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Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

blog.filippo.io

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Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#191

Post by geodel »

creamytaco wrote: post #141
watwut wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry is nor moving towards multiple rounds of code review. Nor towards in house development nor away from using open source.

Every engineering-driven fintech company I know of (having myself worked there or having friends who work there) is doubling down on every single one of the processes I mentioned.

Yeah, and that is about 0.1% of total amount of software assembled and deployed in the world. It is like saying all my friends drink Evian water so that's the way we handle clean drinking water shortage in the world.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#192

Post by wolverine876 »

beebmam wrote: post #19

The solution to this, along with many other socioeconomic problems, isn't going to be solved through voluntarism. This is easily solved with a universal basic income. Some of us would gladly forever maintain and contribute to free software if we had our basic needs guaranteed. I certainly would

> The solution to this, along with many other socioeconomic problems, isn't going to be solved through voluntarism.

Open source has been incredibly sucessful using voluntarism.

We could also throw in political movements; the all-volunteer military, which has existed on and off since the American Revolution; science (the pay doesn't nearly match the efforts and value); non-profits; teaching (same as science); etc., etc. Why do people feel so motivated to sh-t on voluntarism, which has changed the world with great success. Almost every major advance in history has been accomplished by volunteers (depending on how you define it). Declaration of Independence, Newton, Van Gogh, World Wide Web, etc. etc. etc. ...

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#193

Post by jokethrowaway »

This is happening because we created a culture that glorify an ideal, Free Software, over practical concerns.

OSS is communism applied to software: it doesn't make sense and it doesn't work. After a few generations of idealistic people who sacrificed themselves and worked for free to give us foundations, most of OSS nowadays is just: - Advertising to let engineers know that company X is cool and you should go work for them - Ways to keep your staff motivated (who doesn't want to become a OSS rockstar?) - Advertising to sell an actual business

I'd rather live in a world where companies are building and maintaining software and reselling it to other companies. Unfortunately we made it sound uncool, somehow.

Pay your invoice, get your token and npm install @user-agent-experts/ua-parser

I'm not necessarily against open source and I certainly benefit and contribute to it; OSS also has the benefit that more people can spot bugs and end users can fix your shit when it's broken.

Still, I would never maintain something that allows companies to use it for free. It doesn't make any sense, no matter how much code the companies are publishing.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#194

Post by oauea »

javajosh wrote: post #165
josteink wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doin…

> ohmyzsh phones home every time I open a terminal

are you talking about the update check that by default runs once every 14 days[1], or is there something else?

[1]: https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh#getting-updates

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#196

Post by wolverine876 »

Scarblac wrote: post #178
wolverine876 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We benefit far more than we can repay, but "stealing" is too strong. It's what the author who adopted an open source license explicitly intended to allow.

Agreed. I use to term to compare it to the parent comment.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#197

Post by DethNinja »

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…

Why not change the license to a revenue share agreement with a cap on total amount of revenue?

For example, if a company uses ffmpeg on their products and product generates a yearly revenue of 1m then they will pay you 1k.

Current open source agreements do nothing to help smaller companies or the maintainers and honestly I find it stupid and destructive.

Charge larger companies more depending on their revenue and let small size companies with less revenue basically use it for free. Isn’t this more ethical than letting FAANG use these software for free?

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#198

Post by [deleted] »

didibus wrote: post #121
ogogmad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now the best way to get a job is leet code, leet code, and more leet code. Rather than spending Maybe more broadly: The only way to prove that you're good at X, is to do X well. An artist is only as good as his portfolio. The same is true for all creative jobs. I'm thinking that these proxies (see all attempts at standardised testing) are a disease of our time.

I'm not sure I fully agree. Doing open source doesn't mean you do it well. You have no sense of how quickly, efficiently and independently they managed to achieve it. I'd much rather hear from prior experience, and probe about situations and scenarios they were in, projects and problems they contributed too, and hear the story of how they went about it, how long it took them, what they did in the face of setbacks and…

[deleted]

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#199

Post by wolverine876 »

didibus wrote: post #163
wolverine876 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> 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.

Good point, but you would have a much smaller industry and platform without FOSS, and there is no way you could build all the libraries, tools, etc., yourself. Even FAANG depends on FOSS. If everything had to be paid for and professionally developed, licensed, etc., there would be much less around, and nobody could fork and innovate - there's a reason people develop and use FOSS.

Re: Professional maintainers: a wake-up call

#200

Post by keyle »

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…

That's interesting hey. Just imagine though, how does a company define what is "the core of the tech" and imagine the arguments in meetings between legal and engineering defining those terms.

The way this industry has evolved is a complete dumpster fire, where the dudes that glue the pieces together are paid 10X the value the dudes that actually built the hard part!

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