Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
blog.steveklabnik.com
Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#2>> "But guess what: competition sucks. Cooperation is much better.
One of the biggest problems with competition is that it means
that somebody has to lose. For every winner, someone is a loser.
That person is going to be hurting. In the case of open source,
someone has spent (possibly) years of their life working on
something, and now, all of that is gone. That shit stings."
A thoughtful post by Steve, but I don't agree with this quote at all. It's misdirected to think that an idea is worth more just because someone has put a lot of time into it. It's also dangerous to assume that there must one way to do something and that it has to work for everyone.
Many others have said this before me, but it bears repeating: Open source is not a zero-sum game. New ideas and implementations do not come at the expense of existing code. The pieces don't get smaller; the whole pie gets larger.
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#3>> "But guess what: competition sucks. Cooperation is much better. One of the biggest problems with competition is that it means that somebody has to lose. For every winner, someone is a loser. That person is going to be hurting. In the case of open source, someone has spent (possibly) years of their life working on something, and now, all of that is gone. That shit stings." A thoughtful post by Steve, but I don't ag…
I would agree with Steve's statement if it were phrased as "cooperation over competition." Sometimes competing is just not avoidable, but that's alright.
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#4>> "But guess what: competition sucks. Cooperation is much better. One of the biggest problems with competition is that it means that somebody has to lose. For every winner, someone is a loser. That person is going to be hurting. In the case of open source, someone has spent (possibly) years of their life working on something, and now, all of that is gone. That shit stings." A thoughtful post by Steve, but I don't ag…
What did Wayne say when you proposed to make these changes to RVM itself? It seems like if you wanted to make the pie bigger, and you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM.
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#5>> "But guess what: competition sucks. Cooperation is much better. One of the biggest problems with competition is that it means that somebody has to lose. For every winner, someone is a loser. That person is going to be hurting. In the case of open source, someone has spent (possibly) years of their life working on something, and now, all of that is gone. That shit stings." A thoughtful post by Steve, but I don't ag…
I would agree with Steve's statement if it were phrased as "cooperation over competition." Sometimes competing is just not avoidable, but that's alright.
Creating new things can be a great way to progress even without cooperation. Not everyone wants to or can successfully cooperate with existing projects, so if creating a new project is what gets them working and contributing to the world, that's still a win.
Naturally, working together on things can get bigger results in the long run, but the idea of creating new projects instead of merely patching up what we already have should never be dismissed or placed "below" cooperation.
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#6>> "But guess what: competition sucks. Cooperation is much better. One of the biggest problems with competition is that it means that somebody has to lose. For every winner, someone is a loser. That person is going to be hurting. In the case of open source, someone has spent (possibly) years of their life working on something, and now, all of that is gone. That shit stings." A thoughtful post by Steve, but I don't ag…
What did Wayne say when you proposed to make these changes to RVM itself? It seems like if you wanted to make the pie bigger, and you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM.
Why assume he did? There's no law or even expectation that you can't create new projects. Not everyone is gifted at the diplomacy or negotiation required to work on existing projects. And, of course, many people want to have their "own" projects. There's nothing wrong with that at all. If everything was just an improvement of something old..
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#7>> "But guess what: competition sucks. Cooperation is much better. One of the biggest problems with competition is that it means that somebody has to lose. For every winner, someone is a loser. That person is going to be hurting. In the case of open source, someone has spent (possibly) years of their life working on something, and now, all of that is gone. That shit stings." A thoughtful post by Steve, but I don't ag…
What did Wayne say when you proposed to make these changes to RVM itself? It seems like if you wanted to make the pie bigger, and you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM.
> you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM.
One of the features I noticed from rbenv is that it does less than RVM. This is a good thing, but proposing this improvement to RVM would essentially be asking the maintainer to remove features.
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did Wayne say when you proposed to make these changes to RVM itself? It seems like if you wanted to make the pie bigger, and you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM.
> you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM. One of the features I noticed from rbenv is that it does less than RVM. This is a good thing, but proposing this improvement to RVM would essentially be asking the maintainer to remove features.
Certainly. Sometimes changes are just too major to bring back upstream and a new project is warranted. It just seems like Wayne was blind-sided by all of it.
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did Wayne say when you proposed to make these changes to RVM itself? It seems like if you wanted to make the pie bigger, and you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM.
> you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM. One of the features I noticed from rbenv is that it does less than RVM. This is a good thing, but proposing this improvement to RVM would essentially be asking the maintainer to remove features.
People had similar complaints about Rails and now it's pretty modular and flexible with what you include/exclude. A proposal for RVM to be more modular with what it does to your shell would have probably been well received.
Re: Literate Programming - We Forget That Open Source is Made of People
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did Wayne say when you proposed to make these changes to RVM itself? It seems like if you wanted to make the pie bigger, and you just want ideas versus egos to rule then you could've proposed to improve RVM.
Why assume he did? There's no law or even expectation that you can't create new projects. Not everyone is gifted at the diplomacy or negotiation required to work on existing projects. And, of course, many people want to have their "own" projects. There's nothing wrong with that at all. If everything was just an improvement of something old..
There's no law for many things in this world, but there certainly are expectations.
There are many projects with widespread use that have become core projects in the Ruby community (Rails, bundler, RVM, etc). It's reasonable to expect that issues or design decisions get discussed on the project mailing list before you try and divide the community.