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I was thinking about the essence of open source recently, and I came to the following conclusion: open source is when you treat people as developers, not as use

by sesm 3y ago

I was thinking about the essence of open source recently, and I came to the following conclusion: open source is when you treat people as developers, not as users. Which means: it should be trivial to build and run from source, debug, add extra logs and apply patches. Moreover, creating and applying your own patches should be encouraged, anything that can be easily patched shouldn't be a configuration option. Most corporate "open source" fails this test, they treat people as users, create marketing websites while publishing zero developer documentation. What's interesting, JS ecosystem accidentally has this property, thanks to packages being distributed as source, standard logging system (console.log) and widespread use of `patch-package` tool.

bee_rider 3y ago
Not everyone can code in a way that is useful for development, but one way of looking at it could be: actually treating people like a community, rather than users. Unfortunately the phrase “community” has been degraded a bit by companies who want a more in-group-feeling-inducing way of describing their users. But, in a real community, people support each other and try to push projects forward, contributing in the fashion that best suits their skills, and toward goals that best fit their interests.
J_Shelby_J 3y ago
In the age of LLMs everyone is a dev. What's the next iteration of SaaS then?
- majewsky 3y ago
  Most uses of LLMs for development that I've seen are for writing code, when the majority of dev time is spent reading code. What offerings exist to read through an existing codebase and ask questions of it? Do contemporary LLMs have enough lookbehind for that?
  - J_Shelby_J 3y ago
    We are years from way from the average user being able to replace X SaaS tool with available open source software they run themselves. Even now, the average person could have GPT walk them through replacing WIX with their own self hosted website. When I say "dev," I probably misspoke. I meant more in the sense that the average person will be able to implement existing software in a way that was previously unreachable.

by sesm 3y ago

bee_rider 3y ago

Not everyone can code in a way that is useful for development, but one way of looking at it could be: actually treating people like a community, rather than users. Unfortunately the phrase “community” has been degraded a bit by companies who want a more in-group-feeling-inducing way of describing their users. But, in a real community, people support each other and try to push projects forward, contributing in the fashion that best suits their skills, and toward goals that best fit their interests.

J_Shelby_J 3y ago

In the age of LLMs everyone is a dev. What's the next iteration of SaaS then?

majewsky 3y ago
Most uses of LLMs for development that I've seen are for writing code, when the majority of dev time is spent reading code. What offerings exist to read through an existing codebase and ask questions of it? Do contemporary LLMs have enough lookbehind for that?
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  We are years from way from the average user being able to replace X SaaS tool with available open source software they run themselves. Even now, the average person could have GPT walk them through replacing WIX with their own self hosted website. When I say "dev," I probably misspoke. I meant more in the sense that the average person will be able to implement existing software in a way that was previously unreachable.