Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they are not working for free, they're doing this work during work hours. Individual volunteer maintainers this article is about are a minority. The majority of contributions to the open source projects that "the internet runs on" are from businesses that use the software and maintain or improve it. I'm not talking about your small hobby project with a few dozen users - as good as it may be, the internet doesn't…
And openssl?
The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
181–190 of 375 posts
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#182The advancement of automation should lead to a post-historical quasi-utopia, and our biggest problem will be sorting out our personal baggage. (Like Star Trek but without FTL and teleporters.)
From my POV, charging money for copies of software is regressive and foolish.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
High for salary, yes. High for buying enterprise support on mission-critical software? Perhaps the value might be different.
Enterprise support and "no badgering on ETAs" don't quite go together. I want to live in the fantasy world some of you live in where you expect corporations to cut you a $100k check, no strings attached.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
So since a corporation might get value from your work then nobody should get value from your work?
That's not a super charitable interpretation of what I said. I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations, so we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're doing god's work here, and my second point is that people probably overestimate the personal reputational/career gains to themselves from contributing to open source. So, a large portion of open source c…
What open source projects specifically?
> So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's.
In my opinion, any open source development is valued WAY MORE than closed source development, as it can be shared and verified by others. If you have a project that's benefiting multi billion dollar companies, then you've created something useful that can be shared with small companies and individuals too.
Also at the end of the day it's the developers choice, they can stop maintaining it, but the point is; sharing code is better for everybody
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#185Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…
all good points. i also think what really pushes a lot of developers to do open source, and bear with me for the unpopular opinion--is ego. they love having followers, and a voice on twitter with some open source badge on their profile page. it's in a way a status symbol of "i did this important thing that a lot of people rely on, im pretty important." i highly doubt that even 5% of contributors are doing it out of t…
Once you see something that you have built, running at thousands of operations a second for years, once it’s running smoothly and all the bugs and edge cases have been smoothed out. Watching the machine dance, visualising the data structures in your mind - and algorithms running on them. Thinking about state changes, loops and execution, and watching it all running in a beautiful symphony of logic : there’s really no other feeling of joy and appreciation of beauty. I love being a programmer, and I suspect the majority of open source contributors are like this.
The snide comments and unhelpful github messages are the minority in my experience, especially with more mature products (kernel development, sys ops tools etc)
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#186Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…
What about science? If you ever benefitted from a genetic screening for any disease, your doctor made anywhere between $100 and $400 an hour, and the graduate student who discovered the function of that gene $10 an hour if you're accounting for his tuition credit. Who tells these students to stop spending 60 hours a week at the lab and start using their skills doing something people will pay for, like develop a no-palm-oil no-aspartame but-still-addictive Mars bar for 25c unit cost?
People will accept less money in exchange for doing something meaningful, like sitting in their basement painting stuff rich people will speculate on for millions of dollars after their death, or campaigning for a rich lawyer who already makes 200k and will get a good bonus post-election because he has the right party colors.
If you could literally sell meaning to people for less friction than those alternatives they'd eat it up. And they'd spend their time making money to spend it on your meaning-making money-sucking machine.
Because that's all money is for: be exchanged for things that make your life not suck. And this exchange tends to bear transaction costs.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#187Some other commenters in this thread have pointed out that nobody is forcing open source developers to work on the contributions that they make, and that is strictly speaking true. But in the culture of software development, there does seem to be an ambient message often repeated or hinted at, that it is good to "give back" to open source by contributing and that it is virtuous to do so. I now am starting to rethink…
all good points. i also think what really pushes a lot of developers to do open source, and bear with me for the unpopular opinion--is ego. they love having followers, and a voice on twitter with some open source badge on their profile page. it's in a way a status symbol of "i did this important thing that a lot of people rely on, im pretty important." i highly doubt that even 5% of contributors are doing it out of t…
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a super charitable interpretation of what I said. I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations, so we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're doing god's work here, and my second point is that people probably overestimate the personal reputational/career gains to themselves from contributing to open source. So, a large portion of open source c…
> I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations What open source projects specifically? > So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's. In my opinion, any open source development is valued WAY MORE than closed source development, as it can be shared and verified…
I have not contributed to any of these projects but for instance: Spark, Flink, Druid, Akka, Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Java Spring, Hibernate, etc etc.
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I like HN's approach to moderation. You don't ban the person unless they are really unreasonable. You flag the comment, disappear it from the thread and tell them to behave. That does happen, but HN also silently rate-limits and downrates comments for people that have been flagged as troublemakers by the mods. I'm currently rate-limited on HN to no more than five comments in a period of, I think, several hours. Try…
I am, I have come to believe, in the exact same situation as you, except that I have never contacted the moderators. My account is even almost exactly the same age as your account. It’s very disheartening to hear that contacting the moderators, which I have considered doing, will apparently accomplish nothing.
(The error I get is "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.", if that sounds familiar.)
Re: The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
High for salary, yes. High for buying enterprise support on mission-critical software? Perhaps the value might be different.
Enterprise support and "no badgering on ETAs" don't quite go together. I want to live in the fantasy world some of you live in where you expect corporations to cut you a $100k check, no strings attached.
Also, I've seen companies cut larger checks for sillier things with minimal conditions, so...