5 ms·

> As I said, as a developer working on a software project for your employer, you often inherit dependencies you had no say in. Well y'know... you're kinda bein

• hampereddustbin 4y ago
  If commanded, sure, but in many cases your job would actually be to communicate the changing environment to management so they may allocate more resources or pay the maintainer or whatever middleman company to upkeep the required software. Silently trying to plow through problems of these magnitudes will cause the project to be late and still cost the same. It's bad for everyone
  • marcus_holmes 4y ago
    this. As a dev, this is not your problem. If you had a dependency forced on you, and that dependency has issues that the maintainers are not willing to deal with, then escalate the problem to your manager. Of course, if you included a dependency because you thought it was a good idea, and it turns out to not be a good idea, then that's a different problem. You'll have to let management know that you'll need some time to refactor the code to remove the dependency. That could be a difficult conversation, but the answer is still not "hassle the maintainer to fix my problem"
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • briantakita 4y ago
      > "hassle the maintainer to fix my problem" Who is proposing that it's a good idea to hassle the maintainer? Most of these interactions go awry when someone decides to be an asshole. The tone of the article which says "fuck off" demonstrates the interpersonal impulses at play here. Choose who you rely on wisely & try not to get into bad situations. If the maintainers of project x have an ill disposition toward the community, then consider it a red flag.
  • jstummbillig 4y ago
    It's really simple: Harassing people, who explicitly waived liability in a manner that agrees with the law, is never an okay strategy. That is not to say it can't be very attractive in the face of personal adversity or be very effective, in getting you what you want. Just it's never okay. I am also somewhat puzzled how we are having a discussion about this on HN, where adherence to open source licenses is usually a virtue. Only as long as our work is not negatively effected, I presume?
    • hampereddustbin 4y ago
      >I am also somewhat puzzled how we are having a discussion about this on HN, where adherence to open source licenses is usually a virtue. Only as long as our work is not negatively effected, I presume? There are a lot of people on this site. Some of them may think differently than others, there is no way to fuse them into a single persona.
      • jstummbillig 4y ago
        But that is exactly what we do by upvoting, statistically. There is a body of prior work to look at. Our collective stance on oss or mass surveillance is clear, and you can infer the resulting upvotes with certainty, statistically (might actually be a fun game). The spirit of hn has clear biases and it's not equally open-minded towards all ideas.
        • hampereddustbin 4y ago
          A tiny subset of the site's users have accounts to vote with, and even less make use of it let alone make comments. Any guess about the "average" would be quite inaccurate. The stance of a vocal minority on X can be quite clear on a given thread, but even that is just the opinion of maybe 20-40 people. And this is assuming there is no point manipulation at play, which is not the case for any popular site. In my opinion points alone can't be taken for more than a slight grain of salt.
    • alibarber 4y ago
      I simply cannot fathom the idea of harassing someone publicly on the internet to deal with a professional issue I face. In fact, at every company I've ever worked for, damaging the company's reputation by doing that would have lead to far more serious issues at work than just finding a workaround and documenting it well - and then, if suitable, contributing back to the project with something helpful.
• ricardobeat 4y ago
  I would like to know which universe everyone here lives in, where such scenario is a possibility. Let’s say you use Kubernetes. A transitive dependency that does DNS resolution in a built in module is doing something wrong, like not resolving hosts ending with the letter X. You can’t “refactor to remove the dependency”, you can’t realistically maintain a fork of the whole thing. This is what the majority of these situations look like. OSS is supposed to be a collaborative environment where everyone can contribute a little, not a “fuck you, pay me” environment.
  • sebastianz 4y ago
    Then do not use kubernetes, if its complex enough that you cannot afford it as a dependency, with all that entails.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • brudgers 4y ago
    OSS isn’t supposed to be anything other than what the license says.
  • MangoCoffee 4y ago
    >OSS is supposed to be a collaborative environment where everyone can contribute a little OSS coders doesn't owe you anything if they don't want to be collaborative. you already getting the code for free. you are paid to deal with these Open Source software. you can always buy the commercial software if Open Source is not doing what you want. > not a “fuck you, pay me” environment i don't understand. if OSS coders offer an pay option. why shouldn't they get pay? you get paid to deal with Open source software by your employer, no? you get to eat 'cause you get paid to deal with Open source software, no? why shouldn't OSS coders get to eat too? only you get to eat but not them?
  • jacobr1 4y ago
    You don't maintain a fork of the whole thing. You maintain a patch, ideally of an isolated area and now pay for the cost of maintaining the integration/sync of that patch until upstream merges or otherwise fixes the root issue. Depending on issue you can do this in basically clean, or ugly-hack kind of way.
• keybored 4y ago
  The hypothetical FOSS maintainer is giving a new meaning to “kill them with kindness” in this thread.