4 ms·

> but just impossible to pay 100x less to someone in-house who could add a couple of features into existing in-house software on a weekend. They don't spend mo

> but just impossible to pay 100x less to someone in-house who could add a couple of features into existing in-house software on a weekend. They don't spend more money for fun. They do it because they've had experiences of many on-a-weekend projects become critical-path nightmares. Owning your own bespoke platform is a giant money hole. The arguments in favour of doing so are plug interchangeable with "let's write our own operating system kernel / database / programming language / HTTP server / CPU architecture / web framework". I also think it's a bit rude to assume that Red Hat has hundreds of brilliant engineers just phoning it in. I work for Pivotal and we are flat. out. every. day. writing this stuff, because it turns out that this stuff is a lot harder than it looks from the outside. And the reason it looks easier is because we did the hard work for you.

cat199 9y ago
> They don't spend more money for fun. They do it because they've had experiences of many on-a-weekend projects become critical-path nightmares. yet strangely these sorts of straw-man organizations adamantly refuse to open source any such projects even if they have nothing to do with their business because of the perceived loss of intellectual property value..
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  Because strangely, it's really expensive to audit your code, it's really expensive to get sued if you flub it, it's expensive to replace all the bits you can't opensource and it buys you approximately nothing in return except a comment on Hacker News accusing you of some ulterior motive.
- zzzeek 9y ago
  if you're a business with capital-M-Money, and you put "hello world" up on github, if someone wipes out their machine running it they're going to sue you. Doesn't matter what license you put on it, you're going to need the lawyers and they cost more money than you would have theoretically gained by putting your crappy "hello world" with the accidental "rm -fr" command in it up on github.
  - cpitman 9y ago
    Has this ever happened? There are plenty of companies that are not software companies releasing open source software.

cat199 9y ago

> They don't spend more money for fun. They do it because they've had experiences of many on-a-weekend projects become critical-path nightmares. yet strangely these sorts of straw-man organizations adamantly refuse to open source any such projects even if they have nothing to do with their business because of the perceived loss of intellectual property value..

jacques_chester 9y ago
Because strangely, it's really expensive to audit your code, it's really expensive to get sued if you flub it, it's expensive to replace all the bits you can't opensource and it buys you approximately nothing in return except a comment on Hacker News accusing you of some ulterior motive.
zzzeek 9y ago
if you're a business with capital-M-Money, and you put "hello world" up on github, if someone wipes out their machine running it they're going to sue you. Doesn't matter what license you put on it, you're going to need the lawyers and they cost more money than you would have theoretically gained by putting your crappy "hello world" with the accidental "rm -fr" command in it up on github.
- cpitman 9y ago
  Has this ever happened? There are plenty of companies that are not software companies releasing open source software.