331–340 of 357 posts
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You could almost say it was a Cambrian explosion of sorts? It’s 2012 all over again: “churn makes things better! BTW, what should we be using this week?”
I’d say it’s forever 1997. Netscape had a server side JavaScript platform in 1997. People still build 3 tier apps, and web farms. It’s eternal 1997.
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I think getting your name and work out in the world with open source work is a career _advancing_ move.
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…
It's not valuable in terms of potential to market/usefulness/popularity, rather, because I can see very clearly how a person designs/writes code, and how they solve problems, when they have plenty of time; I can also see other non-technical aspects, like how they structure their git history (which, to me, has lot of signals).
People (rightfully) dislikes to show their capacity under pressure; open source is the way to show it without pressure :)
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…
I remember using one, but I not exactly which one; it's not in the Wikipedia list.
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that's why telemetry is imporant If I were doing serious OSS I'd really hard consider adding just something like a once-a-week ping just to be aware of users count ofc with an ability to disable it
SaaS or something explicitly that people know will 'phone home' is one thing, but putting unexpected telemetry into a library would be staggeringly unprofessional.
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Unwilligness to pay for developer tools or desktop software is what made me gave up and just focus on Apple, Google, and Microsoft platforms. I rather work for ecosystems where customers see a value that developers keep their job.
Andy Gocke put it best, on Twitter: "Developer tools seemed like a good industry to be in, "sell shovels in the gold rush" and all, but it turns out developers prefer to dig for gold with their teeth."
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Just like a couple of street musicians happen to hit gold, the large majority doesn't.
The implication is that the OSS contributor has to be good. The same with street musicians. I once had the pleasure of encountering some street musicians that were very, very good. I bought their CD out of their suitcase. It remains one my favorite CDs. Pludo's "The Only Thing Certain Is The Future". Sadly, they never made it. The large majority of street musicians are worthy of a tip, but I'll pass on their CD. P.S.…
In many of such places you will probably live better from tourist tips than trying to make it as programmer.
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You don't own the open source software you write, so you don't have the right to make demands of its users beyond what the license stipulates. That companies can make billions with your software and not owe you so much as a cup of coffee is not the dark side of open source, it's an expression of the same freedom that allows you to fork and reuse any FOSS software under the same terms. If you want to require payment f…
Please stop the misinformation: Open source authors do own their IP, but are altruistic enough to license it to others. In the long term, altruism only works if there aren't too many leeches. Up to 2010, OSS authors at least got recognition, could stay aloof and in general weren't little corporate bitches. Now, this has changed, so there is no longer any point of writing OSS for free. The corporations have won their…
And when they do, they give up many of those rights in the process. At the very least they give up any right to tell anyone else what they can or can't do with "their" code. The entire premise of FOSS is that software belongs to the community, not to authors. It is fundamentally collectivist, anti-ownership and anti-capitalist at its core, and only recognizes concepts like IP and copyright out of legal necessity.
>Now, this has changed, so there is no longer any point of writing OSS for free.
The only thing that's changed is that a new generation of open source developers have lost the plot now that software has become a billion dollar business and suddenly they want to get paid for work they voluntarily gave away for free. The point has never been compensation.
Again, if programmers want to get paid, they can use a proprietary license, or write code for a corporation and get a paycheck. Or get a second job. Otherwise the complaints from people who likely have never contributed so much as a dime or a single PR for any of the FOSS code they use, and who chose the FOSS path out of a belief in its moral superiority to the capitalist incentives of proprietary software, are starting to get tedious.
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You didn't have any way of knowing who was using your library? Any way of communicating with them? A survey even? Download numbers?
Once it's up on Github and out there, you don't really have any control. It's not like we were keen to put big barriers on the 'try it out' side. I didn't have some mad keen quest to be able to communicate to management "hey, someone from A----- or H----- downloaded our library". That's not that interesting. A lot of people kick the tires. What I did kinda want to know is if a major Intel customer put our library int…
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…
Thanks for your work on hyperscan! I think I'll identify a few other libraries that we use and reach out to their developers - it's a good reminder to not take everything for granted.
https://geekmonkey.org/regular-expression-matching-at-scale-...
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This is a serious shortcoming in github's current UI. There's no easy discovery for which forks are active. It would be useful if there was a checkbox "Actively Publicly Maintained" in forked repos that defaults to Off. That way, on the forks page of a repo, if someone is offering an alternative, an "actively maintained" check mark (and perhaps a date) can be shown and it can bubble to the top of the "forks" list.
There is a graph showing the fork activity. Also, the setting you are thinking if is probably “archive”.
Many of forks are made for personal purposes, experiments, one offs to patch bugs, to keep an eye on a project, or other reasons.
I'm thinking of the opposite of "archive" -- a setting that means "I nominate myself to become the lead repo for the community to rally around should the community be interested.
On this repo, can you tell me which fork the community moved to for this dead project?
https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy/network/member...