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I feel like the author is not the best spokesperson considering the overwhelming success he's had with open source on a personal and financial levels. It's like

I feel like the author is not the best spokesperson considering the overwhelming success he's had with open source on a personal and financial levels. It's like those startup success blog posts. It's also quite idealistic. For other people open source might start as a desire for better software or just a desire to help but then it doesn't play out the same way. The project doesn't have as much success, the effort is high and the positive feedback low, the user demands or costs unreasonable. Then you draw a line and realise you just created yourself a sort of unpaid internship position where the globe is your boss. Having experienced something like this my conclusion is that open source in any continuous form is to be seriously avoided.

acdha 6y ago
I’ve had similar experiences but haven’t drawn the same conclusion. I haven’t given up on being able to change the norm where a lot of open source users act like they have an enterprise support plan while actually contributing nothing.
- fierarul 6y ago
  Funny thing: I had my email on a commercial support page for, you know, companies that wanted to pay money for custom work. 100% of the emails were from companies asking various questions; everybody took that page as priority free support for companies. I just removed my email in the end.
  - acdha 6y ago
    That’s a really common behavior. I’ve had people open issues stating that something is a production blocker but of course they can’t contribute time to fix it.
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hjntmp 6y ago
His point is that if you end up like that it's because you don't recognize freedom when you see it. Its like that movie when the monkey does not go out of thee cage even if opened. Because its your project and you can do whatever you want. Its all in your head.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  > Because its your project and you can do whatever you want. Its all in your head Well yes, you can. But I think most people feel obliged to respond to feedback, and in fact probably want to respond. Perhaps it's different for mature projects, but my personal projects are a source of perpetual disappointment. Too much to do, not enough time.
  - hjntmp 6y ago
    The beauty of it is that once you craate something and you share it you have already contributed something. I think that what you feel has more to do with your educaction. Like I said it is all in your head and you do that to yourself.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      Contributing "something" isn't that satisfying or fulfilling to me, even though it can undoubtedly be helpful. Perhaps it's just my personality.
    - hjntmp 6y ago
      In some ways it has to do with the fact that people are educated to have a need for validation from an authority and several other ways of thinking that are completely counterproductive.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        Validation from authority is not counterproductive. People who need zero external validation are at risk of psychotic behavior because they have no grounding.
ricardobeat 6y ago
If the project is unfulfilling, you drop it and move on to something you care about. It seems a lot of this recent commotion around OSS is coming from people who feel they are entitled to get paid for doing unfulfilling work, but they want to keep prestige that comes from having their name attached to it. Open source as a job is a privilege, not a career move. Commercial software hasn't gone away. It felt really nice to have a sphere of software development not tied directly to capitalism for once, but welp, too late now. I guess that's the idealistic part.
- fierarul 6y ago
  Which is why I said stopping open source work is a valid option. It's quite hard to untangle yourself from that and sometime it seems like money would help.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Why would someone have to choose between pay and prestige? They are mostly independent. Most famous people are rich.
indigochill 6y ago
Generally agree except in some special cases like Django or Linux. They're both open source and continuous and seem (at least from the outside) to be successful at it. They also have foundations around them, though. I think the better model for solo passion projects is generally to write your program and declare it "as-is". If people want changes to it, that's what forking is for. If you agree with their changes, you might arrange a pull request but that should be seen more as an exception rather than the rule (for this kind of project). This way the original code evolves in separate branches. Maybe one eventually becomes the de facto source, but being the original creator of the project should confer no automatic responsibility. One very successful example of this in the wild is the open-source roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Whales wrote the original Cataclysm but ended development of it in 2012, at which point the community forked it and kept development going for the past 8 years so far.
astrobe_ 6y ago
I seems to me that GitHub's "social coding" is slowly turning things inside-out and upside-down. At the beginning, you have a problem and you try to solve it yourself. If you succeed in doing so, great! Job done. The project is already successful at this point. Next, you can take the extra step of open-sourcing it, because it might be useful for others too, and you might maybe benefit from the improvements, bug fixes or bug reports of others. But if you start spending more time on dealing with emails, PRs etc. and it's no fun, just say no. Ignore people calling you "unprofessional" and whatnot. You owe them nothing.
- Mathnerd314 6y ago
  There's another step at the beginning: after you have a problem, you search for similar projects that might have already solved your problem. And in fact this step seems to generate most of the bug reports - you get "please implement feature X" and "does this have feature Y?" and so on, from people who have used your software for all of 5 minutes (or not at all). It's only after a lot of time is wasted that a new project is started. Alternatively, it could be that the people who try to use/reuse software and the people who write new software are completely separate, so that no amount of bug tracker work will lead to new source contributions.
cryptica 6y ago
I think Antirez may be just another puppet of the financial and corporate elite. Which might explain why he gets so much coverage on HN and why his open source projects have such high degree of adoption from corporations... And receives such big contracts. He writes a lot of nice uplifting pro-social articles, but keeps dancing around the real issues and doesn't do enough to really help open source. From first-hand experience, he doesn't even bother to answer emails or messages from community members or from authors of other popular open source projects.

