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More than one FLOSS developer has written of huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature adde

by JJMcJ 3y ago

More than one FLOSS developer has written of huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software that serves only the company's interest. Or even replying that they are busy with other things but if the company wants to pay for the change they can work on it, and company replying that that seems like "extortion", as if the developer is under moral obligation to fix Initrode's problems for free by the end of the week.

kdmccormick 3y ago
Yeah, our situation isn't quite that bad. The big company is happy to write the feature usually, but that doesn't mean the feature should be bolted into the main repo with its special dependencies dropped right into setup.py install_requires.
ThrowawayR2 3y ago
> "...huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software..." One clueless employee, almost certainly without the knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind of authorization to represent their employer when communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?
- JJMcJ 3y ago
  Many mega corps have a culture of bullying the vendors. That can easily spill over to a single interaction.
  - ThrowawayR2 3y ago
    Yeah but the point is that megacorps have dedicated teams of specialists to do that kind of bullying and they do it with organizational consensus and coordination between relevant departments. No random individual engineer is ever going to be authorized to do that.
    - JJMcJ 3y ago
      What I meant was that when an engineering group needs a fix from a FOSS developer, the natural thing to do is to bully and beg. One reason beside bad culture is another aspect of bad culture. If they want a fix to a piece of FOSS, probably a library, they might have to beg their management for weeks or months, instead of just specifying that their project requires lib-from-overworked-dev-in-Nebraska-who-is-thinking-of-taking-up-alpaca-ranching-instead version 2.44 or later, which is what they can get if they beg, cry, and/or bully said alpaca contemplating developer.

by JJMcJ 3y ago

kdmccormick 3y ago

Yeah, our situation isn't quite that bad. The big company is happy to write the feature usually, but that doesn't mean the feature should be bolted into the main repo with its special dependencies dropped right into setup.py install_requires.

ThrowawayR2 3y ago

> "...huge companies with thousands of programmers working for them practically crying and begging to have a feature added to software..." One clueless employee, almost certainly without the knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind of authorization to represent their employer when communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?

JJMcJ 3y ago
Many mega corps have a culture of bullying the vendors. That can easily spill over to a single interaction.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  Yeah but the point is that megacorps have dedicated teams of specialists to do that kind of bullying and they do it with organizational consensus and coordination between relevant departments. No random individual engineer is ever going to be authorized to do that.
  - JJMcJ 3y ago
    What I meant was that when an engineering group needs a fix from a FOSS developer, the natural thing to do is to bully and beg. One reason beside bad culture is another aspect of bad culture. If they want a fix to a piece of FOSS, probably a library, they might have to beg their management for weeks or months, instead of just specifying that their project requires lib-from-overworked-dev-in-Nebraska-who-is-thinking-of-taking-up-alpaca-ranching-instead version 2.44 or later, which is what they can get if they beg, cry, and/or bully said alpaca contemplating developer.