[HN Gopher] You use more open source software than you think
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You use more open source software than you think
Author : mooreds
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-06-09 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| quanticle wrote:
| "Even if you have funding, there's always more work than you can
| possibly do," Van Slyck says. "And the bar is always being
| raised. It used to be enough to just put some code online. Now
| you're expected to foster a community. You have a lot more hats
| to wear."
|
| I found this statement perplexing. Why is it no longer "just
| enough" to put some code online, in a take-it-or-leave-it
| fashion? If anything, given how easy git has made it to fork
| projects, it's more acceptable to do that today than it is is the
| old days of centralized version control. If you have the time and
| effort to maintain it, then great. If not, that's fine too;
| having some code out there to serve as the basis for future work
| is better than no code at all.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| This is a perfectly reasonable position to take, however a lot
| of people are very needy, wanting to be handheld through
| support beyond a reasonable limit, or demanding that you
| implement x or y because they need it, and want you to do it
| for them for free.
| quanticle wrote:
| Well, sure, but you can say, "I'm sorry, I just don't have
| the time to do that right now." They can then either fork the
| project and implement the changes themselves or better yet,
| step forward and ask if they can help with the maintenance of
| the project.
|
| EDIT: I glossed over this part when I was reading the
| article, but indeed there are many open source developers who
| do hold this attitude:
|
| _Halliday--better known by his handle substack--takes an
| uncommonly hands-off approach to his work. "I have all my
| GitHub notification emails turned off," he says. If someone
| finds a problem with his code or wants a feature added to a
| module he's no longer working on, they're free to fork his
| code. That is, after all, the open source way. But he doesn't
| put effort into issues or pull requests for packages he
| considers finished. "It's not my job to keep tabs on every
| little thing I wrote years or decades ago very often," he
| says. "I am always busy with new projects and if I was always
| looking back at old projects I wouldn't have enough time to
| move forward."_
|
| I fully agree with this viewpoint and I think it's good for
| the overall software ecosystem if engineers did more due
| diligence on the packages that they use.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Which is why I always say "show me the code" or "we accept
| patches".
| quanticle wrote:
| I thought about writing "patches are welcome" as an
| example response, and I deliberately chose, "I'm sorry,
| but I just don't have time for that," instead. Reviewing
| a patch, in many cases, takes somewhere between 50% and
| 75% of the time it takes to write the code in the first
| place. It's not a given that someone who open sourced a
| random project will have time to review patches.
| kop316 wrote:
| Personally, I much prefer "patches are welcome". It puts
| the ownership back on that person who asked for XYZ
| feature to do it.
|
| If that person is actually motivated enough to write a
| patch (which I have had!), I welcome reviewing it,
| because it empowers that person to feel like they can
| contribute to my project (and hopefully other projects
| too!), and makes others feel like they can contribute to
| my project as well.
| lupire wrote:
| Patches are always welcome on your fork. Upstream can
| merge whenever they want.
| meetups323 wrote:
| Hah. I regularly see patches whose review takes well over
| 100% the time it would have taken me to create the patch
| myself.
|
| But then I'm employed by $MEGA_CORP and part of the job
| description is "helping to build and maintain the OSS
| community", so helping novices create their first patches
| is a big part of that.
| pvorb wrote:
| But are those bad actors really that common? Typically, what
| I see is that developers really know what to expect from an
| open source project. If you can't offer them support they
| could walk away looking for alternative options instead of
| funding your project. That's because devs usually don't have
| a budget to spend. They even could fork and solve their own
| problems without caring to support the problems of others.
| But I guess all of this is okay and perfectly acceptable use
| of open source software.
| pvorb wrote:
| I agree with you. At least I've never been offended by anyone
| for not replying to issues raised in my repositories. And a few
| of my libraries are downloaded millions of times per week from
| NPM (which is not that uncommon on NPM, but still).
|
| That really bad support didn't lead to any actively maintained
| fork, though. So I guess it's all stable enough for people to
| still depend on it in their new projects.
