11–20 of 364 posts
Also FYI, Bob is pleading for some volunteers to help manage the project; he's doing it all on his own as a side project. If you can, please put the word out
It is interesting, that the lack of a feature that would cost $629 to add is significant enough to make it the the HN front page. Makes me feel like I would like to learn more about open source. What drives it's development and what the business models are. There are 152 contributors to this project who wrote 21,686 commits. If each commit took an hour of work, and we value each hour at $50, that is $1,084,300 worth…
The economics are probably pretty simple: you can have fun contributing your time to a project, but you can’t have fun contributing money. It’s also easier to get your employer to okay your spending time to upstream bugfixes or even features than to get them to pay money to what’s likely a very vaguely defined organization for a very fuzzily defined service as opposed to straightforwardly buying a thing. (The money itself would be negligible—the accountants’ and lawyers’ time will cost more.)
It is interesting, that the lack of a feature that would cost $629 to add is significant enough to make it the the HN front page. Makes me feel like I would like to learn more about open source. What drives it's development and what the business models are. There are 152 contributors to this project who wrote 21,686 commits. If each commit took an hour of work, and we value each hour at $50, that is $1,084,300 worth…
> we value each hour at $50
If you start with fantasy hypotheses like these, you're going to obtain fantasy conclusions.
https://github.com/technion/rustypwneddownloader/blob/main/....
This worfklow isn't usable with these new rules, and I'm having a hard time with the assertion that moving builds to my desktop to use a hardware signing key and uploading them in a non automated, non transparent fashion is an improvement on security.
It is interesting, that the lack of a feature that would cost $629 to add is significant enough to make it the the HN front page. Makes me feel like I would like to learn more about open source. What drives it's development and what the business models are. There are 152 contributors to this project who wrote 21,686 commits. If each commit took an hour of work, and we value each hour at $50, that is $1,084,300 worth…
Simple: there is no business model. Open Source is not a business. It is a philosophy and hobby, where people help each other and give away their labor with no expectation of a return.
(Some youngsters that have grown up in the social media age have developed a kind of entitlement complex where they focus more on the popularity of their contribution than its utility; they may be developing it just to see a lot of stars on a GitHub page. But largely it's a community driven by people who just needed some code to exist and then released it for free when it worked)
(Some businesses do release code with an open source license and even accept some contributions from the public, but largely they are doing so for various business reasons and the project is more a reflection of the business than the needs of a community. Since those projects are financed and organized by the business, they tend to end when the business abandons them; whereas a grassroots community project is often just maintained by a new stranger on the internet if the old maintainer gives it up)
It is interesting, that the lack of a feature that would cost $629 to add is significant enough to make it the the HN front page. Makes me feel like I would like to learn more about open source. What drives it's development and what the business models are. There are 152 contributors to this project who wrote 21,686 commits. If each commit took an hour of work, and we value each hour at $50, that is $1,084,300 worth…
I"m curious what the actual negative impact of this would be - ImageMagick is a command-line tool (or runs in-proc somehow) and rarely used directly by end-users, just like LAME and ffmpeg - and the binaries are far more often shipped as part of another application. My day-job SaaS uses ImageMagick on Windows (long story), but this doesn't affect us - I imagine most other users will be the same. I'm surprised they ev…
The fallout has been that corpos can build it from their source and ship it themselves if they need it so bad, and users are always informed up front about what is coming to their computers.
Let that stick in your brain for next time you wonder why Windows still hasn't gotten a competent package manager that can wrangle dependencies. The userbase has been made terminally paranoid by decades of trojans and adware installers.
We need a LetsEncrypt for executable signing. Although I suspect Microsoft and Apple are making distributing executables for their platforms costly and inconvenient on purpose in order to drive developers onto their app stores. If that's the case, I guess we'll just have to train users to ignore all the security prompts about unsigned installers (some developers already do).
That’s the idea behind Sigstore[1]. The larger challenge is the vendors themselves: Sigstore (or anyone else, really) can give code-signing certificates and tooling to developers for free, but that tooling has limited value if the host OS doesn’t bundle the CA certificates that would enable native validation. [1]: https://www.sigstore.dev/
We need a LetsEncrypt for executable signing. Although I suspect Microsoft and Apple are making distributing executables for their platforms costly and inconvenient on purpose in order to drive developers onto their app stores. If that's the case, I guess we'll just have to train users to ignore all the security prompts about unsigned installers (some developers already do).
I"m curious what the actual negative impact of this would be - ImageMagick is a command-line tool (or runs in-proc somehow) and rarely used directly by end-users, just like LAME and ffmpeg - and the binaries are far more often shipped as part of another application. My day-job SaaS uses ImageMagick on Windows (long story), but this doesn't affect us - I imagine most other users will be the same. I'm surprised they ev…
Some PDF-related apps used to bundle ghostscript's installer as a silent install and it would just appear in your programs list. Then those users would see a mysterous entity named ghostscript in their start menu and complain online about it being malware or whatever. The ghostscript people decided to disable their silent installer because of it. The fallout has been that corpos can build it from their source and shi…
winget?