10 ms·

A leap of faith: Committing to open source

175 points by theBashShell 6y ago

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smabie 6y ago
Man I hate emojis. But that's probably because they make me feel old. When I was a teen I was :p'ing and :)'ing on IRC. How times have changed
- marvy 6y ago
  Here's a question I've vaguely wondered but never mustered the effort to actually look up: how does IRC work? Like, if two people want to talk to each other over IRC, do they need to be connected to the same same IRC server at the same time? If so, does that mean that IRC is basically like instant messaging along the lines of AOL Instant Messanger, or Google chat? Or is there something that makes IRC very different?
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    For standalone IRC servers, yes. But many IRC servers are collected together into networks (Undernet, Freenode, EFnet, and so on) and in that case all you need to be is in the same channel on the same network. IRC is "very different" in the sense that it's more open and more freewheeling than, say, Slack. Slack is basically IRC with a slicker coat of paint and more monetization.
    - marvy 6y ago
      Never tried Slack, so that comparison doesn't help too much :) But I think I'm getting the idea now. It's a similar idea to a typical instant messenger, except that since the protocol is standard, you have federation that actually works, much like someone who uses gmail can email someone else who uses yahoo. Plus you have the concept of a channel, which seems to have no direct analog in a typical instant messenger, but seems to be essentially a persistent chatroom that doesn't vanish even if nobody is in the channel at the moment. Is that about right?
      - rabidrat 6y ago
        Most of IRC is on those 'channels' (#whatever). and most channels (at least back in the day) were public, so you could just go to #books or whatever. For example, I spent my formative years on #uiuc, where there was a healthy community of 50-100 people from the university I was at. Newcomers would stop by on a regular basis and ask a question or just start chatting or troll or even grief--there were kickbans and scripts and bots to help manage larger communities. Also these persistent channels are created just by joining the channel with that name; they disappear when the last person leaves. Notably, the first person to join a chatroom gets "operator" status, and thus the rights to change channel settings and kick/ban people etc. So there evolved a culture of bots, who would sit in channels with op status and 'occupy' it in case someone came along; these bots had op status themselves, and were programmed to auto-ban certain users or even domains, and auto-op their owners and their owners' friends. slap me summa dat +o. And of course, there were the bot wars and the attempts at deliberate netsplits to try and steal op status, which were fun games for the script kiddies, but would really take the piss out of your evening chat when they would come by.
        shifto 6y ago
        Totally forgot about the slap command. Thought of it because you said to 'slap you some of that +O'. shifto slaps rabidrat around a bit with a large trout
        senko 6y ago
        Fun fact: slap was a client command that just sent "action" over the channel/privmsg, which would get rendered as something like: * <nick> <action text> More generally, on most clients you could use "/me <text" command to do the same thing. And on the protocol level, it was done by a mini-protocol on top of IRC, called DCC (direct client-connection), that would look like: PRIVMSG #channel :^AACTION text^A (where "PRIVMSG #channel :text" was a way to send a normal message, and ^A is Ctrl-A). DCC was also used as signalling for file transfer. Clients wishing to send files would open a high-end port on their machine and send a DCC message with the file name, IP and port to connect to (similar to active FTP). (yes, I spent an inordinate amount on time on IRC...)
  - symkat 6y ago
    Two people would need to be on the same server to instant message. Basically you have private messages, and then group chats. The difference over something like AOL is that IRC is more open. Anyone can run an IRC server, so there was a lot of niche irc networks. https://freenode.net/ https://freenode.net/ is a popular IRC server for various open source communities.
  - Galanwe 6y ago
    Yes, typically all your communications on IRC go through a server. But depending on your client, and server, there's a lot of room for extensions around the native features. For instance, you can use DCC to send messages directly to an other user
  - kilburn 6y ago
    IRC at its core is really simple: there's a server that relays messages between currently connected clients (i.e.: the server does not store messages ever). To whom does each message get sent? This is where channels come in: a "channel" is just a list of currently connected people, and the server relays every message sent to the channel to all the people who's in it. You can also open "private consversations" (i.e.: channels between only you and another person in the server). From this very simple model, new features where added over time. Most notably: - Very early on people realized that trolls are annoying. So... whenever a chanel is created, the first person to join gets "operator" status and can kick other people from the channel, silence them, etc. They can also make other people operators. - Some severs are federated to form an "IRC Network" (like freenet). These servers are relaying messages between them. For end-clients, it should not matter to which of the servers in the network you are connected to. Federation only works between servers on the same network (there's no federation between networks!). - Some networks created a small layer of authentication. You can "register" your nickname so the network won't allow other people to use it. Furthermore, you can "register" channels so when they get created the first person to enter doesn't get operator status. The network will only grant such status on that channel to whatever (registered) nicknames you specify, etc. On this basis, people started creating bots to: - Build archives of conversations (remember that all of this is ephemeral!) - Auto-reply to certain "messages" in certain channels. - Whatever else crosses your mind it has probably been done at some point. IRC is old ;)
