Live data from Hacker News

We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

akrites.org

41–50 of 257 posts

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#41
post #19

Unforteuately I think it's moot to post this on hacker news. The majority of people here drink deep from the AI pool and just don't care. Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source

All voices have a place.

Some should be at the bottom of a well.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#42
post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

Commercial entities are 95% of useful open-source (Linux, Postgres and similar — excluding leftstr-type of utilities).

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#43
All those open statements are just business wank.

> Amazon Web Services

We really don't give a shit, We will continue to not give a shit. We might give you a credit if threatened by the EU but really? We don't give a shit. Keep sending us that sweet dosh for AWS.

> Anthropic

We underpin the front page of the internet with Ai and in so we allow it to train upon the collective with no recognition. It's great to take and not give back. By the way your vibe coded app is looking ownage.

> Cisco

We are Cisco and we'll license you if we could. We invented the subscription model to charge you per Ethernet port on your router. Opensource is great, we don't even have to contribute upstream. We did once upon a time, isn't that enough?

> Citi

In partnership with Linux Foundation, we will do nothing and keep doing nothing. Linus enjoys his dosh and handjob now and then.

> CNCF

Working on the right fixes before the window closes, we prefer that to be left to the developers and we are very proud to support that effort. Unfortunately, no treats for the developers is written in to our company policy. How does pizza sound?

> RedHat

Open source is the foundation of modern software innovation so we hide answers behind a paywall. We sold ourselves to IBM so we could keep lubing that stripper pole to fill our filthy pockets. Larry Ellison will be here soon for his next lap-dance.

> Microsoft & GitHub

We decided to throw legal action at a security analyst for finding exploits in our OS for laughs. Open source all the way, we don't even allow you to search on GitHub without a rate limit; it's healthy to laugh. How's your mother doing? She seems a keen user of Windows 11 and as she is very important to us, we've removed that feature she uses most.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#44
post #16

Anything they "maintainer of last resort" would actually be forks, or collectively a distribution. We already have hundreds of distributions acting as maintainer of last resort many times over, only with actual developers and not presuming to make themselves the new upstream for anyone else.

Microsoft controls NPM and GitHub. I would not put it past them to truly take over a project if they gauged it in their best interest (though it would be a massive violation of trust, so I'd imagine they'd tread carefully before going there). If it's sent to Akrites, they can even pretend it's done responsibly – even though only megacorps get a seat around that table.

We already saw Automattic (the owners of wordpress) do exactly that in their plugin repository for purely commercial reasons.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#46
The most important information is this:

> participants will contribute engineering resources

If it works out as planned, we will see. Apart from this, I am not overwhelmed by the claim of this project. It favors centralization and corporate circles, exactly the opposite of what the hacker ethics promotes for good reasons.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#47
So this corporate project wants to spam down more repositores via AI slop. No, I don't like it. And no, I am not feeling encouraged to "defend it together" at the slightest, even more so as many of these companies don't really contribute anything at all back.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#48
post #19

Unforteuately I think it's moot to post this on hacker news. The majority of people here drink deep from the AI pool and just don't care. Besides many of the companies on the list are suspext numero uno for the state of open source

All voices have a place.

Ok, and? Where did I say otherwise?

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#49

The most important information is this: > participants will contribute engineering resources If it works out as planned, we will see. Apart from this, I am not overwhelmed by the claim of this project. It favors centralization and corporate circles, exactly the opposite of what the hacker ethics promotes for good reasons.

You can even shorten that. This is some corporate hollo-bollers takes-your-time-and-gives-nothing-in-return fakery-roo.

> exactly the opposite of what the hacker ethics promotes for good reasons.

Yup. Seems kind of like those zombie plants in the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (the first remake; though the original is also great, but it was more about communism as threat, whereas the first remake added a bit of alien horror motifes).

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#50
post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

Commercial entities are 95% of useful open-source (Linux, Postgres and similar — excluding leftstr-type of utilities).

Commercial entities latch onto useful open-source because it is a successful product they simply cannot compete with.
Post reply on HN