[deleted]
Sorry everybody, I failed with you
241–250 of 357 posts
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've long believed "open source" is for suckers for exactly this reason. Literally being open source, having the code open for review, isn't a problem. But usually "Open Source" also ends up meaning free as in beer, for EVERYONE, whether you're some college student or a billion dollar company. The only sane, healthy, sustainable license is the "wacky" one you describe: individuals (and possibly even (very) small busi…
I've never liked that approach, it's leading with the stick and not the carrot and IMO it defeats the purpose of open source. It cuts away one of the main benefits of open source -- that companies can use it and start contributing back to it right away with no friction. AFAIK Microsoft, Amazon and Google actually DO hire a lot of open source maintainers at this time, for exactly this reason.
Companies rarely contribute back except for very few projects like gcc and LLVM.
FAANG does hire OSS devs, but a lot of them don't really do that much apart from being excellent politicians. To be fair, they don't get any time for OSS development in the first place.
However, they do have time for politics and often ruin the projects. People play along because they want to get hired at GNAAF.
As a result, these projects combine the worst of corporate and OSS development (horrible atmosphere and yet no money for development).
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allowing people to help also takes time...there's a non-trivial management effort involved...one that's too frequently forgotten about in these discussions.
This is very true. Even when collaborating with very skilled engineers, it takes a lot of time and energy to respond to ideas, questions, and review PRs. It’s like a regular programming job to a certain degree, but you’re typically not paid for doing it.
Software can be shitty garbage in many ways. It can be shitty garbage by having lots of bugs, and it can be shitty garbage by having a maintainer which cares more about bottlenecking all changes than about the future of a project.
But everyone is free to make shitty software, so have at it.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#244Seeing 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've long believed "open source" is for suckers for exactly this reason. Literally being open source, having the code open for review, isn't a problem. But usually "Open Source" also ends up meaning free as in beer, for EVERYONE, whether you're some college student or a billion dollar company. The only sane, healthy, sustainable license is the "wacky" one you describe: individuals (and possibly even (very) small busi…
The problem isn't the software but the discussion around it. With discussions, issues, feature requests etc you can be a contributor or you can be a user (beneficiary). There should be a possibility to distinguish between both and require compensation from beneficiaries.
We already do this to an extent but the mechanisms are not strict enough. The stake on the ground needs to be put much earlier on, for much less demand than it typically is.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#245Seeing 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've long believed "open source" is for suckers for exactly this reason. Literally being open source, having the code open for review, isn't a problem. But usually "Open Source" also ends up meaning free as in beer, for EVERYONE, whether you're some college student or a billion dollar company. The only sane, healthy, sustainable license is the "wacky" one you describe: individuals (and possibly even (very) small busi…
Not everyone needs more money.
I've been struggling with the question, how do I want to spend all this money?
I decided to diversify, but one of those places is a true to heart non profit charity that doesn't make a profit. I spend time on a business that if it becomes profitable, it's due to physical book sales while the same digital books are free.
And I have for profit projects and investments.
Each is different in my goals.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be nice to have a similar system to the language metric at the bottom of a repo, have something like a library metric that list what external libraries a project uses and feed those metrics back to the maintainers.
GitHub does show a dependency list in the sidebar for some projects.
Unfortunately, they don't have dependency plugins for a bunch of popular languages. Even languages with well-structured dependency tracking like Rust.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#247Dude, you spent your own free time which you barely had making software for others. You could've done anything else with that time and you spent it helping others.
And now you have to take care of your mental health, because when you're burnt out or miserable you psychologically can't help others. You take time off for yourself now or eventually you'll physically and mentally break down and be forced to take time off. So even now your decision to care for yourself is actually for the benefit of others.
You have nothing to be sorry for. Thank you for giving docz to the world, and I hope you feel better soon :)
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#248Seeing 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'd really like GitHub to have the option of open sourcing your work but both being able to turn off pull request and be able to limit PRs and issues to trusted contributors. Open source / closed contribution on an individual level.
I like the project I'm working on now, but if I release it publicly I don't want to deal with 98% of the possible users. I'm mostly worried about the idea that the itch I want to scratch will turn out to be popular, because open source is mostly horrible.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#249Seeing 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'm curious. Is there a reason to not build in some sort of ping for the software being used? Essentially doing analytics for open source usage so you can monitor how many people use it?
Obviously there are some potential privacy issues here, but adding it to the README and doing a single ping on use seems like not too bad a compromise to keeping open source projects alive.
It won't be 100% accurate due to offline use or available to many open source software projects due to their use case, but most applications would probably connect.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#250At my last gig I got budget to bring in the maintainer of an open-source testing library we using for some really important stuff. We paid him $1500 for a couple of days consulting. He showed us how to fix a couple of tricky bugs and gave a talk to the eng team. At this point we've more than recouped the investment. He was psyched to see his tool being used and I feel the visit contributed to him continuing to mainta…
About a decade ago, Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo fame set up fosstithe.org, which was about encouraging companies to set aside some percentage of your profit to donate to FOSS projects. Alas, the website no longer seems to exist. I still think it's a great idea, and every year I donate 5% of my profits to FOSS projects I like.
Convincing corporates to do the same is a little trickier. They want things like invoices, which can be hard for many smaller FOSS projects. Not every FOSS developer has a consulting gig. Not sure how to help out those developers, except by using their software and being appreciative, I guess.