261–270 of 285 posts
I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.
I literally got bullied by people who called themselves "the community" because they weren't happy with my copyleft license and the fact that I wasn't implementing their feature requests for free.
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So don't do it when you don't want to.
I found some prs in one of my GitHub projects which were over 12 months old. I just hadn’t noticed.
(I still get bug tracker emails for the kernel from before 2010!)
I am building a startup and now thinking this way. Build cool useful stuff, give it for free. And then later see what can actually be done with this
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linux
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance Just because we’ve spent he last 30 years running Linux and not worrying about the nonsense in the wider computer world doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do the same for he next 30 years The era of the hacker, the ethos of free software, it’s mostly over. In the 80s and 90s people could get jobs and write software on the side, Just for fun. Today it’s all about side hustles.
Pong is a placeholder for all software, there.
Anything one person could do, has been done over and over. Except things that only Fabrice Bellard could do, progress now needs a team of people and a longer time horizon and a large budget. nobody is satisfied with Pong anymore and if they are they already have as much Pong as they need.
We’re already in Vernor Vinge’s age of programmer-archaeologists.
A lot of comments can't help but mention the constant looming threat of potentially permanent destitution that pervades our society. It's increasingly hard to understand the position of people who think that this is a feature, excepting of course those very few with the resources to use that pressure rather than be driven by it
I'm not sure what you mean by "permanent destitution" but certainly life is full of struggles. It's not just a feature of our society, but of the universe itself. Without struggle and pain there is no life. Fighting entropy is a constant battle. The good news is, life has been winning the battle for many millions of years.
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They'll find loopholes around that too, in time - they already found some, which led to the SSPL being created. What you actually want is some kind of noncommercial clause: you can use my free shit as part of your free shit. If you want to make money off my shit, the rules change to "fuck you, pay me" "But what if a company just wants to try it out?" well they can live within the already existing exception called "no…
This. It's that simple. Companies shouldn't get your labor for free. Especially the big ones. Trillion dollar companies don't deserve hand outs. We should have figured this out twenty years ago.
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I wasn't alive in the 90s, and barely was in the 00s. I look at others writings about those early days, and compare it to today, then get a weird feeling of wanting to experience the "good ol' days" before python scripts made in 10 minutes by an AI and sold to investors as "vendor lock-in" was the thing to strive for.
I was there. It's mostly rose tinted glasses. There were some amazing feats. But it was slow and frustrating. Like you wouldn't believe how long things took. In the 90s most technical documentation was in actual physical books. If you wanted to learn something you had to order and buy the book (and Amazon wasn't a thing everywhere!), and it would take weeks or months to arrive. Or you did inter-library loans (which w…
No, we really did lose something along the way.