8 ms·

It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? A while back I bought a

It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks https://github.com/wpietri/sucks Honestly, this was a mistake on my part. It was a demanding audience of home-automation hobbyists mostly without programming skills. The company was thoroughly unhelpful. When my vacuum finally broke, I was relieved, as I had a good excuse for trying to hand off the project. Nobody stepped up, so I shut it down. I just ran out of interest in doing free work to support a company worth billions. I really admire the community spirit of open source But it's not sustainable if companies making their money off it keep depending on the niceness and generosity of others without giving back enough to keep them happy, healthy, productive people.

bawolff 5y ago
> It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? I think that's a pretty unfair characterization of the previous post.
candiddevmike 5y ago
IMO, I think the golden age of completely FOSS apps (no open core) is ending/has ended as users expect more features and apps struggle to meet demands without effective monetization. I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Entirely possible. Although I suspect more libraries and tools will go that way as well. Note that mine was in theory a library/tool. And the examples mentioned in the blog post were similarly infrastructural. Most of us work at such high levels of abstraction we couldn't even name all our dependencies. Which in effect makes us the same sort of consumers app users are: expecting a lot out but not putting anything in.
- the_af 5y ago
  > I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source. Very sad if this ever comes to pass. It's a world in which I would never have learned about computers or decided to work with them. I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals. (I don't think this future will happen though: I think it's based on a deep misunderstanding of what drives FOSS developers to do what they do).
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Shouldn’t Open Source be considered the 8th wonder of the world? - OSS allowed an entire industry to flourish, - It has had so many contributions that it is easily the category which is the biggest benevolence of the world, and possibly the biggest achievement of humanity, - It allowed the entire world to go securely on the internet (launch a Debian and it’s secure and up to very high professional standards without effort, try doing that in the legal field), - Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      > Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM. In practice, I think that only entirely cloud based ecosystems will be lost to time. As long as the requisite hardware can be emulated and there is an archived version of a local viewer, it's possible to interpret a closed source format document. People already do it with WordStar and retro games.
  - prirun 5y ago
    > I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals. I agree, but how do you distinguish between the two, and how do you make the source available yet compel large companies to pay?
- smorgusofborg 5y ago
  > as users expect more features I think mobile was a reprieve for commercial software and UX specialists and the increasingly negative comments on new OS versions indicate it is close to done like desktop. For every user that likes a change there are 19 that prefer the flow they already learned to stay exactly the same and at least half are looking for exploitive attempts to modify their behavior in anything a publisher changes.
- urthor 5y ago
  I think the exact opposite. All of my open source tools in 2021 are of extraordinarily higher quality than they were 10 years ago. All I see with the FOSS ecosystem is it picking up steam at an extraordinary pace from 2005. Postgres in particular has absolutely dominated its incumbents in recent times, an insane reversal from the situation at the turn of the millennium. There's a guarantee of correctness, availability of auditability, and a tide of slow, iterative improvements. The key is supply and demand. Open source software is often not a trailblazer. Open source is often reactive to a need, and punctuated by a demand for quality, bad treatment by the commercial incumbent, and constant iterative improvement. See the pattern of so many technologies, Docker following VM ware, open source databases following Oracle (1980s Oracle was a real pioneer). Open source has always and will continue to be a slow rolling borg that chases commercial software. Projects will never be rushed, but the benefits of an open base has time and time again crushed closed source incumbents.
mfer 5y ago
A few thoughts... I've long known people who modified cars. Sometimes they did it as a business. Sometimes they helped friends out. Sometimes the work was on nights and weekends. The car manufacturer never had a responsibility to support them. They never had to support people in forums. Anything they did was their choice. Sometimes as a business and sometimes volunteering. You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support. Doing volunteer work and hoping for generosity from companies isn't working.
- phkahler 5y ago
