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Why do people bother with open source?

bunkum.us

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Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#11

Post by reactordev »

“People want to create [sic] things that are useful to other people.”

For me, it’s this. So many useful tools and projects helped me when I was getting started that I feel obliged to give back for life. If my abilities came from reading tutorials, books, open source code, etc then shouldn’t I give back? Must everything be for profits? My employer owns me from 9-5 but not my side projects. I can explore other areas of computing with those and share my findings with others. Whether or not you find it useful. I think the idea that if you create a successful open source project, you’re more employable is a farce. You’ll just be more busy. But it depends on the gravity of the project I guess.

From the other side, I look for open source projects from candidates to see if they know how to code. I look at the history and logs, the diffs, and changes. If they don’t have any code out there, I force them into a coding challenge. If you do have code out there, you don’t have to take the challenge. (Fair hiring practice I say)

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#13

Post by sroussey »

Lately, I’ve written several PRs to an otherwise one man show.

https://github.com/clarkmcc/ngraph

I added prebuilt binaries as part of the CI process for others like simdsim

Made a fork of transformers.js to make it work with bun (also some fixes for bun, and another on the way).

These things add up.

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#14

Post by CuriousCosmic »

> The types of desires that motivate open-source developers are the same as those of creative people in other fields, including fields where the norms are to charge for your work and to not license it permissively. If programmers could somehow satisfy these desires without giving away their work for free, I believe most of the open-source developers would not be open-source developers. It is a means to an end.

This seems to miss that those same creative people in other fields very commonly give away their work for free. It's basically one of the staple means to actually surviving as an artist.

Digital artists and illustrators distribute their work for free and commonly allow it to be used free of charge for non commercial purposes. The same goes for musicians.

Freely distributing your work is basically how you survive as an artist. It builds you a brand (a "style") and a community of fans who end up networking your works for you. That's the underlying strategy for getting commissions as a digital artist nowadays.

The difference with open source software is that software developers tend to use formal licenses rather than informal "ask me first but I'll probably say okay" licenses. And of the licenses that open source devs tend to use, plenty of them use copyleft licenses that fill essentially the same "okay for non commercial" condition (but instead of com vs non-com it's closed vs open source).

So I think the bigger question should be "Why don't more open source developers use copyleft licenses when possible?". That question probably highlights the bigger difference between software developers and other creatives.

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#15

Post by vemv »

> The idea that prospective employers will look at open source contributions to evaluate job applicants is now, thankfully, understood as pernicious.

Says who?

This is very much an unsubstantiated claim - no reasoning behind it and the naive assumption that everyone agrees with him.

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#16

Post by TulliusCicero »

andybak wrote: post #6
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't necessarily say that it isn't anti-capitalist. Free software is perfectly compatible with a free market but the ethos of free software is pretty anti capitalist.

Tangent time. I genuinely don't understand what people generally mean when they use the phrase "anti-capitalist". I doubt most are Tankies or full-on Utopian Anarchists. I suspect a fair few mean "I want a mixed economy that's (a lot) fairer than the one we've got now" (which is probably my position). But outside of these three positions - what do people mean?

They're opposed to capitalism on some level. Though it's probably true that some are just social democrats that want heavy regulation of capitalism.

Another possible alternative is being a market socialist (wanting an economy that's basically all worker owned co-ops).

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#17

Post by wyldfire »

I think this is written by someone who clearly does not participate in any Open Source software development communities.

There are many of us who feel strongly about preserving the principles of free-as-in-freedom software and the principles of Open Source software. We hold one another's feet to the fire despite some commercial preferences.

The quality level of the work is top notch. I consider myself very fortunate that I get to work with some of the best software developers in the world.

> The idea that prospective employers will look at open source contributions to evaluate job applicants is now, thankfully, understood as pernicious.

Ad populum - please back up this claim.

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#18

Post by prussia »

graemep wrote: post #4

Majority of projects, does not mean majority of code. Big projects have large numbers of contributors and far more code. The linux kernel is one project, a few lines of code might be one project too. The anti-capitalist bit is not true. All the major open source licenses allow commercial use. Open source (especially copyleft) is encourages free markets because it makes it harder to erect barrier to entry or lock cust…

I thought all open source licenses allow commercial use, not just the major ones.

My understanding was that is the definition, at least according to OSI [0]:

> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#19

Post by bdw5204 »

graemep wrote: post #4

Majority of projects, does not mean majority of code. Big projects have large numbers of contributors and far more code. The linux kernel is one project, a few lines of code might be one project too. The anti-capitalist bit is not true. All the major open source licenses allow commercial use. Open source (especially copyleft) is encourages free markets because it makes it harder to erect barrier to entry or lock cust…

One reason why employers looking at open source contributions would be pernicious is that it biases them towards hiring people who have no life outside of writing code. That perpetuates a prevalent culture in the industry where people can't just write code for a living and do something else with the rest of their time.

People should be able to have other interests besides code and still have a livelihood.

Re: Why do people bother with open source?

#20

Post by ekidd »

I bother with open source for a number of reasons:

1. I want to write a cool program, but I am painfully aware that it would make a lousy business. Why not toss it up on GitHub?

2. My employer wants to write a useful program that we need, but is too low-level to fit into our commercial offerings. And by itself, the program wouldn't help anyone compete with us. So rather than splitting our sales team's focus with a product that doesn't fit into our strategy, we publish it on GitHub with a short manual.

I've absolutely gotten jobs and consulting gigs from people interested in my projects. They function as a portfolio.

And it's not like releasing projects as open source imposes any particular burden on me. I am absolutely willing to close a feature request with a note that says, "This is an excellent idea! But realistically, I will not get the time to implement in the next 5 years." And then I can finish with either "I would review a clean PR with tests," or "Even if someone sent me a PR, I would be unlikely to merge it, because it would add maintenance overhead." Once you learn to say no, it gets easier. Or if the requestor is obviously making a lot of money using my software, I could offer consulting services.

(Also, for many types of open source programs, it helps not to ship Windows binaries. This reduces support costs.)

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