3 ms·
There a couple of categories of comments on this thread that I think are missleading. 1) Judging the author's decision based on his previous behaviour or curre
by gtsop 6y ago
There a couple of categories of comments on this thread that I think are missleading.
1) Judging the author's decision based on his previous behaviour or current speculation over his situation
2) Judging the author's decision to write OS and "demand" to be paid.
Both categories, imho, are missleading the real issue at hand which is this: We, as developers, as companies and as a society, who decided to depend uppon one man's work to make a living, our interest is to keep maintaining this library to keep our software running and evolving properly. Time (thus money) has to be spent for that.
So the question is for the rest of us here: Do we want to keep replacing various OS libraries on our depedency trees because some people can't keep maintaining them? Or shall we pay them? Or shall we maintain them ourselves? Somethint has to give.
To me, his point is at it's core very correct: pay me or fork it.
The rest is chit chat
- carapace 6y agoYou know the Bash shell is maintained by a single unpaid volunteer? He also maintains the GNU readline library.
- gtsop 6y agoWhat is your point? He can maintain it without pay. Good for him, good for us, good for all. This case is different.
- carapace 6y agoWell I guess I have a few points: 1) We all depend on Chet Ramsey and don't spare a moment to think about it. How many people have emailed him a thank you note, let alone sent him money? 2) Is that good or bad? or both? 3) Mature software has low low maintenance costs (that's almost the definition of "mature software", eh?) 4) The real problem might be that we keep writing new code. If you restrict yourself to mature code your costs go way down, since you're not paying to write new code nor to maintain it. (It might read like I'm saying Marak should be like Ramsey, that's NOT my point.)
- gtsop 6y ago1) Very few indeed. 2) I will say mostly bad, but this is also a factor of his personal ability to cope financially and support bash at the same time. But again, mostly bad. 3) ahmmm not always. You can make the argument the linux kernel is very mature but the maintenance cost isn't low at all since it needs to keeo changing and is also getting larger and larger. 4) Yes agreed, but sometimes this isn't an option because many companies want to build propriatery solutions (for reasons that may be valid or not). If I am a developer at that project... well I will reuse as more mature code as possible, but then I'll need to write new code as well