  - bregma 6y ago
    You have it backwards. AOL-brand Instant Messaging and Google-brand Chat are like IRC, only in the latter cases commercial interests recognized the value in IRC and built walls around the commons in an attempt to extract rent. They all require a server to relay messages.
- friendzis 6y ago
  The main problem with emojis (usage of them aside) is that while they are characters, they do not work in the same way as other characters. Smileys are composed of symbols right at your fingertips. Native emoji keyboards are severely lacking - typing them is a lot different than text. The worst part is that while fonts exist since forever, the emoji generation forgot all the engineering put into it and no font tooling works with emojis. Whatever font setup you have, it goes down the drain once emojis are in the text, because emoji glyphs come not from your font setup, but from within the rendering application.
  - thristian 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "emojis come from the rendering application". Some applications (particularly web applications) forcibly replace emoji characters with inline images because they don't trust every user-agent to have a sufficiently-complete emoji font installed, or because they want to use their own custom emoji designs rather than the platform-native ones. That's not a fault of emojis or the font setup, though - that's just paranoid developers. Most UI toolkits will render emoji characters according to whatever emoji font you have installed, just like they'll render Cyrillic characters according to whatever Cyrillic font you have.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      When you say "forcibly replace" you mean the same thing as the last sentence of the parent comment
  - fdw 6y ago
    > but from within the rendering application. I'm not sure if you imply that the emoji glyphs are not from a font, because they usually are. To display emojis well, you should have your normal font setup, plus one font for emojis (like [Noto-Emoji]. All desktop applications I use display these glyphs and don't interfere with it. The only example of something overriding your selected font is Slack, which uses small images if it knows the emoji. At least, that is true on my Linux. What Windows does, I have no idea. [Noto-Emoji]: https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/emoji/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/emoji/
ColinEberhardt 6y ago
A great article - and lines like this really resonate with me "More than project management skills or technical expertise, empathy is the most important skill in open source." However, the article doesn't address the most obvious question, how does Henry fund this activity?
- jgilias 6y ago
  Well, the article mentions his Patreon, as well as features a GitHub Sponsors button at the end of it.
  - ColinEberhardt 6y ago
    True, both were mentioned in passing - but it would be good to hear about how sustainable this is? If an open source maintainer relies on GH sponsors, Patreon, Open Collective then they are going to have to invest time in marketing themselves to the community. It's an odd dynamic.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      Gotta have some hustle if you wanna get paid.
      - fsewe20 6y ago
        ..which is a real shame, as there are very talented people working on public goods who don't have that "hustle" and could do with the support. Open source / Free software has been valued over $400 billion, and supports our entire economy, funding developers shouldn't be a problem. Open source / Free software is a public goods issue, and we should be looking for the best ways to support them. Quadratic funding could be a useful mechanism for this: https://wtfisqf.com/ https://wtfisqf.com/
      - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
        Great if you're an extroverted narcissist, but that only represents (a small) part of the software development world.
hardwaresofton 6y ago
I don't know if I've had my head under a rock, but Github's README[0] is the bigger news to me -- Are we going to finally see the end of technical posting on Medium in ~5 years? I never even knew README existed until seeing this post. [0]: https://github.com/readme https://github.com/readme
- _def 6y ago
  Same! It'll be interesting to follow this and see what happens. But in the long run I think we need something distributed but also connected (like diaspora or mastodon maybe, concept wise). And as always, it'd be probably hard to establish.
  - moron4hire 6y ago
    A blog on your own server with an RSS feed is more than enough
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      With the (text) sources in Git so they can be easily archived, distributed and indexed for the future. I've fired up and taken down multiple attempts at blogging, I don't know if anything I've written was worth keeping but still, the information is lost.
    - hardwaresofton 6y ago
      True -- but I wonder if Github would be willing to do the "on your own server" bit -- they already let you host Github Pages for free, and you can bring your own RSS support.
      - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
        Certainly you can have RSS-enabled blogs of Github or Gitlab. I think Netlify (also free for a single-user instance) makes it a bit easier, but isn't strictly necessary.

