201–210 of 454 posts
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Needs a GNU GPLJ license. You can use this for commercial purposes only if you offer the copyright holder a job.
I almost believed that was a thing, but I don't see any indication that it is. Not a bad idea IMO
When I was a younger man, I fought long and hard and spent many late nights on the phone with the lawyers abroad, to convince my company to open source a tool that I was proud of and thought would help our brand and attract new developers. They finally granted approval, but I was not allowed to accept features or updates, customer service, spend time on fixes, accept pull requests, etc. Unfortunately my name was all…
Yup. Long long (2016 ish) ago I released an Unreal Engine 4 plugin that let people embed chromium embedded framework views into the engine via textures, so you could make fancy HUDs or whatever. Epic Games was kind enough to give me a developer grant for open sourcing and making it, cool as hell for a college student at the time, helped pay my classes. The number of angry game devs who basically wanted me to solve al…
Say you made a plugin that serializes/deserializes to JSON. They making an FPS and the gun doesn't shoot in the correct direction. They'll ask why it's not working in your support area, even though it's got nothing to do with your plugin.
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Did you apply through the website/job posting? I’d strongly recommend trying again and reaching out to the friend of a friend who informed you of the role and asking for a more direct intro to the hiring manager. Unfortunately, it’s really really easy to slip through the cracks as a resume, and one feels no remorse rejecting a pdf file. Even without the warm contact, some way of directly reaching the hiring manager (…
Anthropic has a tough alignment interview. Like I aced the coding screener but got rejected after a chat about values. I think they want intense people on the value/safety side as well as the chops.
I am the maintainer of a library to simulate keyboard and mouse input. I didn't start the project but took over the maintenance and have since rewritten pretty much all of the code. I recently found out that Anthropic is shipping it in Claude Desktop for some unreleased feature which is probably like "Computer Use". I noticed they had an open position in exactly the team responsible for the implementation and applied…
(Submit it as a dedicated story here too!)
I tried to open source a weekend personal project while at $BIGCO via their "Invention Assignment Review Committee". It turned into a minor bureaucratic nightmare and I was ultimately never given the OK to release it, or any clarity over whether my employer was choosing to assert an IP ownership interest in it. In retrospect, I wish I had never notified them of its existence, and released it under a pseudonym instead…
Whenever I see someone on HN talking about their moonlighting or side/hobby project, I get chills and think to myself "Boy, I hope they don't work for $BIGCO, because in all likelihood their existing employer claims IP ownership over that work, and if they ever try to do anything substantial with it, they're going to have corporate lawyers on their case." I've had experience with a similar "committee" (probably same…
No regrets here, but I did use Google Code a fair bit prior to GitHub and I had an experience that made me think maybe Google regretted that product in some ways. Around 2005-6 I wrote a Mac OS X client for Xbox Live. The idea was I wanted notifications on my computer when my friends came online and started to play certain games, so I could turn on my Xbox and join them. This is a feature of the Xbox mobile app today…
I thought it sounded pretty plausible for that era of Google.
When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11's xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn't contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again. Everything else I've open-sourced has gone pretty well,…
And people wonder why Codes of Conduct became popular...
Still, I really don't think most people need to be told not to tell other people to kill themselves, and in many places where I hung out when I was younger I strongly believe you would have been tempbanned for "flaming". I was a forum moderator and I can tell you I would not have hesitated.
But you said the magic words, so it bears addressing; I think we all get the picture that the Code of Conduct drama usually doesn't have much to do with the actual rules that are contained within, which really aren't that controversial on their face, but rather the way in which power is moved from stakeholders within a project to other people by virtue of initiatives like establishing Code of Conducts and the governance structures that enforce them. And, I think most people will probably not get upset over the idea that telling someone else to go kill themselves might get you suspended from a discussion forum... Rather, the drama comes in when you see the reach of a project or organization's CoC start to extend outward past what people actually want to stop (toxic, unproductive communication) and past the edges of the project (and into policing the rest of the Internet.) Two notable examples I'd cite are Python with Tim Peters (who as far as anyone can tell genuinely didn't do anything wrong) and Freedesktop.org with Vaxry (who can be a bit immature, but is primarily accused of not moderating the Hyprland Discord... Which is a fair complaint about the Hyprland Discord, but not a very good reason for him to be banned from Freedesktop.org.)
Of course, truthfully, there is no 100% winning answer here; if the stakeholders who have control over a project by virtue of being the original developers don't want to cede any control to people for CoC enforcement, they don't really have to (although in reality, external pressures to implement one might make it an untenable position to hold.) In that case, you have to rely on those people to hold themselves accountable to reasonable conduct, and nobody's perfect. It's kind of like when police departments conduct internal investigations and find no problems; even if you're pretty pro-police, you must feel somewhat skeptical that they actually were reasonably impartial in conducting said investigation.
But, I generally side with The Evil I Know, which is that the project authors and biggest stakeholders should generally maintain most of the power and control in an open source project including the ultimate decisions regarding moderation. In cases where developers have proven particularly egregious with their conduct, forking has proven to be effective enough as a mitigation strategy, and the fact that it comes at a cost is a sort of feature, as it's better if a power shift like that isn't easy; while I can't guarantee that the original authors and maintainers of a project will act reasonably and impartially, I can at least say that I expect them to have the project's best interests at heart, whereas the kinds of people that go around looking for established projects and organizations to join roles that have authority tend to not be the kinds of people you usually want in those roles. Having it be difficult means you need people who genuinely care about the project rather than the types of people who just kind of seek power. (And I am sorry, but there are fuckloads of those people among us and they are absolutely dirty enough to hide under the guise of anything to get a modicum of control. Running an online community for any appreciable amount of time opens your eyes to this IMO.)
All of this to say, it reflects poorly on the state of the Internet at the time and KDE's mailing lists that the situation happened and was possibly not rectified in a way that is satisfactory (it sure doesn't sound like it.) The correct thing to do is obviously to issue a ban, and you don't need a rule book of any kind to figure that out. I think when people push for these things during major incidents, it's misguided at best, because usually the core problem was not that a "don't tell people to kill each other" rule didn't exist, but that people actually would've needed such a rule to decide the behavior was unacceptable in the first place. This isn't some complex gray area case. I don't think people are acting in bad faith when they suggest it as an option after a drama incident, but I still think it's the wrong knee jerk 99% of the time.
(The most favorable thing I can say is that I think a CoC might possibly have value in very large projects like Linux or Kubernetes, but so far the execution has always felt like it leaves something to be desired. Seeing people occasionally openly threaten to contact the CoC committees over effectively technical disagreements leaves a bad taste in my mouth.)
That aside, have had two other projects take off and get flooded with normies demanding things on social media/github. I now do each under throwaway names and sell them to people who want the appearance of having shipped