Professional maintainers: a wake-up call • Hacker News Board

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#161

Post by mfer » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

jbk wrote: post #91

mfer wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, large SV companies and startup should also start agreeing to pay for open source, when it's the core of the tech. Companies usually have a reason to keep their expenses low. Sometimes they are a public company with fiscal responsibilities. A startup will only have so much runway and is likely trying to reduce expenses. Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free?

> Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? See the article...

I was responding to the parent comment not the article. The article makes great point. It essentially talks about a services and support business around open source. Some have been doing this for decades.

When you have contracts and support at a cost you aren't doing the work for free. The article is talking about running open source like a business rather than a volunteer situation. That means, you're not doing everything for free.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#162

Post by Klonoar » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

jbk wrote: post #74

> Now is the perfect time for Open Source maintainers to become legible to the big companies that depend on them—and that want to get more out of them—and send them five-to-six figure invoices. Well, this is exactly what I've been doing around VideoLAN (VLC, x264) and FFmpeg for the last few years. In order to do that, I've created 2 official companies Videolabs and FFlabs (besides the non-profit orgs) and I've gone…

Wasn't there some YC company that was trying to act as a sales agent/middle-entity for this kind of situation? If not YC, they at least were on HN at one point.

Curious if anyone knows.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#163

Post by didibus » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #156

didibus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might sound weird, but I find every time someone publishes or contributes open source, they are stealing value from me, because it is one less thing that a company will need me to implement, build and maintain for them, instead they'll now expect me to simply use the existing free of charge open source one. Not only does it feel like I'm stolen value, open source work tends to be the most interesting, and as mor…

I can understand the perspective. But it goes both ways: Aren't you (and I) 'stealing'? How much do you use open source, as a developer and as a user - and just to post his message: try enmuerating all the open source that goes into it. We benefit far more than we can ever repay.

> How much do you use open source, as a developer and as a user

As a user I agree, things would probably be more expensive if nothing was open source. But as a developer, I disagree, my employer would simply need to pay for the stuff I use, or they'd pay me or another developer to build them one. And this is precisely what the article argues, that companies should pay for it. If there wasn't any open source logging library, the maintainer could either work for a company that offers a paid one, start his own company, or work for a company that pays him to maintain one for them.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#164

Post by DarylZero » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

The real solution is to throw out all the crap at the top of the stack, get down to simpler and simpler code that can be maintained by the people autonomously without corporate involvement.

E.g., Gemini.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#165

Post by javajosh » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #79

daenz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could figure out for certain which big companies were using my software, I might try the invoice idea for fun. I expect it would be ignored, but I would send it anyways to prove the idea one way or the other.

If you hosted the package/library yourself instead of in closed silos/package repos, you could directly check the IPs of whoever regularly pulls your stuff. We all opted for centralized package repos though, so now only they know. And they’re not telling us. Just another “free” opportunity lost to centralization, I guess.

> We all opted for centralized package repos though, so now only they know. And they’re not telling us.

I'm sympathetic to the view, but there really are some things that are better centralizing. Reducing code into binaries is something that a "fair" 3rd party is going to be better at than the 1st party. Why? The 3rd party central source is (presumably) mechanically cloning and building, whereas the 1st party is doing much much more. Effectively the 3rd party offers a better guarantee to the end user that this binary corresponds to that particular source.

Also, the Way to measure who's using your code is to put runtime telemetry in there. Distasteful, but so common now with every kind of software, it's crazy. Yes, even OSS CLI programs phone home now (heck, ohmyzsh phones home every time I open a terminal!). For a generic server library, you'd add a check to make sure it's the most recent version and print that out to stdout on startup.

