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Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

gavinhoward.com

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Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#71

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

Looking at my own experience, as a full-time employee:

- I keep learning something in the process

- It keeps me busy, if there is downtime at work, like when we are waiting for a management decission or waiting for some other component to complete. (that is of great value to me, right now; as it keeps me from being depressed)

- It gives a deep feeling of satisfaction, to see the working result

- I am my own boss in the process

So yes, it is worth it, but it does not directly translate into money. I guess it might be helpful, if I am forced to turn to work as a contractor; in this case it would be a kind of showcase.

(my own stuff is here: https://github.com/mosermichael )

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#72

Post by tlocke »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #39
IceWreck wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The FOSS that was imagined by Stallman, where end-users could actually use FOSS products in their everyday lives, is not possible under capitalism I have to disagree. Use a Linux based operating system, self-host your internet services at home, use google free android, or do a subset of that. Its all open source and works locally.

end-user != IT professionals For average end-users, “use a linux based operating system” alone comprises a mountain of barriers, but most are rarely even approached because they’re preempted by lack of reliable hardware support and lack of support for staple applications like Word, Excel, and Photoshop.

Is this still true? The latest version of Ubuntu will run fine on most laptops that Windows will run on, and LibreOffice provides an equivalent to MS-Office. I'm not sure about Photoshop because I don't use an image editor, but in the Open Source world there's Gimp, Krita and Pinta for example.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#73

Post by cobertos »

Only certain FOSS is worth working on for me. Here's my heuristic as of today.

* Don't work on FOSS that supports a SaaS or proprietary product. You're enriching someone else's ecosystem for no money. You take on the communication bandwidth and issue load of dealing with not only your issues but their issues too. Your software is useless if theirs fails. It's thankless.

* Don't work on FOSS you aren't using yourself anymore. This heuristic isn't fully fleshed yet, but I've found if I stop using software I wrote, it just becomes a support burden for me. Especially frustrating are entitled users or entitled users who make money entirely using my software who want niche issues fixed. Not PRs, they want me to debug it all or put in the thought to get the features working. (Probably doesn't apply if you're immersed socially with a friend group working on a FOSS project though)

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#74

Post by GoblinSlayer »

watwut wrote: post #53
adabaed wrote: post #25

Imagine blaming a FOSS dev/mantainer because you didn't do your job properly and trust a third party on a production code!

I find thins point of view equally absurd as all the abuse on maintenners of Foss. It is standard for production code to rely on third party libraries. Not just standard, but the opposite is considered bad thing - you are not supposed to implement everything from scratch. If you do, you will end up with more bugs and issues. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in development last 30 years that would say "it is bad t…

The legacy code is definitely bad, because it uses bad programming practices. A rewrite can easily be better by not doing known bad things.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#75

Post by ZeroGravitas »

This feels more like a cry for help, hope the author is doing okay. Christmas can be a rough time for many people.

To answer the question though, like climate change, or whatever big issue, there's personal things you can do, there's groups you can join but we're in a democracy and pushing for things to be put into laws and then enforced is better than relying on copyright which was never really designed or operated with the best intests of society as a driver, despite that being the official spin.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#76

Post by chii »

piaste wrote: post #62
AndrewDucker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They enjoy it. They need to for their own needs. It provides them with some other benefit.

Unfalsifiable. You're basically saying "they're adults, so if they do it they must necessarily get value from it". Myth of the rational maintainer, if you will. In real life, people get (mentally) stuck into suboptimal situations where leaving would make them happier all the friggin' time . Bad jobs they should have quit. Bad partners they should have broken up with. Why not bad open-source projects they should have…

one would just assume that people doing it are making a rational choice, and don't need someone else to second guess it.

What's so wrong with this line of thinking?

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#78

Post by chii »

mgaunard wrote: post #68
austincheney wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does not work. After several years of hard work a prior open source project that grew to immense popularity got me employment a few times. It wasn’t the actual project, code, or capabilities that meant anything. The only thing appealing about that project was it’s popularity. Nobody ever looked at the code, except people interested in submitting pull requests. If you think a prospective employer will take the ti…

Well that's precisely how it works, why would you expect an employer to review your code for free? Instead they'll just look at whether you contributed to big projects. Someone who managed to make significant contributions to Linux or LLVM for example might be better than the average joe.

> Someone who managed to make significant contributions to Linux or LLVM for example might be better than the average joe.

which leads to people who want to use this mechanism to claim credit in projects they don't actually have contributions in, and because the employer doesn't actually look at the code, they cannot tell.

I recall a while ago where someone would contribute a skeleton README or some random typo fixes to many different project, and using that to make their claim to fame.

So i reject the idea that employers should use open source contributions as a metric without closely examining what those contributions are.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#79

Post by tlocke »

I work on a few Open Source libraries and they're used by companies that make a lot of money, and people often regard me as a mug for doing the hard work for free so that other people can make lots of money. The argument I give in response is that from an economic perspective, you can only make money from a unique advantage, and since Open Source can be used by anyone, it's not giving anyone a unique advantage. I'd put it this way, that any company that's not using Open Source is putting themselves at a disadvantage.

Re: Is It Even Worth Working on FOSS Anymore?

#80

Post by wheresmycraisin »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #50

"Since companies steal Open Source software without a care in the world" If you don't want companies to use your code for free, don't publish it for free. If they violate the licence, presumably it is a case for the courts. People have different reasons for working on open source. Some want to make money from it, others don't. As an example, I don't know the full ElasticSearch story, but if Amazon's fork was legally…

> If you don't want companies to use your code for free, don't publish it for free. If they violate the licence, presumably it is a case for the courts.

Good look to the OBS team in pursuing legal actions against ByteDance/CCP.

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