| amelius wrote:
| > It's time to stop taking open source infrastructure for
| granted.
|
| It's time our governments start taking OSS seriously.
|
| Like academia, OSS deserves state sponsoring.
|
| Most of the research papers I read were made possible by OSS one
| way or another.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I know. I'm always amazed to see how many open source licenses
| there are on every device.
| simonw wrote:
| I got a bit of a shock when I visited
| https://github.com/readme/unseen-oss and it wasn't a GitHub
| repository, it was a custom designed page!
|
| Not a lot of URLs on GitHub sit outside of their regular
| /owner/repo pattern - the only other section I can think of that
| does that is https://github.com/about - things like documentation
| tend to live on separate subdomains, like
| https://docs.github.com/
| pvorb wrote:
| I also was a bit confused, because I mistook this for coming
| from Readme.io, which is on GitHub at
| https://github.com/readmeio, and I thought about how the heck
| they convinced GitHub to add a custom design for their
| repository.
| sneak wrote:
| I expect Microsoft marketing to continue to do splashy,
| unexpected things like this as they milk the still-as-yet-
| trusted GitHub brand for all it's worth to expand Microsoft's
| control over the open source ecosystem.
| pvorb wrote:
| The GitHub.com namespace is quite limited, though. I wonder
| if they had to delete or rename anyone's GitHub account or
| org for creating this page or if it was preserved for a long
| time.
| sombremesa wrote:
| According to wayback machine Sandy McMurray [0] used to own
| it [1], but it has been commandeered for quite some time as
| well [2].
|
| [0] https://readme.tumblr.com/
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090709114358/github.com/r
| eadme
|
| [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160218095949/github.com/r
| eadme
| epigen wrote:
| Exactly, what's the catch?
|
| How does Microsoft come to own all of open-source? That's the
| plan, right?
| sneak wrote:
| VS Code becoming standard tools, alongside GitHub and NPM
| which they own now. This affords a tremendous amount of
| steering control and opportunities for lock-in. Some of the
| existing ones are the proprietary plugins for VSC, and
| GitHub Actions.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if they end up picking up Docker
| for a song now that Docker has utterly failed to find a
| workable revenue model. (Microsoft sponsored Docker's
| surprisingly-complete Windows support, IIRC.) The
| extremely-widely-used Docker Desktop products are already
| nonfree, as well as the dockerd that runs on Windows.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Ouch. What's a good docker alternative? Something with
| similar dockerfile semantics but can be linux only for
| sure.
| Multicomp wrote:
| IIRC RedHat offers podman
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Presumably it's like I'm assuming Win10 is, a slow burn.
|
| Coax people slowly over time to give up other options until
| there's nothing else to choose, then flick the switch and
| fleece them harder than hardness itself.
|
| Based on past performance I just assume we're in an
| elaborate version of the 'fleece tourists with inordinate
| drinks bills' con trick.
|
| #GetOffMyLawn
| ghuntley wrote:
| Authored two blog posts on this recently:
|
| "Did you know there are less than 2100 people in the inner GitHub
| open-source maintainer community? I often wonder what the future
| would look like if these high achievers that our digital society
| is built upon were empowered to become independent artists."
|
| https://www.gitpod.io/blog/devxconf-wrap and
| https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-open-source-sustainability...
| torstenvl wrote:
| Surprised there's no mention of Gecko or WebKit, now that every
| major browser is based on one of the two.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| This is the inevitable result of the widespread use of
| permissive, non-copyleft licenses. Instead of developing an
| alternative to proprietary software that protects users' freedom,
| OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large tech
| companies.
| [deleted]
| parafactual wrote:
| This isn't snark, but a genuine question. What makes open
| source developers prefer permissive licenses to GPL and other
| copyleft licenses? What is the benefit in letting corporations
| use your work in proprietary software?
| SteveMoody73 wrote:
| I don't release much open source code, most of the code I
| work on can't be released publically.
|
| The code I do release is probably not that useful to many and
| in most cases is something i've written for personal use
| primaraly.
