Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
dont-ship.it
Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#2Would it fix the problem to develop with a more restrictive license, and only license the releases with a more permissive license?
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#3Funny how I was instantly triggered as a SaaS maker by the title, ready to unroll in the comments and then quickly realized upon reading that I am not the audience here and the title does make a lot of sense for the intended audience :)
Unexpected self-calibration completed. Nice.
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#4For some additional context: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659
> Supporting Manjaro has historically done very little to facilitate the development of the software stack which is necessary for these devices [Pinephone/Pinephone Pro] to work. In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken versions of software and pointing to the developers for support. Which is why https://dont-ship.it/ was started.
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#5Would it fix the problem to develop with a more restrictive license, and only license the releases with a more permissive license?
Interesting thought :D
But it would probably create even more legal issues and also risks. A lot of people don’t use software, that has a non-standard way of licensing (like MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL). Just because there is a risk that you step into a legal trap.
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#6For some additional context: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659 > Supporting Manjaro has historically done very little to facilitate the development of the software stack which is necessary for these devices [Pinephone/Pinephone Pro] to work. In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken v…
So distros like Manjaro should stop calling themselves "rolling release" distros and start calling themselves "nightly" distros, so everyone is aware of the potential instability?
Is there any rolling release distro that already follows the suggestion of only distributing tagged releases?
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#7For some additional context: https://blog.brixit.nl/why-i-left-pine64/ Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659 > Supporting Manjaro has historically done very little to facilitate the development of the software stack which is necessary for these devices [Pinephone/Pinephone Pro] to work. In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken v…
So distros like Manjaro should stop calling themselves "rolling release" distros and start calling themselves "nightly" distros, so everyone is aware of the potential instability? Is there any rolling release distro that already follows the suggestion of only distributing tagged releases?
Distributions like Manjaro should change their behavior and quit shipping unfinished patches.
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#8That should be common sense. Shrug.
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#9Would it fix the problem to develop with a more restrictive license, and only license the releases with a more permissive license?
Interesting thought :D But it would probably create even more legal issues and also risks. A lot of people don’t use software, that has a non-standard way of licensing (like MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL). Just because there is a risk that you step into a legal trap.
If only the WIP commits were non-Free then relicensed to Free for each release, then the legal uncertainty would probably have the desired effect - no packager / distro worth their salt would touch any non-release with a barge pole. Such an unorthodox approach would risk scaring them off completely though.
In a roundabout way it's pretty much trying to re-invent the trademark system (ie. "don't distribute this code and call it MyProject without it being an authorised release"). Quite frankly far easier to just get a trademark if that's the desired effect.
Re: Do not ship work in progress: An open letter
#10Would it fix the problem to develop with a more restrictive license, and only license the releases with a more permissive license?
Preventing distros from patching software at all would be a non-starter; there are lots of legitimate reasons to want/need to patch things.
Indeed, most patches I see in off-beat systems like nixpkgs, homebrew, etc, are not plucked from preexisting pull requests, but rather are fixes developed by the person who did the packaging and submitted upstream, then included as a patch until the first tagged release that has them merged.