Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sorry everybody, I failed with you

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 357 posts

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#161

Post by mellavora »

jiofih wrote: post #102
glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

> there needs to be a way of getting paid You said you worked on the library at Intel . Doesn’t that qualify as getting paid for your work? That’s not the usual setup when developers talk about getting paid for their OSS contributions, usually off the clock, so its not clear what the lesson is here besides politics/resourcing at big co (which is a real but distinct problem). This situation was supposed to be where OS…

Need to justify the time spent on it to management.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#162

Post by jcadam »

glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

A lone developer can not maintain more than one or two open source projects at a time. I know for me, if I don't see any traction at all in the community once I get a project to some sort of MVP state, I will lose interest and move on. My github has many dead 1.0 projects :)

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#163

Post by bachmeier »

altf4 wrote: post #115
glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support. I think GitH…

> I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice

Why don't you? That's how you get people to step up.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#164

Post by umvi »

altf4 wrote: post #115
glangdale wrote: post #98

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hypersca…

I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support. I think GitH…

> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project.

Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referencing it.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#167

Post by gkilmain »

umvi wrote: post #164
altf4 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support. I think GitH…

> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referenci…

"stars", at least from my perspective, doesn't map to usage. I've stared plenty of projects I don't use. I like the latter two metrics - thank you for sharing!

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#168

Post by ianwalter »

ratww wrote: post #145
josephg wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For javascript packages, npm lists which other packages which depend on any given package, and how many times a package was downloaded in the last week. That gives you a rough sense of usage, but it can also be super mysterious. As an example, here's a package I wrote which I haven't touched in 3 years: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jumprope There are no projects on npm which depend on this, and yet it gets downloade…

You can possibly find some users in Github: https://github.com/search?q=jumprope+filename%3Apackage.json...

I really wish GitHub would invest more in the dependency graph, like allow you to sort by stars at least: https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#169

Post by josephg »

hnthrowaway2 wrote: post #148

Instead of expecting corporate users to pay (which can be difficult, corporate finance depts are good at spending large sums of money, but suck at small expenses), or acknowledge use (company policies might mean employees are not allowed to), perhaps the major hosting providers such as Github and Gitlab can directly remunerate open source repo maintainers depending on the popularity of the hosted repo? Surely they ma…

I like the idea, but I don't think it should be on github's shoulders to directly fund opensource. They do more than enough.

What I'd like to see is a fund which companies who use opensource are expected to contribute to. For every 100 employees at your company building on top of opensource software, I'd like to see at least 1 employee's salary funneled into the opensource ecosystem. That fund could have a default division based on community needs, or each company could specify how their donations are allocated. And if they donate by having their employees publish generally useful packages, thats fine too.

I don't think it should be compulsory, but I want this stuff to be very visible. If someone files an issue against one of my projects, I want to know if the organization they're part of contributes to the community, and how, and to what projects. If you want me to donate my time to fix an issue you're running into, but you don't contribute back in any way, I'd like to know that before I decide if I'm going to spend my weekend helping out.

Right now there's no incentive for companies to contribute to opensource because contributions are generally invisible. And bugs they run into usually get fixed anyway. If we tie a company's contributions to their reputation, and make reputation affect public standing, we might have a shot at changing social norms.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#170

Post by ianwalter »

josephg wrote: post #151
ratww wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can possibly find some users in Github: https://github.com/search?q=jumprope+filename%3Apackage.json...

Oh good idea! It looks like Github also tracks a project's dependancy tree explicitly, though those 3000 downloads per week remain a mystery: https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents

I've heard that the vast majority of those downloads are from CI systems. It would be cool if GitHub could draw anonymous metrics from GitHub Actions and help with this mystery.
Post reply on HN