acdha 6y ago

I’ve had similar experiences but haven’t drawn the same conclusion. I haven’t given up on being able to change the norm where a lot of open source users act like they have an enterprise support plan while actually contributing nothing.

fierarul 6y ago
Funny thing: I had my email on a commercial support page for, you know, companies that wanted to pay money for custom work. 100% of the emails were from companies asking various questions; everybody took that page as priority free support for companies. I just removed my email in the end.
- acdha 6y ago
  That’s a really common behavior. I’ve had people open issues stating that something is a production blocker but of course they can’t contribute time to fix it.

deleted 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hjntmp 6y ago

His point is that if you end up like that it's because you don't recognize freedom when you see it. Its like that movie when the monkey does not go out of thee cage even if opened. Because its your project and you can do whatever you want. Its all in your head.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> Because its your project and you can do whatever you want. Its all in your head Well yes, you can. But I think most people feel obliged to respond to feedback, and in fact probably want to respond. Perhaps it's different for mature projects, but my personal projects are a source of perpetual disappointment. Too much to do, not enough time.
- hjntmp 6y ago
  The beauty of it is that once you craate something and you share it you have already contributed something. I think that what you feel has more to do with your educaction. Like I said it is all in your head and you do that to yourself.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Contributing "something" isn't that satisfying or fulfilling to me, even though it can undoubtedly be helpful. Perhaps it's just my personality.
  - hjntmp 6y ago
    In some ways it has to do with the fact that people are educated to have a need for validation from an authority and several other ways of thinking that are completely counterproductive.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      Validation from authority is not counterproductive. People who need zero external validation are at risk of psychotic behavior because they have no grounding.

ricardobeat 6y ago

If the project is unfulfilling, you drop it and move on to something you care about. It seems a lot of this recent commotion around OSS is coming from people who feel they are entitled to get paid for doing unfulfilling work, but they want to keep prestige that comes from having their name attached to it. Open source as a job is a privilege, not a career move. Commercial software hasn't gone away. It felt really nice to have a sphere of software development not tied directly to capitalism for once, but welp, too late now. I guess that's the idealistic part.

fierarul 6y ago
Which is why I said stopping open source work is a valid option. It's quite hard to untangle yourself from that and sometime it seems like money would help.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Why would someone have to choose between pay and prestige? They are mostly independent. Most famous people are rich.

indigochill 6y ago

Generally agree except in some special cases like Django or Linux. They're both open source and continuous and seem (at least from the outside) to be successful at it. They also have foundations around them, though. I think the better model for solo passion projects is generally to write your program and declare it "as-is". If people want changes to it, that's what forking is for. If you agree with their changes, you might arrange a pull request but that should be seen more as an exception rather than the rule (for this kind of project). This way the original code evolves in separate branches. Maybe one eventually becomes the de facto source, but being the original creator of the project should confer no automatic responsibility. One very successful example of this in the wild is the open-source roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Whales wrote the original Cataclysm but ended development of it in 2012, at which point the community forked it and kept development going for the past 8 years so far.

astrobe_ 6y ago

I seems to me that GitHub's "social coding" is slowly turning things inside-out and upside-down. At the beginning, you have a problem and you try to solve it yourself. If you succeed in doing so, great! Job done. The project is already successful at this point. Next, you can take the extra step of open-sourcing it, because it might be useful for others too, and you might maybe benefit from the improvements, bug fixes or bug reports of others. But if you start spending more time on dealing with emails, PRs etc. and it's no fun, just say no. Ignore people calling you "unprofessional" and whatnot. You owe them nothing.

Mathnerd314 6y ago
There's another step at the beginning: after you have a problem, you search for similar projects that might have already solved your problem. And in fact this step seems to generate most of the bug reports - you get "please implement feature X" and "does this have feature Y?" and so on, from people who have used your software for all of 5 minutes (or not at all). It's only after a lot of time is wasted that a new project is started. Alternatively, it could be that the people who try to use/reuse software and the people who write new software are completely separate, so that no amount of bug tracker work will lead to new source contributions.

cryptica 6y ago

I think Antirez may be just another puppet of the financial and corporate elite. Which might explain why he gets so much coverage on HN and why his open source projects have such high degree of adoption from corporations... And receives such big contracts. He writes a lot of nice uplifting pro-social articles, but keeps dancing around the real issues and doesn't do enough to really help open source. From first-hand experience, he doesn't even bother to answer emails or messages from community members or from authors of other popular open source projects.