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Sorry everybody, I failed with you

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Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've honestly never been at a job interview where people gave a crap about my open source contributions. They're typically much more interested in hearing war stories from the closed source projects I've worked on. The thing about open source projects is, they tend to be slightly generic things like "file format," "widget library," or "machine learning algorithm" that most companies see as the kind of thing they can…

> I've honestly never been at a job interview where people gave a crap about my open source contributions. They're typically much more interested in hearing war stories from the closed source projects I've worked on. Counterpoint - I have. Many times. I created some Perl libraries (most notable DateTime " rel="nofollow">https://metacpan.org/dist/DateTime">DateTime and Log-Dispatch " rel="nofollow">https://metacpan.or…

To be fair, that's like the guy that wrote moment-js or jQuery. I've worked at a number of Perl-based companies and every single one used DateTime (I'm a huge fan, btw). Something like that is going to be noticeable on a resume. Assuming they have some experience with Perl.

There was a company I know of that was advertising in their job postings that the guy that wrote Perl's DBI once worked for them or was their CTO or whatever. That was about 6 years ago, so not that far off.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#252

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 was recently shocked to discover that sindresorhus, one of the most prolific oss devs of all time (I think), only has around $14k/yr of app revenue. It sounded like he was saying that it was a majority of his income, so I pressed him how he could possibly live on it. He said he had GitHub sponsorships and open collective donations, and then mentioned he was living in a country with low expenses. I ended up feeling.…

It seems that he isn't really trying to make more money. Maybe I'm misinterpreting his words from his site:

https://blog.sindresorhus.com/answering-anything-678ce562379...

> How do you make a living if you don’t have a job and don’t take donations?

> I don’t make a living, currently. I have some money saved up. I don’t really care much about money or material things, don’t use much money, and don’t have a lot of monthly expenses.

> Do you enjoy being homeless?

> Definitely. It’s nice being free to travel anywhere at any time. I don’t really care much about material stuff either, so I have everything I need and care about in a small backpack.

> How to be rich?

> You don’t want to be rich — You want to be happy.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#253

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…

Maybe an easy solution is to do the thing everybody seems to discourage: add a clause to your preferred OSS license, stating that usage of the code is subject to sending a mandatory thank-you email.

That change alone might be enough to break the fragile conditions that allow the license to be considered Open Source... but who cares, the mental health and happiness of OSS devs affected by the difficulties mentioned in here is more important than the technicalities of what could happen by a small clause addition.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#254

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…

Feels like a great opportunity for Github or another website to have these sort of analytics. Seems like quite the complicated task tho. Start small?

Rather than centralizing on GitHub, this seems like something that could be well suited as a `.well-known` url websites/companies could use, then anyone/everyone could aggregate or just inspect what is being used.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#255
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…

There are a lot of facets to open source contributions. One big facet is the whole itch-scratching thing. If you know longer itch, stop scratching. That's ok. Maybe when you stop scratching, it will start to itch again for you or for someone else. If nobody steps up, it just means it doesn't itch enough. Abandonware is not such a bad thing. It served its purpose for a season, then the world moved on. Nobody's out the…

The hard part of OSS management is dealing with change requests. Something comes in and now it's on the maintainer to ensure that the new fix doesn't break anything existing, or the new feature doesn't collide with anything else that comes down the pipe later. It's not work that can be done by volunteers, it's something that can only be done by long-term maintainers.

When I worked on an OSS project I hated getting PRs. They usually wouldn't work for one reason or another and I would have to explain why they were problematic. It took a lot of time out of my day—I would rather people just submit bug reports and feature requests.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#256
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 projec…

A bit off topic, but instead of FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) I much more prefer the MAAAF or FAAAM acronym (Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft) because their monopolies basically make them a mafia family, and I don't really see Netflix belonging in the group.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#257
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that scenario, retreating corporate sponsor would probably not have retreated if only usage was more visible, that must have been very frustrating. Almost seems as if the odd occasional visibility boost from some heavy bug or exploit could have saved it. Were Oscar Wilde and PT Barnum secretly open source visionaries?

One thing I found immensely frustrating was that occasionally other projects at Intel (not mentioning names) would wind up completely fucking up by, say, building the wrong thing, then they would do some heroic 8-week "save" of the mess that they made, and wind up getting Major Corporate Recognitions. A bodgy, high-touch system that required endless customization and lots of meetings would become a high profile proje…

That has been my own experience too. The heroics to fix messes are given more recognition than a properly run projects. One company would actually give quarterly awards be those who did heroics.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#258

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'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…

pg has a good article on doing things that don't scale[0] and showed how the AirBnB guys went and setup the first listings manually, but it's actually far more general than just kicking off the network effect. Moats are things that don't scale. Open Source software scales perfectly. Billion dollar companies are billion dollar companies because they can use Open Source software wrapped around some Moat-able structure. The more Open Source Software that exists, the bigger the garden.

When Google spends a billion dollars sending cars all around the world taking pictures, they are doing so in a way that the Open Source world can't centrally compete against, as they don't have the billions to get that done. This means that all Open Source mapping software will be missing a crucial feature that users rely on, and will therefore go unused. But meanwhile the libraries that those Open Source Software use, Google can freely use within their walled garden. On the other hand, Microsoft paid a great deal of money to researchers with Encarta and had this same exact structure and Wikipedia came in and disrupted them. It takes more time for the decentralized approach to come online, but as long as it's possible and the data is kept high quality Google Maps will slowly lose market share to OSM.

So eventually decentralized open source software will catch up and these billion dollar companies will go to 0, but in the interim period, and as innovation never truly ends so there is always a new horizon, we should consider creating a better incentive structure.

The big problem with capitalism today is that we care very deeply about prices. Prices is where supply and demand match, but we no longer have any supplies. We have costs of 0 and values that can differ between people. Price is merely a negotiation between the two, with Open Source Software declaring 0% of the value, and Billion Dollar companies declaring 90% of the value. Price has become a flawed metric. What society truly cares about is the surplus. What we need is a way to do a sort of Incentive Compability system[1](i.e. a Vickrey Auction) so that these Open Source Software can show the value that they produce. If they can show that their development costs were offset by their users values, they should be funded for it. Linux would certainly have a much higher value than Microsoft in this view, and would therefore be able to fund their own data collection systems, and would likely leave those open to the world so that everyone could reuse the Linux Street Map data for themselves.

[0]:http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_compatibility

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#259

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'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 only sane, healthy, sustainable license is the "wacky" one you describe: individuals (and possibly even (very) small businesses) can use it for free. Everyone else needs to pony up. It's absurd that a ton of the software allowing giant corporations to run day-to-day is not only created but ACTIVELY MAINTAINED by an individual or groups of individuals for free, as if they were running a soup kitchen. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are not homeless. They can, and should, pay the people that make the software that keeps them going.

> "But if it's open source, couldn't they just fork it and keep using that for free?" Yes, but a. not legally, if the terms forbid it and b. They would now have to find a new group of people to maintain the code, after just creating a bunch of ill-will in everyone in that space. In the end nothing is absolute: you can always just pirate closed-source commercial software too. But doing so has serious negative consequences.

This is neither free nor open by either the OSI or the FSF's definitions.

The real problem is that there is a fundamental crisis at the intersection of capitalism and human freedom/autonomy that may be impossible to resolve.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#260
Commenting more on the general pattern than specific case here, but sounds like the only failure here could have been to either 1) ask for help or 2) effectively delegate

At some point a leader/entrepreneur has to get out of the way and open the path for others to do some/all of the lifting.

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