  >> You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support. That's true. The problems brought up in the article all stem from companies relying on open source and then getting into trouble when there are problems with it. They would pay if they had to. The core problem is that everyone wants something for nothing. Sure companies appreciate that they can get billions of dollars worth of infrastructure software for free. Individuals appreciate that they can get useful software for free (though many don't care if it's FLOSS or illegally obtains commercial). People will take what they can, and pay for what they must. Open source is sometimes better than commercial, and even if the developers were paid industry rates it would be much cheaper because companies charge rent for software - not for development.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    It is not a problem. It just is how humans function. So act accordingly. Trying to change how humans work is a waste of times. You are fighting millions of years of evolution. Good luck with that. Try not to be bitter when you fail.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      That is one of those evo-psych just-so stories. American corporate culture in the late 20th/early 21st century is not representative of all humans at all times. I get that it's the dominant experience for you, but please don't confuse that with some sort of deep evolutionary imperative. One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is how extremely social, how extremely cooperative we are. See, for example, E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of the Earth" for more on where we fit in evolutionarily.
usefulcat 5y ago
>> Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? > If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? That doesn't answer the GP question, which is all about incentives. The answer is, at least some parties won't pay for what they can get for free. So the options are: a) deal with it b) require payment c) come up with some way to incentivize more donations
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  d) stop It’s not like there is a parable about killing the goose that laid the golden egg to teach you how to appreciate these things.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all. Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.
  - cxr 5y ago
    > tech people [need] to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy Agreed on this, but the "and companies" thing is a total red herring. Two things to note: even though you mention "people and companies", it's incredibly clear from popular sentiment that the conception held by most people of the problem/solution comes down to the latter (companies) and not the former (people). Focusing on companies at all—let alone allowing it to occupy a majority share of one's focus—is a huge mistake. Depersonalized abstract entities like companies are almost entirely immune to whatever methods of persuasion people have in mind here. Gay rights only just became kosher to "take a stand" on, and even then it's invariably limited to being trotted out as a vehicle for the most empty and self-serving marketing horseshit and other corporate speak that anyone should expect to come out of these institutions. Cultural pressure for open source by way of shaming companies doesn't stand a chance; it has to come down to people. I've brought up the subject before: why do we rake companies over the coals for their inaction, but ignore the individuals? It's worth reflecting on the relationship between a company and its employees. A company, no matter how many layers of management are involved, delegates some problem to an employee. That employee surveys the lay of the land and then elects to use some tech that is available from the commons towards solving the problem. In turn, they are rewarded by their employer in both tangibles and intangibles that are considered proportionate to the achievement and budgeted accordingly. Thus, that person is, in a very real way, converting the labor of others into personal gain—in the form of wealth, career prospects/advancement, and personal stature in wider society. Why is it easy to frame a company as the perpetrator and hard to say anything about any given developer who benefited from this (and did not share)? Because it's uncomfortable, since it's too personal? That might make sense if we were talking about, say, a custodian with limited career prospects just doing their best to keep their head above water and provide for their family already, but that tends not to be the case where software development is involved. The implication here is clear. (Forget, for now, the prior argument I just made about effectiveness for a moment and feel free to focus just on the fairness aspect here, if it uncomplicates things.) If there's any appropriate allocation of social pressure to be meted out—resulting in social expectations to be met—then it needs to come in the form of beliefs like, "hey, if as part of your employment you are singlehandedly making something like twice the US national average of an entire household, and you're not giving away at _least_ 10% of your salary to the people who made that possible, then you're kind of a piece of shit." Is that a stand that people are willing to make, though? It's acceptable to disagree with this, but to understand why you feel it's justified to defend the individuals involved means that you have everything you need to understand why there is no movement on the problem. Perennially and impotently opining that companies need to quit screwing around and do something already is a ridiculous strategy.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. Making something open source is about granting freedoms for users of that thing. One of those freedoms is usually "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software". Open source authors that expect some benefactor to appear and sprinkle money so that they can quit their day job and work on their hobby full time are, for lack of a better term, delusional. The default is that no one will use your thing, no one will contribute, no one will fund you, etc. Anything beyond that is a fluke.
