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>This generation seems very sensitive to the prospect of computer crime. You're right. I remember a time, maybe 20 years ago, when stuff like this would be gen

>This generation seems very sensitive to the prospect of computer crime. You're right. I remember a time, maybe 20 years ago, when stuff like this would be generally appreciated by any community of hackers.

xwdv 4y ago
I think the problem is people are entering a matured industry, all they know is the professional buttoned up culture we have today. People have no further curiosity beyond working and making money in tech. They do not have memories of a time when people tinkered around doing all kinds of crazy and possibly illegal stuff, just for fun, just to see if the could. Sad really.
- medellin 4y ago
  The punishments are now somewhat known. I used to tinker with things that were questionable but after seeing what happened to swartz and others i stopped. It’s not worth it.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    It is widely suspected that was the goal.
  - lfodofod 4y ago
    Swartz was going to get a custodial sentence of less than 6 months, quite likely just probation. A slap on the wrist. What exactly did you expect the punishments to be like? A fine?
- twosdai 4y ago
  Hangout on different forums
  - rdlw 4y ago
    Where?
- nine_k 4y ago
  Tinkering is fine. Even leaking and study is fine. But re-licensing someone's else code is at the very least impolite. People avoid using BSD-licensed code in GPL code base, or vice versa, just to not violate an open-source license of some fellow hacker who won't sue (but would yawp on Twitter, or something). Also, cutting proprietary stuff out of the thick scaffolding of proprietary dependencies is often hard. Removing proprietary cruft / tech debt may be even harder. A rewrite from scratch (not clean-room though) may be just easier. This is to say nothing about any serious business unwilling to depend on code of unclear provenance, with possible legal complications attached; there goes adoption.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    > People avoid using BSD-licensed code in GPL code base Huh? I don't believe they do that. It's completely fine to use BSD in GPL code, but not the other way around.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      It is fine to do either but the result is always a GPL license.
      - dotancohen 4y ago
        I actually laughed when I read this. It is a terrific, concise explanation of the nature of both licenses.
      - andrewaylett 4y ago
        The code keeps the original license, please don't go sticking "GPL" on the BSD bits when redistributing the source. Binaries, yes -- either more or less restricted depending on which side of the ideological fence you're sitting on.
- xpe 4y ago
  > People have no further curiosity beyond working and making money in tech. For some, sure. There are also many who still explore, but qualitatively the overall culture feels very different. Unfortunately, there are employers who seem to want their employees to tinker, but own virtually everything they do, all while still playing lip service to supporting work-life balance, including parenting. So we get mixed messages and weird hiring priorities.
  - com2kid 4y ago
    > There are also many who still explore, but qualitatively the overall culture feels very different. I thought the same, then one day I stumbled onto a discord populated by teens and college students who were doing the same sort of shenanigans my friends and I were up to back in the day. The S/N ratio is worse, but there are still people out there having fun!
    - xpe 4y ago
