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Devtools must be open source
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Re: Devtools must be open source
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have sent countless small bug fixes even before, to tools that I use that I could dig into when something was off... No big heavy lifting, but plenty of "tinker on your tools" stuff. And I don't think what I did was that special, so maybe the experiences are different? The current LLM-driven stuff seems to break down the expectations, and now there are a lot of places which just ignore anything I send in (the same…
That's my biggest gripe with open source software. It's not really the open source part that's bad, but when projects turn into major projects with a substantial user base, I think the owners have an obligation not to delude their users into thinking they have more say than they actually do. Plenty of big projects leave their issue trackers public and have docs that encourage community contribution, yet effectively i…
> which is absurd because forking should be a last resort for software that thrives from having a community.
This is true, of course, but having a community is completely orthogonal to whether software is open or closed source.
Re: Devtools must be open source
#73One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…
> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The canonical example was RMS needing to fix a printer driver bug back before software updates were really a thing. That meant that there was a greater motivation for users to maintain their changes. Today, with software being an evergreen stack of turtles from the BIOS all the way…
> I think that original vision of open source software is very much the exception and not the rule.
RMS has never supported open source. And never emphasized software repositories or deployment or app stores or whatever. He is a proponent of free software based on ethical motivations, to allow users the freedom to control how their computing is done. It perfectly fits the local-only personal project.
Re: Devtools must be open source
#74One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…
> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
A corollary is that more people will have eyes on the source code than the original developer(s), so the project can benefit from a broader skill set and set of orientations and priorities than if it were proprietary. Not just on the development front, but hopefully also in security, usability and accessibility
> The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
I imagine you are correct that most people historically didn't inspect or modify most tools they use, but most developers I know who have relied on open source software -- even if they didn't contribute directly upstream -- have had the experience of locally patching a small bug or adding a small enhancement to suit a use case, or studying a piece of an open source module as a starting place for their own implementation for some piece of functionality, or doing a cursory scan of a project to make sure it isn't e.g. phoning home, or simply taking a morbidly curious look to see how the sausage is made.
Sure, I'm not a representative sample and it would be great to have some actual numbers on this, but I have observed this among engineers at Fortune 500s and YC startups, but also non-tech businesses as well as at local public utilities and health systems.
Anyway, I agree that LLMs can provide a lot of value here and reduce the friction but I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously because most people didn't have time to read code. It provides value even without developers reading code in the first place, and reading code was historically one of the essential parts of the work
Re: Devtools must be open source
#75> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version. This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor redoing the software every night, and every day there is a chance you wake up and find your workflow broken. And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is…
> This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor...
But, at least you know the cost up-front.
Oh, wait...
Re: Devtools must be open source
#76exe.dev is NOT open source. Funny
Re: Devtools must be open source
#77Everything is now open-source by default. All features are replicable. I don’t really care that much any more that tools need to be OSS because I can make my copies when I want. And I do when I so desire.
Your feature page is your source code.
Re: Devtools must be open source
#78This is one of the only fields where the customer (developers) almost never pays for their own tools and instead builds their own or even to compete against another developer. Then, they later realize why human developers in open source burnout so easily. Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees. "Open sour…
I earn income selling copies of free/libre/open source software. Other people could too, if they tried, but they don't.
Re: Devtools must be open source
#79> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version. This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor redoing the software every night, and every day there is a chance you wake up and find your workflow broken. And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is…
I don’t auto-rebase but I definitely vendor in and choose to update on my own cadence.
Re: Devtools must be open source
#80LLMs make things easier but can we not advocate for making them a dependency to configure our tools?
Even open weight models aren't fully open source. It's basically like having the back end binary but not the source code.
Use em to make your life easier but I'd rather not we normalize LLMs becoming the primary way we interact with open source software.