- wpietri 5y ago
  > "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software". This is demonstrably not how many people many treat open-source authors. Just look at how the Log4J folks are feeling right now: https://twitter.com/yazicivo/status/1469349956880408583 https://twitter.com/yazicivo/status/1469349956880408583 I do have some open-source code out there where people have been mostly pleasant and reasonable. It's targeted at developers in particular niches and they do act mostly as you describe. But once it shifts from a peer relationship to a producer/consumer relationship, things can easily get ugly. Ugly in a way that drives people out of open source and keeps people from open-sourcing useful code. You appear to be fine with that. But if anybody's delusional here, it's the people who expect to keep taking from open-source software without worrying about its sustainability.
  - pxc 5y ago
    the text of the tweet: > Log4j maintainers have been working sleeplessly on mitigation measures; fixes, docs, CVE, replies to inquiries, etc. Yet nothing is stopping people to bash us, for work we aren't paid for, for a feature we all dislike yet needed to keep due to backward compatibility concerns. Why don't they 'resolve' the security issue by removing the feature and then set up a bug bounty for backporting fixes to the shitty feature? Then the companies that depend on it will actually be on the hook for once. Too much collateral damage for downstream F/OSS? Too unseemly a move, in a moment of ‘crisis’?
sennight 5y ago
> reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced ... free work oof, I know that feeling - that sadness that comes with the realization that the manufacturer could have saved you so much trouble but chose not to... which you then rewarded with free labor and promotion. I got it every time I disassembled binary blobs in order to get hardware to work with anything beyond Windows. For a long time there wasn't much of an alternative, but that isn't really the case anymore. Setting up a new openpower system was a very strange experience, reverse-engineering wasn't even an option - the manufacturer provided schematics for the board and a wiki directing you to the source code for every bit of firmware (including the ring -3 processor).
- wpietri 5y ago
  My sympathies! It sounds like you got much deeper than I did. I don't regret trying it once. It's possible, after all, that the manufacturer would have said, "Look, there's demand for an open protocol, just like some engineers have been saying. Let's take on that work ourselves." And honestly, they could have gotten away with some very modest support of the project: occasional discussions with engineers and enough free hardware that we could test new builds. But no shits were given on their part, so I also don't regret shutting the project down. I'm glad to hear things are getting better in some spaces. Let's hope it keeps going that way!
deterministic 5y ago
It seems like you haven’t quite got the concept of capitalism and how humans and markets actually work. If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0. Yes a tiny minority may want to pay more than that to make themselves feel morally superior or to virtue signal their goodness. But most won’t. Accept it and act accordingly: make companies pay to use your work and sue the companies that fail to comply with the licence conditions. It isn’t rocket science.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  > If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0. I should've been paying my mother market rates. After all, she and my father have been running at a loss for this whole "family" enterprise. IMO, open source is (or should be seen as) more of a "friends and family doing favours for each other" kind of human activity. Some people do it for the sheer joy of it, share without expectation of more than a "thank you" (at max), and calling their work valueless is just crass marketism.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    You are not getting my point. I am reacting to the OSS maintainers that get upset when the intrinsic value of their work doesn't automatically convert to market value ($ in their pockets). My point is to stop blaming the world and instead put a market value on their work for corporations.
    - dang 5y ago
      Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been it a lot in these threads. I'm afraid it's repetitive and it lowers the quality of the discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - wpietri 5y ago
        Thanks. My apologies for taking the bait.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
j1elo 5y ago
I don't think that releasing that tool was a mistake. The mistake was worrying about providing support for it, beyond what you needed it to do. This is the same as the poor log4j devs, getting bashed and still trying their best effort to please everybody. Lost and lots of open source authors release some work to the open, and then start to worry about everybody's opinions and complaints. But that's a very unhealthy thing to do, IMO. In essence, this is your own garage project and you've taken it out to the street for people to enjoy or admire. You should care about people's complaints as many f*cks as stacks of money they are putting on your table. Anything else, will end up deteriorating your mental health, one way or the other.