      Fair enough. Still, after many decades in software, the current ethos feels so different as to be unrecognizable from where I started. I learned to program on an Apple ][+. To start, I was not business driven; I primarily explored software and hardware, without a particular business end in mind. Later, after studying engineering, I moved more into caring about problems and products. Over time, I found more and more companies wanted the benefits of having skilled software developers, but they seems to primarily want the businessified version -- solve the problem at hand while punting obvious existential problems down the road. Sure, many Silicon Valley startups say they want "passionate" programmers, but they didn't usually embrace the tradeoffs that go along with it ... time and resources to explore, supporting risk taking, and fostering a culture where some experimentation is its own end (not merely a means). Worse, these same companies that claimed to be business focused didn't even engineer well. So often I saw a double failure: a lack of both the long-term exploration and tactical execution. Somehow both got lost. There are exceptions of organizations that have healthy, adaptive cultures that internalize continual assessment and improvement, ranging across team interactions, software quality, user experience, and organizational processes. Perhaps I was too naive and didn't fully appreciate the difficulty here; my progression in engineering has generally coincided with me lowering my expectations. I mean this as a trend line only; I have seen some impressive exceptions, but they tend to be unusual and fairly narrow in scope. For example, the best product vision I've ever seen was coupled with a seemingly distracted CEO. This is just one thread of my experience, I'm sure others have seen many other things. I for one would really enjoy reading reflections on working in the software industry. For myself and perhaps other "passionate" programmers, learning to dial down "caring" and attempting to fit in with imperfect cultures is very hard. It would be one thing if the people in control seemed to understand the situation and showed empirically good results.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- seanhunter 4y ago
  Not really. If you value your own work, have things you have chosen not to give away and therefore wouldn’t want someone else to steal them, then it makes logical sense to consider the value of other people’s work and not feel comfortable about using a stolen version. Not everyone has to share a political point of view, so while some people are anarchists and are happy to just have a giant free-for all others believe in the concept of ownership. That isn’t a lack of curiosity or a professional buttoned-up money-chasing approach.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    I think OP is lamenting the fact that the hacker culture shifted away from what you describe as "anarchism" as the mainstream position. It really was a lot more common among people who self-identified as hackers 20 years ago than it is today. More broadly speaking, I'd say that the cultural distinction between "hacker" and "corporate" was much wider then, and it manifested in this manner among others.
    - seanhunter 4y ago
      I've been programming and part of "hacker" culture for over 40 years now so I get it. 20 years ago you would get people lamenting that 20 years before that everything was all hippy sunshine and rainbows and homebrew computer club, phreaking and shareware etc, and that wasn't true then just like it isn't now. I don't think anarchism has ever been the mainstream position at least never in my experience. It has always been present but always been fringe.
robin_reala 4y ago
Maybe, but I remember when the Windows 2000 source leaked, and the ReactOS developers started forcing all contributors to sign a statement saying that they hadn’t read it.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  Yup it'd end up in random places just like fast inverse square root. Origin will be forgotten and that will be that. These days everyone whack code on GitHub I wonder if it'd be possible for GitHub to review repos for likely derivative of leaked code?
  - YoshiRulz 4y ago
    If GitHub did that then there's a chance it would flag Copilot-written code, revealing their public narrative as a lie, so I think they'd quickly kill any such proposals.

