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As a user of "Hacker" News, you are potentially .... a hacker, who is quite likely to care if it is possible to hack on it in general (hence it matters that its
by lf-non 4y ago
As a user of "Hacker" News, you are potentially .... a hacker, who is quite likely to care if it is possible to hack on it in general (hence it matters that its open source) and you also likely care if it is easy for you to hack on it in particular (hence the implementation and plugin languages matter too).
- dragosbulugean 4y agoLet's consider Visual Studio Code. It's OSS — still, I read the codebase a couple of times and I wouldn't venture into hacking into it — it's too large. Being OSS enables hackability, it doesn't provide or guarantee it.
- lf-non 4y agoI wasn't claiming that OSS necessarily enables a specific individual to be able to hack on it. Just in case of your example if as a TS programmer I learn about a new code IDE that is open source and is written in TS, I might be more motivated to go check it out and explore it. So that fact does deserve mentioning - that is all I was saying. Whether or not I eventually end up contributing to it depends on a lot of factors and is besides the point.