175 points by theBashShell 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Man I hate emojis. But that's probably because they make me feel old. When I was a teen I was :p'ing and :)'ing on IRC. How times have changed

marvy 6y ago
Here's a question I've vaguely wondered but never mustered the effort to actually look up: how does IRC work? Like, if two people want to talk to each other over IRC, do they need to be connected to the same same IRC server at the same time? If so, does that mean that IRC is basically like instant messaging along the lines of AOL Instant Messanger, or Google chat? Or is there something that makes IRC very different?
- techsupporter 6y ago
  For standalone IRC servers, yes. But many IRC servers are collected together into networks (Undernet, Freenode, EFnet, and so on) and in that case all you need to be is in the same channel on the same network. IRC is "very different" in the sense that it's more open and more freewheeling than, say, Slack. Slack is basically IRC with a slicker coat of paint and more monetization.
  - marvy 6y ago
    Never tried Slack, so that comparison doesn't help too much :) But I think I'm getting the idea now. It's a similar idea to a typical instant messenger, except that since the protocol is standard, you have federation that actually works, much like someone who uses gmail can email someone else who uses yahoo. Plus you have the concept of a channel, which seems to have no direct analog in a typical instant messenger, but seems to be essentially a persistent chatroom that doesn't vanish even if nobody is in the channel at the moment. Is that about right?
    - rabidrat 6y ago
      Most of IRC is on those 'channels' (#whatever). and most channels (at least back in the day) were public, so you could just go to #books or whatever. For example, I spent my formative years on #uiuc, where there was a healthy community of 50-100 people from the university I was at. Newcomers would stop by on a regular basis and ask a question or just start chatting or troll or even grief--there were kickbans and scripts and bots to help manage larger communities. Also these persistent channels are created just by joining the channel with that name; they disappear when the last person leaves. Notably, the first person to join a chatroom gets "operator" status, and thus the rights to change channel settings and kick/ban people etc. So there evolved a culture of bots, who would sit in channels with op status and 'occupy' it in case someone came along; these bots had op status themselves, and were programmed to auto-ban certain users or even domains, and auto-op their owners and their owners' friends. slap me summa dat +o. And of course, there were the bot wars and the attempts at deliberate netsplits to try and steal op status, which were fun games for the script kiddies, but would really take the piss out of your evening chat when they would come by.
      - shifto 6y ago
        Totally forgot about the slap command. Thought of it because you said to 'slap you some of that +O'. shifto slaps rabidrat around a bit with a large trout
        senko 6y ago
        Fun fact: slap was a client command that just sent "action" over the channel/privmsg, which would get rendered as something like: * <nick> <action text> More generally, on most clients you could use "/me <text" command to do the same thing. And on the protocol level, it was done by a mini-protocol on top of IRC, called DCC (direct client-connection), that would look like: PRIVMSG #channel :^AACTION text^A (where "PRIVMSG #channel :text" was a way to send a normal message, and ^A is Ctrl-A). DCC was also used as signalling for file transfer. Clients wishing to send files would open a high-end port on their machine and send a DCC message with the file name, IP and port to connect to (similar to active FTP). (yes, I spent an inordinate amount on time on IRC...)
- symkat 6y ago
  Two people would need to be on the same server to instant message. Basically you have private messages, and then group chats. The difference over something like AOL is that IRC is more open. Anyone can run an IRC server, so there was a lot of niche irc networks. https://freenode.net/ https://freenode.net/ is a popular IRC server for various open source communities.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  Yes, typically all your communications on IRC go through a server. But depending on your client, and server, there's a lot of room for extensions around the native features. For instance, you can use DCC to send messages directly to an other user
- kilburn 6y ago
  IRC at its core is really simple: there's a server that relays messages between currently connected clients (i.e.: the server does not store messages ever). To whom does each message get sent? This is where channels come in: a "channel" is just a list of currently connected people, and the server relays every message sent to the channel to all the people who's in it. You can also open "private consversations" (i.e.: channels between only you and another person in the server). From this very simple model, new features where added over time. Most notably: - Very early on people realized that trolls are annoying. So... whenever a chanel is created, the first person to join gets "operator" status and can kick other people from the channel, silence them, etc. They can also make other people operators. - Some severs are federated to form an "IRC Network" (like freenet). These servers are relaying messages between them. For end-clients, it should not matter to which of the servers in the network you are connected to. Federation only works between servers on the same network (there's no federation between networks!). - Some networks created a small layer of authentication. You can "register" your nickname so the network won't allow other people to use it. Furthermore, you can "register" channels so when they get created the first person to enter doesn't get operator status. The network will only grant such status on that channel to whatever (registered) nicknames you specify, etc. On this basis, people started creating bots to: - Build archives of conversations (remember that all of this is ephemeral!) - Auto-reply to certain "messages" in certain channels. - Whatever else crosses your mind it has probably been done at some point. IRC is old ;)
- bregma 6y ago
  You have it backwards. AOL-brand Instant Messaging and Google-brand Chat are like IRC, only in the latter cases commercial interests recognized the value in IRC and built walls around the commons in an attempt to extract rent. They all require a server to relay messages.
friendzis 6y ago
The main problem with emojis (usage of them aside) is that while they are characters, they do not work in the same way as other characters. Smileys are composed of symbols right at your fingertips. Native emoji keyboards are severely lacking - typing them is a lot different than text. The worst part is that while fonts exist since forever, the emoji generation forgot all the engineering put into it and no font tooling works with emojis. Whatever font setup you have, it goes down the drain once emojis are in the text, because emoji glyphs come not from your font setup, but from within the rendering application.
- thristian 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "emojis come from the rendering application". Some applications (particularly web applications) forcibly replace emoji characters with inline images because they don't trust every user-agent to have a sufficiently-complete emoji font installed, or because they want to use their own custom emoji designs rather than the platform-native ones. That's not a fault of emojis or the font setup, though - that's just paranoid developers. Most UI toolkits will render emoji characters according to whatever emoji font you have installed, just like they'll render Cyrillic characters according to whatever Cyrillic font you have.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    When you say "forcibly replace" you mean the same thing as the last sentence of the parent comment
- fdw 6y ago
  > but from within the rendering application. I'm not sure if you imply that the emoji glyphs are not from a font, because they usually are. To display emojis well, you should have your normal font setup, plus one font for emojis (like [Noto-Emoji]. All desktop applications I use display these glyphs and don't interfere with it. The only example of something overriding your selected font is Slack, which uses small images if it knows the emoji. At least, that is true on my Linux. What Windows does, I have no idea. [Noto-Emoji]: https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/emoji/ https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/emoji/