|
| I always use a permissive license for anything I release.
| It's usually served it's initial purpose to me and if it can
| be of benefit to another, then they should be able to use it
| in any way they want
| golergka wrote:
| So I can use it at my job, and justify spending my employer-
| paid time working on open source.
| mechEpleb wrote:
| Getting it out there. If your goal is just to ensure that a
| well supported open source solution exists and people can use
| it instead of having nothing at all or only paid proprietary
| garbage, a permissive license makes far more sense.
|
| If your goal is sticking it to the man and demolishing
| capitalism or whatever then it's different of course.
| logbiscuitswave wrote:
| I've worked several jobs in the past where using reciprocal
| OSS (such as GPL) was expressly forbidden. This would leave
| us in the position of reinventing the wheel, buying
| something, or using something (possibly inferior) that's
| more permissive.
|
| (I guess in many ways this is a data point to support the
| "OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large
| tech companies" thesis up thread.)
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Open source software is bizarrely sticking it to
| capitalism. RMS and his ilk developed these licenses pretty
| much because they wanted free shit out there with no
| stipulations. It's insane that anyone with skills would
| care enough to work on GNU instead of making 6 figures to
| write the same code for IBM. OSS kinda proves that humans
| are deep down pretty alright
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _RMS and his ilk developed these licenses pretty much
| because they wanted free shit out there with no
| stipulations._
|
| Copyleft, _having_ to release code diffs, is a
| stipulation / restriction.
|
| MIT/BSD is the one without any stipulations /
| restrictions:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License
|
| Depending on one's goals one may be better than the
| other.
| zxzax wrote:
| Just a small correction -- The GPL does not require you
| to release code diffs.
| lupire wrote:
| IBM pays some people to write GPL code.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I don't think open source developers prefer permissive
| licenses - I think permissive licenses are better suited to
| become popular.
| MereInterest wrote:
| I think permissive licenses lack any pushback against
| proprietary network effects, and therefore are subsumed by
| them. One of the goals of the GPL is to cultivate a network
| effect of its own, to counter that of proprietary software.
| It's not that permissive licenses are better suited to
| become popular, but that they represent support of the
| proprietary status quo.
| _def wrote:
| You can base your business model around that. Support,
| certificates, Trainings, etc.
|
| Of course that is not the case for the majority of projects
| like curl for example.
| chowells wrote:
| Writing software sucks. I release code with a permissive
| license because I want to make it suck a bit less for those
| who come after me. My only goal is to relieve developer pain
| by providing reliable chunks of code.
|
| Maybe I'd feel differently if I made an entire service
| instead of small focused libraries. But that's an entirely
| different world.
| caramelcream wrote:
| Wider adoption results in a healthier ecosystem. Also, don't
| forget that most of FOSS developers are employed somewhere
| and surely they want to use FOSS at their jobs.
| nicoburns wrote:
| As soon as someone else contributes, copyleft licenses also
| prevent you from using your own work in anything proprietary.
| So if you have side project that may potentially grow into a
| business if it takes off then permissive makes sense.
| lupire wrote:
| Why do you think you need proprietary software to run your
| business?
|
| Especially if it's a hosted web app business?
| dkarras wrote:
| I don't think many people are lamenting the fact that their
| project is popular and being used.
|
| Because they can just... stop maintaining it if they wanted.
| They are completely free to do so.
|
| Many developers like to feel useful, feel like they are solving
| an important problem in a suitable way. Some even want the fame
| associated with it, or the doors having such (a) project(s)
| opens (you use X? I wrote it, and maintain it - or people
| hunting you specifically because you are known to have created
| X).
|
| The point is, the tradeoff between the feeling of being taken
| advantage of and feeling useful and fulfilled because of
| solving an important problem in a suitable way is controlled
| _directly by the author / developer_! If they feel it is not
| worth the effort, they can just stop!
