes popular. That’s when the problems start. Some may see their software being adopted by millions and may start feeling envious of those that make money using it.

Maybe unpopular opinion here, but I don’t see why they should get sponsored by a company. They made the software open source for a reason, and others used it based on the terms it was licensed. No foul play here.

On the other hand it’s well within their rights to ask for money to continue supporting it and developing it. Just because they made something open source in the past doesn’t mean they signed up to be forced to support and develop it indefinitely.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#86

Post by didibus »

01100011 wrote: post #74
_greim_ wrote: post #10

It isn't so much that companies are unfairly using others' work. It's that if you're going to use an open source tool in your business's codebase, you'll inevitably need support, upgrades, and bug-fixes, which translates into you putting pressure on the maintainers to do more work. By all means, use those people's previous work to put something amazing out into the world quickly. However, when you inevitably need hel…

> if you're going to use an open source tool in your business's codebase, you'll inevitably need support, upgrades, and bug-fixes I started using open source software and tools almost exactly 20 years ago in my career as an embedded software engineer. In exactly one case a company I worked for needed support from the developer, and in that case they hired the developer, ESR, to enhance his project, GPSd. Perhaps it i…

I don't think the pressure is always, or even ever from the company to the open source maintainers. Instead it will be from the developers working for the company, who are asked to deliver their feature, and require improvements or new features from open source to help them do it. They will personally cut issues, possibly insist, be rude, and name call the project or maintainers when they can't get traction.

I think this might happen also from University students who are similarly stuck for a school project of some sort.

Mind you, most people don't do that, but it takes only a few bad apples.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#87

Post by jessedhillon »

YousefED wrote: post #84

What about automatically "crowdfunding" open source projects? Idea: would it be possible to design a system where we distribute a membership fee to open source projects used? Let's say NPM would cost $10 / month per end-user. This would be redistributed to all the packages you use. (Or, similarly, cumulative membership fees will be distributed according to # of projects that re-use your package). Have there been expe…

That idea needs a bit more baking IMO. It seems obvious to me that the immediate consequence of this would be that we'd be rewarding trivial but widely used packages like left-pad[0], and thereby incentivizing the creation of a hundred clones of every trivial feature.

0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#88

Post by 01100011 »

didibus wrote: post #86
01100011 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're going to use an open source tool in your business's codebase, you'll inevitably need support, upgrades, and bug-fixes I started using open source software and tools almost exactly 20 years ago in my career as an embedded software engineer. In exactly one case a company I worked for needed support from the developer, and in that case they hired the developer, ESR, to enhance his project, GPSd. Perhaps it i…

I don't think the pressure is always, or even ever from the company to the open source maintainers. Instead it will be from the developers working for the company, who are asked to deliver their feature, and require improvements or new features from open source to help them do it. They will personally cut issues, possibly insist, be rude, and name call the project or maintainers when they can't get traction. I think…

> Mind you, most people don't do that, but it takes only a few bad apples.

Agreed. Frankly OSS wouldn't have gotten this far if that wasn't the case.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#89

Post by dalke »

andi999 wrote: post #34
cageface wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At every company I've worked I've lobbied for us to make donations to open source projects we depend on. Every single time it quietly dies in legal. There must be a better way.

I am not from legal, but too me there the problem would be: you use a product, but you dont 'buy' it, you 'donate' to the guy who made it, who is also 'super nice' and fixes some stuff about the product you need. This looks like a work/service/purchase agreement in disguise. Actually you dont want that to be possible.

I tried commercial FOSS development. An older version was available at no cost, the newest version cost money. Both were MIT licensed.

If you were a company, and wanted to pay me, it was easy - send me a PO and you would get the source code to the newer, faster, more capable version.

Nothing in that looks like a donation.

I did it this way precisely because giving someone money for being "super nice" and distributing no-cost FOSS software DOES NOT FIT with the accounting mechanisms of most companies.

Even with this, I was at one pro-FOSS workshop. One of the presenters described how they used my no-cost version and how great it was. (Did I know they used the software? Not until that day.) I pointed out that many FOSS projects are underfunded. Their response was that it was so hard to get their company to fund FOSS projects (along lines that cageface observed).

I pointed out that it's really easy to pay for my project.

They still never bought a copy or support contract.

I came out of that workshop convinced that the primary reason companies like FOSS is because it's generally available at no cost. Not because it reduces long-term dependencies on external parties, not because it improves software development methodologies, and not because it's an essential liberty. But simply because of the cost.

Re: The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders

#90

Post by jmnicolas »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #8

I can’t read the article. I’m very interested, but Wired has become such a cesspool of popovers, pop ups, advertising, tracking, and general dark patterns that I just can’t go there... even with an ad blocker the experience is annoying and sucky. What happened to them?

I'm on Firefox with uBlock origin, nothing to complain about. Out of curiosity what adblocker / browser are you using?
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