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Personally, I don’t really sympathize with the “sabotage” stuff. To me, that’s just immature. Nobody can stop you from quitting out, archiving or deleting repos

by jchw 5y ago

Personally, I don’t really sympathize with the “sabotage” stuff. To me, that’s just immature. Nobody can stop you from quitting out, archiving or deleting repos, etc. but choosing the route of trying to use your influence to try to cause harm is not helpful to anyone and only serves to mess up your reputation (and to a degree, the reputation of all of us maintaining open source projects.) I am yet again still annoyed by how the “problem” here is portrayed. Open source doesn’t need to be “sustainable” for anything in particular. I like open source because I can work on anything I want, and other interested parties can join. I also work for money, and in that case, I don’t get to work on whatever I want to. The problem of internet entitlement is also not unique to open source devs. I’m sure I am not the only one here who has ran internet communities of various sorts, and that, too, can be quite rough. Possibly even worse sometimes. I do sympathize with people who can’t mentally deal with the stress, because after all, people are only human and I think they have only good intentions at heart. But if you are feeling overwhelmed by your successful projects, I think it may be necessary to step back and make sure you’re still in it for the right reasons. Because big tech companies depend on open source, it is often seen as a problem that open source code is mostly unfunded… but frankly, that only matters if you care about the fate of the tech companies more than the open source communities. I say fuck it; Google can fork whatever project if it goes unmaintained. I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft, but if they get no such influence, exactly what incentive do they have to support the original maintainers instead of forking it for themselves?

rs999gti 5y ago
> I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft Yet there are tons of developers using Angular, React, and Typescript
- jchw 5y ago
  I don’t consider this to be giving up control; I use open source projects from corporations by choice, mostly due to their merits. This is a mutual thing. On the other hand, having a big corp take over the direction of something I’m writing for fun to fit their needs is a totally different ball game. After all, many developers also use Windows or macOS, and that can have an impact, too. But for the most part, it’s inconsequential. The way I see it, open source is not different from freeware in this sort of way. If you release something out to the world under some set of terms, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people adhere to those terms. You also aren’t owed anything for being nice or giving people gifts. If you really care about getting a return on your investment, then I can only say that open source is a strategically shitty choice. Open source gives me the rare opportunity to work on stuff I actually care about, with other people who also happen to care about those things. Mutual benefit. For corporations that release software, it’s not really about autonomy, but it is still about mutual benefit; Facebook was even honest with this, mentioning that a reason for opening up React was to help make it more general and mature, and help flush out idiosyncrasies that plague the design.
graderjs 5y ago
> again still annoyed by how the “problem” here is portrayed. Open source doesn’t need to be “sustainable” for anything in particular. I like open source because I can work on anything I want, and other interested parties can join. I also work for money, and in that case, I don’t get to work on whatever I want to. Everyone's different. Some people paint as a hobby. Some people are full-time artists and want to be full-time artists so they get paid and make money doing what they want basically. Even full-time artists have got to deal with gallery owners, other artists in exhibitions, marketing publications, buyers, patrons and grant money. Somehow the way that open source works where it's never just what you want because you got a whole lot of ideas, inspiration, requests from other people so I don't think the traditional models of patronage or sponsorship are going to work for all cases. And some people like yourself they're not going to be relevant at all because you just like to work on what you want as a hobby and don't care if you get paid for it and that's perfectly fine but there's plenty of other people who will be choosing to be full-time professional creators and I think that's wonderful and I just don't think there's the right options for them to monetize that at this time.

by jchw 5y ago

rs999gti 5y ago

> I wouldn’t really want my project to be controlled or influenced by Google, Facebook or Microsoft Yet there are tons of developers using Angular, React, and Typescript

jchw 5y ago
I don’t consider this to be giving up control; I use open source projects from corporations by choice, mostly due to their merits. This is a mutual thing. On the other hand, having a big corp take over the direction of something I’m writing for fun to fit their needs is a totally different ball game. After all, many developers also use Windows or macOS, and that can have an impact, too. But for the most part, it’s inconsequential. The way I see it, open source is not different from freeware in this sort of way. If you release something out to the world under some set of terms, then you shouldn’t be surprised when people adhere to those terms. You also aren’t owed anything for being nice or giving people gifts. If you really care about getting a return on your investment, then I can only say that open source is a strategically shitty choice. Open source gives me the rare opportunity to work on stuff I actually care about, with other people who also happen to care about those things. Mutual benefit. For corporations that release software, it’s not really about autonomy, but it is still about mutual benefit; Facebook was even honest with this, mentioning that a reason for opening up React was to help make it more general and mature, and help flush out idiosyncrasies that plague the design.

graderjs 5y ago

> again still annoyed by how the “problem” here is portrayed. Open source doesn’t need to be “sustainable” for anything in particular. I like open source because I can work on anything I want, and other interested parties can join. I also work for money, and in that case, I don’t get to work on whatever I want to. Everyone's different. Some people paint as a hobby. Some people are full-time artists and want to be full-time artists so they get paid and make money doing what they want basically. Even full-time artists have got to deal with gallery owners, other artists in exhibitions, marketing publications, buyers, patrons and grant money. Somehow the way that open source works where it's never just what you want because you got a whole lot of ideas, inspiration, requests from other people so I don't think the traditional models of patronage or sponsorship are going to work for all cases. And some people like yourself they're not going to be relevant at all because you just like to work on what you want as a hobby and don't care if you get paid for it and that's perfectly fine but there's plenty of other people who will be choosing to be full-time professional creators and I think that's wonderful and I just don't think there's the right options for them to monetize that at this time.