See, it's not user hostile it's to keep them informed of updates! /s

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#166

Post by the_af » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

creamytaco wrote: post #69

moksly wrote: post #48

The alternative to what we have now is not going to be a healthy OSS community. The alternative is going to be big companies insourcing more of their libraries. The only reason why OSS has seen the up-pick it has is because major companies profit from it. Microsoft didn’t embrace open source because it had a change or morals, it embraced open source because it started making so much more money from enterprise orgs sw…

Reviewing code is the elephant in the room. Filosotile -perhaps out of ignorance or disconnect- fails to mention that the vast majority of open source projects (log4j being a great recent example) are absolute shit. Nobody should be building anything on top, nevermind giving the maintainers more money. In-house development, software BOMs, rising of standards and multiple rounds of code review are the processes that t…

> In-house development

... keeps resulting in shit code, too! There's no evidence standards of quality are rising. In my own extremely limited view of in-house software -- i.e. my own professional experience -- code quality is crap, standard quality practices are very low and actually worse than in FOSS projects (I've seen someone mention more than once that "this crap PR simply wouldn't fly if this were an open source project, it's so bad nobody would want to review it!"), absolutely dumb bugs keep hitting production, and people think of automated testing as "that thing we don't want to do".

In-house code is just code you don't know is garbage because you cannot look at the code.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#167

Post by mk81 » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

didibus wrote: post #119

lumost wrote: post #42

Once upon a time, the best way to get a software job was to demonstrate your ability to build useful open source projects. 10 years ago the Principal Engineers I would work with had super sized open source portfolio's which leant them both credibility and experience building products people liked. Junior devs would search (sometimes in vain) for issues where they could contribute a few PRs Now the best way to get a j…

This might sound weird, but I find every time someone publishes or contributes open source, they are stealing value from me, because it is one less thing that a company will need me to implement, build and maintain for them, instead they'll now expect me to simply use the existing free of charge open source one. Not only does it feel like I'm stolen value, open source work tends to be the most interesting, and as mor…

No post body was provided.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#168

Post by DarylZero » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

imachine1980_ wrote: post #130

DarylZero wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Mostly they wouldn't even pay employees if they could get away with it. We have to make laws about it.

like dual licensees?qt?

I mean just ordinary employees really wouldn't get paid at all if not for labor regulations.

Just look into the amount of simple "wage theft" (employers forcing employees to work off the clock, etc.) that exists in the USA.

Of course, this country fought a war over the issue of free labor from black slaves.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#169

Post by the_af » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

creamytaco wrote: post #135

wpietri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be fascinated to see your evidence that in-house code is any better on average than open-source code. I haven't done a lot of consulting lately, so I haven't seen much in-house code in the last few years. But my experience is that the average in-house codebase is worse. And that makes sense from the incentives. Open-source projects that want more than one contributor need to be approachable enough that people…

I worked at engineers-call-the-shots fintech and later SV shops for many years. No, their in-house code is not worse than open-source. In fact one can safely say that top companies that attract top talent also have methodologies in place that lead to better than average code quality.

If you are comparing the top engineering shops to open source, you should also pick the top (quality) open source projects. Apples to apples.

Most in-house code is crap.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#170

Post by didibus » Sat, Dec 11, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #153

didibus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might sound weird, but I find every time someone publishes or contributes open source, they are stealing value from me, because it is one less thing that a company will need me to implement, build and maintain for them, instead they'll now expect me to simply use the existing free of charge open source one. Not only does it feel like I'm stolen value, open source work tends to be the most interesting, and as mor…

I guess in the same way that public libraries steal value from book publishers and public education steals value from private tutors. Also, how rainwater steals value from bottled water companies, fresh air steals value from air filter vendors, and sunlight steals value from the electric company.

Libraries still pay for each copy of a book, and in some countries royalties are paid out each time the book is borrowed. The library is not allowed to make additional copies of a book and borrow them either. Public education pays its teachers.

But overall I'm not in disagreement with you, you could say open source is done as part of the greater good and advancement of technology and computer science, and not for personal capital gain. That also means that it isn't meant to be a sustainable career path, or job that you can do full time though.