[HN Gopher] Producing Open Source Software (2020)
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Producing Open Source Software (2020)
Author : zdw
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-05-30 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (producingoss.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (producingoss.com)
| kfogel wrote:
| Nice to see this posted here. I feel obliged to say that the 2nd
| edition (which is now finally completed) has a number of
| Kickstarter backers waiting for their treeware, and I'm sorry for
| the delay in getting that to them. It's the print-run process,
| much more than the shipping, that turns out to be complicated,
| somewhat to my surprise, but I am plugging away at it. I am very
| grateful for those backers' support and have not forgotten.
|
| In the meantime, the entire 2nd edition is online in various
| formats, under a free license of course (CC-BY-SA), at the link
| OP gave.
|
| -Karl Fogel (author)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Wow, this is incredibly informative and nicely even-tempered in
| tone, for those of us not that familiar with the whole history
| behind the controversies we see expressed in various forums
| regarding the various licenses, ideologies, etc.
|
| This bit in particular resonates:
|
| > "Developers had another reason to stick together as well: it
| turned out that the free software world was producing some very
| high-quality code. In some cases, it was demonstrably technically
| superior to the nearest non-free alternative; in others, it was
| at least comparable, and of course it always cost less to acquire
| -- and you didn't have to worry about the manufacturer going out
| of business. While only a few people might have been motivated to
| run free software on strictly philosophical grounds, a great many
| people were happy to run it because it did a better job."
|
| This is very inline with academic thinking on distribution of
| information: put your research in the public domain with your
| name on it, transparently, so that everyone can replicate it (or
| not), and that's how you get rid of the chaff as soon as
| possible. This also leads to academic appointments and a
| financially secure career... Sounds like an argument for
| federally funded software development, really, but would Bill
| Gates still call that 'communism'?
|
| There's another connection: open source seems to suffer from lack
| of investment in UI/UX, and that appears to be because spending a
| lot of time on that is viewed as drudgery. Similarly, for other
| academic researchers the Materials and Methods section of a
| report is often the most important if they're out to replicate
| the work, but researchers aren't going to hold your hand and walk
| you through the fundamentals of experimental design and setup,
| you're expected to learn that on your own. M & M sections of
| reports are notorious for being terse and requiring insider
| knowledge to replicate, kind of like using some open source
| projects is.
|
| I wonder if the foundations and such in the open source world
| would consider just hiring experts in UI/UX, on a contract basis,
| to clean up their UI/UX to make it easier for non-techie people
| to adopt opensource platforms?
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| An excellent book that taught me a lot, but it first came out a
| long time ago. So, I'm very pleased to see it being updated. I
| will surely buy it and read it anew when it's finalized and
| printed.
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