|
| Having a permissive license helps you gain popularity. Many
| people won't touch GPL derivatives for their business / side-
| project-that-might-turn-into-a-business so such a license can
| have an inhibiting effect in adoption. Developers generally
| aren't stupid, they know that and they choose more permissive
| licenses, because they want to be seen, they want their
| solution to be used. They maybe want the fame and open doors
| associated with having such a project take off. It is a trade-
| off under their control. They can stop with maintenance any
| time. Hell they can even change the license of future versions
| (if they have not started with a GPL-like license) if they
| want. So I don't see the problem here. Everything is under the
| developer's control. You can't have it both ways: The boost to
| popularity by having a no-strings-attached license, but reaping
| proportional profits from such an endeavor as if you had a
| restrictive license protected by a business entity.
|
| If you give money (value) away for free, you'll be pretty
| popular. "I want to be easily popular as if I'm giving money
| (value) away for free, without actually giving money (value)
| away for free" does not make much sense.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I love OSS. I just think it should come with a cap. If a
| single stakeholder (shareholder, employee, bondholder, etc)
| is worth $1B USD or more, the license is $1m[0] a year. That
| way we all get to have fun, but the megagiants like Amazon
| actually have to pay something back to projects like
| Postgres. We'll get better security and a naturally
| progressive, opt-in tax on the largest of companies and
| investors.
|
| [0] Or whatever, if it's a small library maybe $50k or maybe
| something that scales with market cap, etc. Throw lawyers at
| it.
| version_five wrote:
| You can make a license like that if you want to.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Since widely-publicized OSS work can be a prerequisite for
| top jobs, it often isn't really a "free choice."
|
| But if it is a choice, then it's a choice that undermines
| fellow workers. By working for free, you're taking away jobs
| from people who might genuinely need them and be unable to
| work for free.
|
| In this way, OSS work can serve to entrench inequality by
| giving a hiring advantage to those with more time and
| resources, while reducing the salaried jobs available for
| others in the industry.
| lupire wrote:
| Lucky for you, top jobs hire by standard whiteboard
| quizzes.
| golergka wrote:
| You don't have any obligation to pursue a top job, nor it
| is necessary for your survival.
| abnry wrote:
| Is there really a shortage of tech jobs caused by open
| source projects?
| senko wrote:
| > Since widely-publicized OSS work can be a prerequisite
| for top jobs, it often isn't really a "free choice."
|
| Which top jobs require you to be a widely-publicized OSS
| author?
|
| I've only ever heard this to be a plus (which I believe is
| fair), not a requirement.
| [deleted]
| smarterclayton wrote:
| It's not a requirement at Red Hat, because anyone can be
| converted to the open source religion. This surprised me
| when I started - I thought I would need to be
| indoctrinated, but then it just became normal to see open
| source as the only way to work.
|
| That said, RH hires key contributors all the time (as do
| many companies), so being the maintainer of a project is
| definitely a plus.
| zxzax wrote:
| >OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large tech
| companies.
|
| I really don't understand why there are always comments of this
| nature every time this is brought up. Why is the size of the
| company relevant? Do people here not have jobs in the IT field?
| When people contribute to open source, anyone is able to use
| that code, including you. That means when you go get a job at a
| new company, you can keep using that code. It doesn't matter if
| you go to a small company or a large company.
| guhcampos wrote:
| On the bright side, this whole story displays the immense power
| of composition (in more than one meaning for composition) in
| software.
|
| If you stop and think about just how much stuff humankind built
| around stuff like the mentioned curl, or linux, or gcc, or numpy,
| or netscape.
|
| We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
| Avery3R wrote:
| That gigantic sticky header that serves no real purpose is so
| ugly.
| nick_g wrote:
| I wasn't a fan of it as well. While I find sticky headers
| common enough to not be too surprised at their presence, the
| strange link symbols next to repositories on GitHub especially
| bothered me during my reading of the (otherwise solid) article
| kzrdude wrote:
| It's not rational, I guess, but it really feels like it is in
| the way, and it distracts from actually reading the text of the
| article.
| teddyh wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2347/
| mooreds wrote:
| There's an xkcd for everything!
| INTPenis wrote:
| More like 1993.
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