21–30 of 195 posts
I'm sure it made impact but at most it saved I'd compare this phenomenon as if drug companies spend millions of dollars to cure an obscure disease a handful of rich people have.
We have a long way to go before the code and the data is truly free.
> Sometimes I wonder whether it'd be possible to earn a living off mammoth. Although there's an option to donate - I currently get a grand total of £1.15 a week from regular donations - it's not something I push very hard. There's no shame in making the source available but using a license that requires payment for commercial use, like the Prosperity [1] license. [1]: https://prosperitylicense.com/
Also nearly impossible to enforce. This approach just adds a layer of guilt/paranoia in the implied legal consequences.
Every boilerplate due diligence process when trying to sell your company includes looking at what open source work you’re using to see if there’s any legal issues.
You’d be stupid to risk scaring off a multi-million dollar pay day over something so trivial.
Isn't the statement a bit obvious? Most of the tech companies out there were not born to make an impact on society, they were born to make money (which is totally fine). Only a handful of companies can be proud of making money while actually having an impact (good or bad) on society (e.g., Apple). Most of us (us != HN crowd) work for companies in the first group. On the other hand, the vast majority of side projects…
> Isn't the statement a bit obvious? No, it isn't obvious, just like the Earth is not obviously round. Even 40 years ago, the statement wasn't obvious to many public intellectuals in the West, when they were in favor of neoliberal economic policies, under the broad assumption that free markets will automatically bring meritocracy (whatever it is). I think this example is one of many that show that meritocracy doesn't…
I'm a CS associate professor. I teach a course which consists in contributing to a free software, in third year at my uni. A few years ago a couple of students decided to make a contribution to GNU ls. The change was to have the output color independent of capitalisation (it is based on filename extension). Their code was accepted. It was a tiny tiny contribution, but it's probable that these few lines of code are an…
> Sometimes I wonder whether it'd be possible to earn a living off mammoth. Although there's an option to donate - I currently get a grand total of £1.15 a week from regular donations - it's not something I push very hard. There's no shame in making the source available but using a license that requires payment for commercial use, like the Prosperity [1] license. [1]: https://prosperitylicense.com/
Also nearly impossible to enforce. This approach just adds a layer of guilt/paranoia in the implied legal consequences.
Quite a few years ago as a (very) junior FE dev I used mammoth.js to automate the generation of a biennial report. Three months had been earmarked for the task as this is what it had taken in previous years (due to bad tools and lack of expertise). I had it done in less than a week by using mammoth. Mike was also very accommodating with questions I'm pleased I cant remember as I'm sure they were embarrassingly simple…
Your story and mammoth's origin story really highlight how the Sisyphean corporate world is seemingly at odds -- or at least tangential -- to progress.
Similarly, I've been writing respectable software for decades but I'm fairly certain that my most widely used piece of software, by a wide margin, is a mildly pornographic app ( http://driftwheeler.com ) This app, published in 2017, has a continuously growing population of users from all over the world. I get email every day asking whether soft1 is the only server, thanking me, suggesting improvements, etc. It's iron…
One is "the day job", used to pay bills.
The other is "what I feel good about as a human being". It's great when both align, but that's not the standard thing that seems to happen.
Take it as a useful data point, not something to get bent out of shape over. :)