bawolff 5y ago

> It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? I think that's a pretty unfair characterization of the previous post.

candiddevmike 5y ago

IMO, I think the golden age of completely FOSS apps (no open core) is ending/has ended as users expect more features and apps struggle to meet demands without effective monetization. I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source.

wpietri 5y ago
Entirely possible. Although I suspect more libraries and tools will go that way as well. Note that mine was in theory a library/tool. And the examples mentioned in the blog post were similarly infrastructural. Most of us work at such high levels of abstraction we couldn't even name all our dependencies. Which in effect makes us the same sort of consumers app users are: expecting a lot out but not putting anything in.
the_af 5y ago
> I think open source will always have a place for libraries and tools, but end user applications will either become open core or no longer open source. Very sad if this ever comes to pass. It's a world in which I would never have learned about computers or decided to work with them. I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals. (I don't think this future will happen though: I think it's based on a deep misunderstanding of what drives FOSS developers to do what they do).
- laurent92 5y ago
  Shouldn’t Open Source be considered the 8th wonder of the world? - OSS allowed an entire industry to flourish, - It has had so many contributions that it is easily the category which is the biggest benevolence of the world, and possibly the biggest achievement of humanity, - It allowed the entire world to go securely on the internet (launch a Debian and it’s secure and up to very high professional standards without effort, try doing that in the legal field), - Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    > Its results are permanent. In 2100, documents written in Office 365 or Adobe will be lost, but they’ll be able to recompile LibreOffice, Chrome (at least Webkit) or Wordpress. Benefits of OSS accrue over time, as opposed to closed-source software which is sold under closed license and DRM. In practice, I think that only entirely cloud based ecosystems will be lost to time. As long as the requisite hardware can be emulated and there is an archived version of a local viewer, it's possible to interpret a closed source format document. People already do it with WordStar and retro games.
- prirun 5y ago
  > I think it makes more sense to charge big companies but keep software free and libre for individuals. I agree, but how do you distinguish between the two, and how do you make the source available yet compel large companies to pay?
smorgusofborg 5y ago
> as users expect more features I think mobile was a reprieve for commercial software and UX specialists and the increasingly negative comments on new OS versions indicate it is close to done like desktop. For every user that likes a change there are 19 that prefer the flow they already learned to stay exactly the same and at least half are looking for exploitive attempts to modify their behavior in anything a publisher changes.
urthor 5y ago
I think the exact opposite. All of my open source tools in 2021 are of extraordinarily higher quality than they were 10 years ago. All I see with the FOSS ecosystem is it picking up steam at an extraordinary pace from 2005. Postgres in particular has absolutely dominated its incumbents in recent times, an insane reversal from the situation at the turn of the millennium. There's a guarantee of correctness, availability of auditability, and a tide of slow, iterative improvements. The key is supply and demand. Open source software is often not a trailblazer. Open source is often reactive to a need, and punctuated by a demand for quality, bad treatment by the commercial incumbent, and constant iterative improvement. See the pattern of so many technologies, Docker following VM ware, open source databases following Oracle (1980s Oracle was a real pioneer). Open source has always and will continue to be a slow rolling borg that chases commercial software. Projects will never be rushed, but the benefits of an open base has time and time again crushed closed source incumbents.

mfer 5y ago

A few thoughts... I've long known people who modified cars. Sometimes they did it as a business. Sometimes they helped friends out. Sometimes the work was on nights and weekends. The car manufacturer never had a responsibility to support them. They never had to support people in forums. Anything they did was their choice. Sometimes as a business and sometimes volunteering. You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support. Doing volunteer work and hoping for generosity from companies isn't working.

phkahler 5y ago
>> You didn't have to open source that work. Once it was out there, you didn't need to provide support. That's true. The problems brought up in the article all stem from companies relying on open source and then getting into trouble when there are problems with it. They would pay if they had to. The core problem is that everyone wants something for nothing. Sure companies appreciate that they can get billions of dollars worth of infrastructure software for free. Individuals appreciate that they can get useful software for free (though many don't care if it's FLOSS or illegally obtains commercial). People will take what they can, and pay for what they must. Open source is sometimes better than commercial, and even if the developers were paid industry rates it would be much cheaper because companies charge rent for software - not for development.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  It is not a problem. It just is how humans function. So act accordingly. Trying to change how humans work is a waste of times. You are fighting millions of years of evolution. Good luck with that. Try not to be bitter when you fail.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    That is one of those evo-psych just-so stories. American corporate culture in the late 20th/early 21st century is not representative of all humans at all times. I get that it's the dominant experience for you, but please don't confuse that with some sort of deep evolutionary imperative. One of the things that distinguishes humans as a species is how extremely social, how extremely cooperative we are. See, for example, E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of the Earth" for more on where we fit in evolutionarily.

