5 ms·

So since a corporation might get value from your work then nobody should get value from your work?

joshlemer 7y ago
That's not a super charitable interpretation of what I said. I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations, so we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're doing god's work here, and my second point is that people probably overestimate the personal reputational/career gains to themselves from contributing to open source. So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's.
- kortilla 7y ago
  >I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations And this is bullshit. Most popular open source projects see heavy usage in academia, personal projects, public projects, government projects, etc. Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all.
  - z3phyr 7y ago
    >Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all At other points in our history that language would be BASIC or Pascal. Their initial implementations may not have been open source
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    This is bullshit. Corporations benefit from a larger pool of students and cheaper pythons developers, Postgresql and mysql are very popular is business. By comparison, how many people use Ubuntu instead of Linux?
- gitgud 7y ago
  > I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations What open source projects specifically? > So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's. In my opinion, any open source development is valued WAY MORE than closed source development, as it can be shared and verified by others. If you have a project that's benefiting multi billion dollar companies, then you've created something useful that can be shared with small companies and individuals too. Also at the end of the day it's the developers choice, they can stop maintaining it, but the point is; sharing code is better for everybody
  - joshlemer 7y ago
    > What open source projects specifically? I have not contributed to any of these projects but for instance: Spark, Flink, Druid, Akka, Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Java Spring, Hibernate, etc etc.
    - gitgud 7y ago
      All those (mostly distributed) systems are not exclusively used by big corporations. They are also used in research and smaller startups too. Hell I know people who use the Java Spring Framework on personal projects. The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free... No matter who you are
      - paulryanrogers 7y ago
        > The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free The risk is that it devalues labor. And could build a culture where so much is expected for free that there is never enough financial support.
        gitgud 7y ago
        We should strive to make things easier. If open source packages can make software easier to write, that's a good thing and devalued labour is a sign that the labour is easier. Much like the improvements in farming and agriculture have changed from manually reaping the fields to AI controlled harvesting equipment. There will always be software engineering problems to solve, they just move up the stack...

That's not a super charitable interpretation of what I said. I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations, so we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking we're doing god's work here, and my second point is that people probably overestimate the personal reputational/career gains to themselves from contributing to open source. So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's.

kortilla 7y ago
>I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations And this is bullshit. Most popular open source projects see heavy usage in academia, personal projects, public projects, government projects, etc. Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all.
- z3phyr 7y ago
  >Python is a massive reason any students know how to program at all At other points in our history that language would be BASIC or Pascal. Their initial implementations may not have been open source
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  This is bullshit. Corporations benefit from a larger pool of students and cheaper pythons developers, Postgresql and mysql are very popular is business. By comparison, how many people use Ubuntu instead of Linux?
gitgud 7y ago
> I'm saying that for a lot of open source software, virtually 100% of the beneficiaries are corporations What open source projects specifically? > So, a large portion of open source contributions do nothing other than provide free highly skilled labour to Coca Cola, Walmart, and McDonald's. In my opinion, any open source development is valued WAY MORE than closed source development, as it can be shared and verified by others. If you have a project that's benefiting multi billion dollar companies, then you've created something useful that can be shared with small companies and individuals too. Also at the end of the day it's the developers choice, they can stop maintaining it, but the point is; sharing code is better for everybody
- joshlemer 7y ago
  > What open source projects specifically? I have not contributed to any of these projects but for instance: Spark, Flink, Druid, Akka, Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Java Spring, Hibernate, etc etc.
  - gitgud 7y ago
    All those (mostly distributed) systems are not exclusively used by big corporations. They are also used in research and smaller startups too. Hell I know people who use the Java Spring Framework on personal projects. The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free... No matter who you are
    - paulryanrogers 7y ago
      > The world of open source benefits the powerful entities, and that's OK that's what open source is about... Everyone gets the code for free The risk is that it devalues labor. And could build a culture where so much is expected for free that there is never enough financial support.
      - gitgud 7y ago
        We should strive to make things easier. If open source packages can make software easier to write, that's a good thing and devalued labour is a sign that the labour is easier. Much like the improvements in farming and agriculture have changed from manually reaping the fields to AI controlled harvesting equipment. There will always be software engineering problems to solve, they just move up the stack...