ColinEberhardt 6y ago

A great article - and lines like this really resonate with me "More than project management skills or technical expertise, empathy is the most important skill in open source." However, the article doesn't address the most obvious question, how does Henry fund this activity?

jgilias 6y ago
Well, the article mentions his Patreon, as well as features a GitHub Sponsors button at the end of it.
- ColinEberhardt 6y ago
  True, both were mentioned in passing - but it would be good to hear about how sustainable this is? If an open source maintainer relies on GH sponsors, Patreon, Open Collective then they are going to have to invest time in marketing themselves to the community. It's an odd dynamic.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    Gotta have some hustle if you wanna get paid.
    - fsewe20 6y ago
      ..which is a real shame, as there are very talented people working on public goods who don't have that "hustle" and could do with the support. Open source / Free software has been valued over $400 billion, and supports our entire economy, funding developers shouldn't be a problem. Open source / Free software is a public goods issue, and we should be looking for the best ways to support them. Quadratic funding could be a useful mechanism for this: https://wtfisqf.com/ https://wtfisqf.com/
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Great if you're an extroverted narcissist, but that only represents (a small) part of the software development world.

hardwaresofton 6y ago

I don't know if I've had my head under a rock, but Github's README[0] is the bigger news to me -- Are we going to finally see the end of technical posting on Medium in ~5 years? I never even knew README existed until seeing this post. [0]: https://github.com/readme https://github.com/readme

_def 6y ago
Same! It'll be interesting to follow this and see what happens. But in the long run I think we need something distributed but also connected (like diaspora or mastodon maybe, concept wise). And as always, it'd be probably hard to establish.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  A blog on your own server with an RSS feed is more than enough
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    With the (text) sources in Git so they can be easily archived, distributed and indexed for the future. I've fired up and taken down multiple attempts at blogging, I don't know if anything I've written was worth keeping but still, the information is lost.
  - hardwaresofton 6y ago
    True -- but I wonder if Github would be willing to do the "on your own server" bit -- they already let you host Github Pages for free, and you can bring your own RSS support.
    - _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
      Certainly you can have RSS-enabled blogs of Github or Gitlab. I think Netlify (also free for a single-user instance) makes it a bit easier, but isn't strictly necessary.