usefulcat 5y ago

>> Given this situation, why will they pay for what they can get for free? > If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last? That doesn't answer the GP question, which is all about incentives. The answer is, at least some parties won't pay for what they can get for free. So the options are: a) deal with it b) require payment c) come up with some way to incentivize more donations

meheleventyone 5y ago
d) stop It’s not like there is a parable about killing the goose that laid the golden egg to teach you how to appreciate these things.
wpietri 5y ago
Those aren't the only answers. The notion that people only respond to direct incentives is incorrect and ahistorical. It's a convenient dogma for the selfish to promote, but I don't have to take it seriously at all. Another perfectly good option is for tech people to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy. Which is what's happening right here in this discussion, so you could be part of that solution if you wanted.
- cxr 5y ago
  > tech people [need] to build strong cultural expectations that people and companies who benefit from a commons should help keep it healthy Agreed on this, but the "and companies" thing is a total red herring. Two things to note: even though you mention "people and companies", it's incredibly clear from popular sentiment that the conception held by most people of the problem/solution comes down to the latter (companies) and not the former (people). Focusing on companies at all—let alone allowing it to occupy a majority share of one's focus—is a huge mistake. Depersonalized abstract entities like companies are almost entirely immune to whatever methods of persuasion people have in mind here. Gay rights only just became kosher to "take a stand" on, and even then it's invariably limited to being trotted out as a vehicle for the most empty and self-serving marketing horseshit and other corporate speak that anyone should expect to come out of these institutions. Cultural pressure for open source by way of shaming companies doesn't stand a chance; it has to come down to people. I've brought up the subject before: why do we rake companies over the coals for their inaction, but ignore the individuals? It's worth reflecting on the relationship between a company and its employees. A company, no matter how many layers of management are involved, delegates some problem to an employee. That employee surveys the lay of the land and then elects to use some tech that is available from the commons towards solving the problem. In turn, they are rewarded by their employer in both tangibles and intangibles that are considered proportionate to the achievement and budgeted accordingly. Thus, that person is, in a very real way, converting the labor of others into personal gain—in the form of wealth, career prospects/advancement, and personal stature in wider society. Why is it easy to frame a company as the perpetrator and hard to say anything about any given developer who benefited from this (and did not share)? Because it's uncomfortable, since it's too personal? That might make sense if we were talking about, say, a custodian with limited career prospects just doing their best to keep their head above water and provide for their family already, but that tends not to be the case where software development is involved. The implication here is clear. (Forget, for now, the prior argument I just made about effectiveness for a moment and feel free to focus just on the fairness aspect here, if it uncomplicates things.) If there's any appropriate allocation of social pressure to be meted out—resulting in social expectations to be met—then it needs to come in the form of beliefs like, "hey, if as part of your employment you are singlehandedly making something like twice the US national average of an entire household, and you're not giving away at _least_ 10% of your salary to the people who made that possible, then you're kind of a piece of shit." Is that a stand that people are willing to make, though? It's acceptable to disagree with this, but to understand why you feel it's justified to defend the individuals involved means that you have everything you need to understand why there is no movement on the problem. Perennially and impotently opining that companies need to quit screwing around and do something already is a ridiculous strategy.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago

It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. Making something open source is about granting freedoms for users of that thing. One of those freedoms is usually "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software". Open source authors that expect some benefactor to appear and sprinkle money so that they can quit their day job and work on their hobby full time are, for lack of a better term, delusional. The default is that no one will use your thing, no one will contribute, no one will fund you, etc. Anything beyond that is a fluke.