xwdv 4y ago

I think the problem is people are entering a matured industry, all they know is the professional buttoned up culture we have today. People have no further curiosity beyond working and making money in tech. They do not have memories of a time when people tinkered around doing all kinds of crazy and possibly illegal stuff, just for fun, just to see if the could. Sad really.

medellin 4y ago
The punishments are now somewhat known. I used to tinker with things that were questionable but after seeing what happened to swartz and others i stopped. It’s not worth it.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  It is widely suspected that was the goal.
- lfodofod 4y ago
  Swartz was going to get a custodial sentence of less than 6 months, quite likely just probation. A slap on the wrist. What exactly did you expect the punishments to be like? A fine?
twosdai 4y ago
Hangout on different forums
- rdlw 4y ago
  Where?
nine_k 4y ago
Tinkering is fine. Even leaking and study is fine. But re-licensing someone's else code is at the very least impolite. People avoid using BSD-licensed code in GPL code base, or vice versa, just to not violate an open-source license of some fellow hacker who won't sue (but would yawp on Twitter, or something). Also, cutting proprietary stuff out of the thick scaffolding of proprietary dependencies is often hard. Removing proprietary cruft / tech debt may be even harder. A rewrite from scratch (not clean-room though) may be just easier. This is to say nothing about any serious business unwilling to depend on code of unclear provenance, with possible legal complications attached; there goes adoption.
- viraptor 4y ago
  > People avoid using BSD-licensed code in GPL code base Huh? I don't believe they do that. It's completely fine to use BSD in GPL code, but not the other way around.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    It is fine to do either but the result is always a GPL license.
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      I actually laughed when I read this. It is a terrific, concise explanation of the nature of both licenses.
    - andrewaylett 4y ago
      The code keeps the original license, please don't go sticking "GPL" on the BSD bits when redistributing the source. Binaries, yes -- either more or less restricted depending on which side of the ideological fence you're sitting on.
xpe 4y ago
> People have no further curiosity beyond working and making money in tech. For some, sure. There are also many who still explore, but qualitatively the overall culture feels very different. Unfortunately, there are employers who seem to want their employees to tinker, but own virtually everything they do, all while still playing lip service to supporting work-life balance, including parenting. So we get mixed messages and weird hiring priorities.
- com2kid 4y ago
  > There are also many who still explore, but qualitatively the overall culture feels very different. I thought the same, then one day I stumbled onto a discord populated by teens and college students who were doing the same sort of shenanigans my friends and I were up to back in the day. The S/N ratio is worse, but there are still people out there having fun!
  - xpe 4y ago
    Fair enough. Still, after many decades in software, the current ethos feels so different as to be unrecognizable from where I started. I learned to program on an Apple ][+. To start, I was not business driven; I primarily explored software and hardware, without a particular business end in mind. Later, after studying engineering, I moved more into caring about problems and products. Over time, I found more and more companies wanted the benefits of having skilled software developers, but they seems to primarily want the businessified version -- solve the problem at hand while punting obvious existential problems down the road. Sure, many Silicon Valley startups say they want "passionate" programmers, but they didn't usually embrace the tradeoffs that go along with it ... time and resources to explore, supporting risk taking, and fostering a culture where some experimentation is its own end (not merely a means). Worse, these same companies that claimed to be business focused didn't even engineer well. So often I saw a double failure: a lack of both the long-term exploration and tactical execution. Somehow both got lost. There are exceptions of organizations that have healthy, adaptive cultures that internalize continual assessment and improvement, ranging across team interactions, software quality, user experience, and organizational processes. Perhaps I was too naive and didn't fully appreciate the difficulty here; my progression in engineering has generally coincided with me lowering my expectations. I mean this as a trend line only; I have seen some impressive exceptions, but they tend to be unusual and fairly narrow in scope. For example, the best product vision I've ever seen was coupled with a seemingly distracted CEO. This is just one thread of my experience, I'm sure others have seen many other things. I for one would really enjoy reading reflections on working in the software industry. For myself and perhaps other "passionate" programmers, learning to dial down "caring" and attempting to fit in with imperfect cultures is very hard. It would be one thing if the people in control seemed to understand the situation and showed empirically good results.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
seanhunter 4y ago
Not really. If you value your own work, have things you have chosen not to give away and therefore wouldn’t want someone else to steal them, then it makes logical sense to consider the value of other people’s work and not feel comfortable about using a stolen version. Not everyone has to share a political point of view, so while some people are anarchists and are happy to just have a giant free-for all others believe in the concept of ownership. That isn’t a lack of curiosity or a professional buttoned-up money-chasing approach.
- int_19h 4y ago
  I think OP is lamenting the fact that the hacker culture shifted away from what you describe as "anarchism" as the mainstream position. It really was a lot more common among people who self-identified as hackers 20 years ago than it is today. More broadly speaking, I'd say that the cultural distinction between "hacker" and "corporate" was much wider then, and it manifested in this manner among others.
  - seanhunter 4y ago
    I've been programming and part of "hacker" culture for over 40 years now so I get it. 20 years ago you would get people lamenting that 20 years before that everything was all hippy sunshine and rainbows and homebrew computer club, phreaking and shareware etc, and that wasn't true then just like it isn't now. I don't think anarchism has ever been the mainstream position at least never in my experience. It has always been present but always been fringe.

robin_reala 4y ago

Maybe, but I remember when the Windows 2000 source leaked, and the ReactOS developers started forcing all contributors to sign a statement saying that they hadn’t read it.

psychphysic 4y ago
Yup it'd end up in random places just like fast inverse square root. Origin will be forgotten and that will be that. These days everyone whack code on GitHub I wonder if it'd be possible for GitHub to review repos for likely derivative of leaked code?
- YoshiRulz 4y ago
  If GitHub did that then there's a chance it would flag Copilot-written code, revealing their public narrative as a lie, so I think they'd quickly kill any such proposals.