Fork My Code, Please (2012)
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Fork My Code, Please (2012)
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#2For some context, Chet Ramey and Arnold Robbins are the maintainers of GNU Bash and GNU AWK, respectively.
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#3Similar sentiments: https://danielcompton.net/2014/11/19/dependencies "Open Source Is Free As in Baby"
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#4I really like to share my projects, it's awesome when it gets featured. But I have to agree, the list of users "suggestions" gets me tired every time.
why would do like this and not like that? like that would be better.
can you add touch support? I don't like using keys.
can you add key support? I don't want to click the screen.
why it's not working on my Android 4.1 version?
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#5Similar sentiments: https://danielcompton.net/2014/11/19/dependencies "Open Source Is Free As in Baby"
At first glance I thought the title next to your link was sort of "Free as in Kittens" but it was slightly different and a good article.
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#6Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.".
Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ?
(I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contributions to Free Software as Arnold Robbin does, just curious !)
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#7Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.". Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ? (I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contribution…
I don't know if there's any expectation that someone will actually hire them. I've written the same thing before. Sometimes you'll get requests to do custom work. For instance, I've had grad students see something I've posted online who've asked me to do X, for some X that would take hundreds of hours. "Sure, I'll be happy to do it for $150/hour" is more polite than saying "Do your own research".
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#8This link was posted in the thread on Elm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447
It makes a nice contrast to the way that the core Elm team pushes back on forks and retains control for themselves.
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#9Genuine question here, the post ends with "In that case, you may wish to talk to us (offline) about our consulting rates.". Without bothering the author, I'm really curious what the price range would be for consulting with recognized open-source maintainers, once you reach them offline ... Anyone willing to try a guess ? (I'm a consultant myself, thinking about my own fees ... but I have zero significant contribution…
I've seen that Stallman does consulting at $250/hr, which is interesting when you consider that I, a no-name from a no-name state school with 8 years' experience, am billed to my company's clients at more than 1/3 the rate of someone who's effectively a celebrity.
Re: Fork My Code, Please (2012)
#10This link was posted in the thread on Elm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447 It makes a nice contrast to the way that the core Elm team pushes back on forks and retains control for themselves.
I agree with OP, and also with the Elm post.
But I'd like to point out that there's a hypocrisy at the heart of many popular open source projects. Yes, you're legally allowed to fork, and yes you'll be told to go "fork off" if you annoy the maintainers. But anyone who has the temerity to actually create a fork will be shunned or constantly bombarded with questions about why they're sowing division in the community. My computer can hold multiple incompatible forks without them mutually annihilating. Why can't people's belief systems?
Now, such sentiments often come from the peanut gallery rather than the maintainer. But maintainers could help more. When was the last time anyone saw a maintainer thank someone for creating a fork? Forks should be treated more like Andon Cords (https://itrevolution.com/kata). Creating them is an act of bravery, and even if you don't agree with the reasons they are a valuable source of feedback. These are events to be celebrated and encouraged. A fork that doesn't gain traction isn't a 'failure' to be derided, it is a valuable experiment at worst, a negative result that didn't take away energy from other efforts. At best it actually influenced upstream. Everyone should be enormously grateful.