wpietri 5y ago
> "you owe nothing and can do with it what you wish: sell it, fork it, modify it" in exchange for "the author provides no guarantees and is not liable for this software". This is demonstrably not how many people many treat open-source authors. Just look at how the Log4J folks are feeling right now: https://twitter.com/yazicivo/status/1469349956880408583 https://twitter.com/yazicivo/status/1469349956880408583 I do have some open-source code out there where people have been mostly pleasant and reasonable. It's targeted at developers in particular niches and they do act mostly as you describe. But once it shifts from a peer relationship to a producer/consumer relationship, things can easily get ugly. Ugly in a way that drives people out of open source and keeps people from open-sourcing useful code. You appear to be fine with that. But if anybody's delusional here, it's the people who expect to keep taking from open-source software without worrying about its sustainability.
- pxc 5y ago
  the text of the tweet: > Log4j maintainers have been working sleeplessly on mitigation measures; fixes, docs, CVE, replies to inquiries, etc. Yet nothing is stopping people to bash us, for work we aren't paid for, for a feature we all dislike yet needed to keep due to backward compatibility concerns. Why don't they 'resolve' the security issue by removing the feature and then set up a bug bounty for backporting fixes to the shitty feature? Then the companies that depend on it will actually be on the hook for once. Too much collateral damage for downstream F/OSS? Too unseemly a move, in a moment of ‘crisis’?

sennight 5y ago

> reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced ... free work oof, I know that feeling - that sadness that comes with the realization that the manufacturer could have saved you so much trouble but chose not to... which you then rewarded with free labor and promotion. I got it every time I disassembled binary blobs in order to get hardware to work with anything beyond Windows. For a long time there wasn't much of an alternative, but that isn't really the case anymore. Setting up a new openpower system was a very strange experience, reverse-engineering wasn't even an option - the manufacturer provided schematics for the board and a wiki directing you to the source code for every bit of firmware (including the ring -3 processor).

wpietri 5y ago
My sympathies! It sounds like you got much deeper than I did. I don't regret trying it once. It's possible, after all, that the manufacturer would have said, "Look, there's demand for an open protocol, just like some engineers have been saying. Let's take on that work ourselves." And honestly, they could have gotten away with some very modest support of the project: occasional discussions with engineers and enough free hardware that we could test new builds. But no shits were given on their part, so I also don't regret shutting the project down. I'm glad to hear things are getting better in some spaces. Let's hope it keeps going that way!

deterministic 5y ago

It seems like you haven’t quite got the concept of capitalism and how humans and markets actually work. If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0. Yes a tiny minority may want to pay more than that to make themselves feel morally superior or to virtue signal their goodness. But most won’t. Accept it and act accordingly: make companies pay to use your work and sue the companies that fail to comply with the licence conditions. It isn’t rocket science.

selfhoster11 5y ago
> If you give away your work for $0 then the value of your work is $0. I should've been paying my mother market rates. After all, she and my father have been running at a loss for this whole "family" enterprise. IMO, open source is (or should be seen as) more of a "friends and family doing favours for each other" kind of human activity. Some people do it for the sheer joy of it, share without expectation of more than a "thank you" (at max), and calling their work valueless is just crass marketism.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  You are not getting my point. I am reacting to the OSS maintainers that get upset when the intrinsic value of their work doesn't automatically convert to market value ($ in their pockets). My point is to stop blaming the world and instead put a market value on their work for corporations.
  - dang 5y ago
    Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've been it a lot in these threads. I'm afraid it's repetitive and it lowers the quality of the discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Thanks. My apologies for taking the bait.

deleted 5y ago

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j1elo 5y ago

I don't think that releasing that tool was a mistake. The mistake was worrying about providing support for it, beyond what you needed it to do. This is the same as the poor log4j devs, getting bashed and still trying their best effort to please everybody. Lost and lots of open source authors release some work to the open, and then start to worry about everybody's opinions and complaints. But that's a very unhealthy thing to do, IMO. In essence, this is your own garage project and you've taken it out to the street for people to enjoy or admire. You should care about people's complaints as many f*cks as stacks of money they are putting on your table. Anything else, will end up deteriorating your mental health, one way or the other.