121–130 of 284 posts
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Except people working on math actually get paid and don't feel entitled to get work of others for free.
They are not always paid for developing math. Sometimes they are paid for teaching math, sometimes for applying math. And they are developing it on the side.
Also they tend to buy their tools.
- it's fun for you
- if you use it personally
Don't work on it if:
- it's just for CV purposes
- you have this idea that you should be working on FOSS because FOSS is great and you should somehow contribute
- you want to create FOSS for the sake of creating FOSS. The world doesn't need more code, it needs less. There's plenty of garbage code floating around
Regarding OP's comments on GitHub Copilot - I agree with the sentiment but I wouldn't worry too much. If the "stolen" code snippet is easy to write then it's really no big deal it it gets copied. If it was difficult to write then the person "stealing" it probably won't be able to understand it, which will lead to trouble down the line. It's not (yet) the same as ignoring the license of an entire repository.
Funny trivia. I spent considerable time working on corporate SW that acted as a gatekeeper for GPL-like licenses. It seems that one of the worst things a corporation can do to itself is use free SW with such a license. Nope. And why should they? There are so many options with so-called "friendly" licenses. Friendly to the corporation that is.
I see it as another aspect of huge corps evading any kind of taxes and IT-crowd actually being OK with it. I mean an unknown dev would be more than proud to do free work for K8S (and many do) just for the sake of putting it in her CV and _maybe_ cash out on it with a better paying role later on. But the fact remains. She, essentially, worked for free for Google, Amazon, Red Hat, etc. All the same as she is OK(ish) with them tax evading because if you get to work for them you'll be extra rewarded (unless you disagree that much of the huge salaries in IT are down to tax evasion).
In any case if you approach FOSS romantically I think you're in for a big let down. It's some form of business transaction. Nebulous and tricky but business nontheless.
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I find thins point of view equally absurd as all the abuse on maintenners of Foss. It is standard for production code to rely on third party libraries. Not just standard, but the opposite is considered bad thing - you are not supposed to implement everything from scratch. If you do, you will end up with more bugs and issues. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in development last 30 years that would say "it is bad t…
Yep. Log4Shell and Heartbleed were nasty security bugs, but imagine living in a world where every single software shop wrote their own logging libraries or SSL libraries. 99% of them would have far worse vulnerabilities. It would be like '90s php cowboy coding.
Only certain FOSS is worth working on for me. Here's my heuristic as of today. * Don't work on FOSS that supports a SaaS or proprietary product. You're enriching someone else's ecosystem for no money. You take on the communication bandwidth and issue load of dealing with not only your issues but their issues too. Your software is useless if theirs fails. It's thankless. * Don't work on FOSS you aren't using yourself…
The “calm and respectful” part is important. I can be right ornery, and learned, the hard way, that OS projects are more fragile than commercial ones, so enemies can do a lot of damage.
I have written software for a fairly … pithy … demographic, and have dealt with feedback that would make many FOSS authors hide under their standing desks, whimpering.
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> The FOSS that was imagined by Stallman, where end-users could actually use FOSS products in their everyday lives, is not possible under capitalism I have to disagree. Use a Linux based operating system, self-host your internet services at home, use google free android, or do a subset of that. Its all open source and works locally.
end-user != IT professionals For average end-users, “use a linux based operating system” alone comprises a mountain of barriers, but most are rarely even approached because they’re preempted by lack of reliable hardware support and lack of support for staple applications like Word, Excel, and Photoshop.
Only certain FOSS is worth working on for me. Here's my heuristic as of today. * Don't work on FOSS that supports a SaaS or proprietary product. You're enriching someone else's ecosystem for no money. You take on the communication bandwidth and issue load of dealing with not only your issues but their issues too. Your software is useless if theirs fails. It's thankless. * Don't work on FOSS you aren't using yourself…
I agree with your second point though. The main reason I see for contributing to FOSS is to fix issues that affect me or creating issues that may lead to the maintainers improving the software in a way that would benefit me.
I think it makes sense for companies to open source tools they depend on. They help others by providing the free software and in return they get help identifying and fixing bugs.
The FOSS that was imagined by Stallman, where end-users could actually use FOSS products in their everyday lives, is not possible under capitalism. So what you have instead is effectively a network of semi-public property primarily for industry use. But, just as anything else that industry cannot turn for a profit, FOSS is and will always be in the lowest of priorities, if a priority at all. Cheers to Stallman, but a…
I know many people, including myself, who do a lot of volunteer work without being Marxists. The motivation is not money, but to provide a benefit to society or to the people in the immediate vicinity, i.e. to be helpful and to be appreciated.
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They are not always paid for developing math. Sometimes they are paid for teaching math, sometimes for applying math. And they are developing it on the side.
Teachers are always developing their stuff on the side, it is part of the job, and either teaching or applying is paid. Also they tend to buy their tools.
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You don't need to maintain anything, you can just drop it and go do something else if you prefer. Maybe someone will pick it up. Maybe noone. If you maintain something you chose to maintain it. You have no obligation to continue maintaining it.
Most of the value is in the maintenance. In responsiveness to changing demand. I bet all the valuable FOSS software you can think of today is maintained.