3 ms·

> A classic tragedy of the commons. Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are in

by feoren 2y ago

> A classic tragedy of the commons. Except software is infinitely reproducible once written. There's no tragedy of the commons if the commons' resources are infinte. "But code needs to constantly change and update all the time! Who's going to do that!?" -- well, maybe that's the problem. Maybe if we want to make a real, lasting contribution to OSS, without being stuck maintaining it forever, we should focus on making software that doesn't have to change. Code is basically math, and we get lots of use out of polynomials and complex numbers and Galois theory without anyone actively "maintaining" them. Galois died in 1832! Maybe the software we're writing is trying to do too much; maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS?

1659447091 2y ago
> maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS? This is something that took some getting use to working with clojure. You'll hear it a lot, a lot of libraries are simply "done". They do their thing and they do it well. The language itself prioritizes not making breaking changes so there is rarely a need to "maintain" many libraries that were last updated years ago. Habit still makes me pause when seeing it, but looking through the code will usually be reassurance enough or tell you that it was abandoned and needs work. There is also CLJ Commons[0] that takes useful/popular libraries that are done/mostly done and no longer maintained by the original maintainers. Usually the only changes are some performance updates with new JVM/Clojure features. Many of them are incredibly useful and haven't been updated in months or years. [0] https://clj-commons.org https://clj-commons.org

by feoren 2y ago

1659447091 2y ago

> maybe we should stop expecting perpetual updates and maintenance of OSS? Maybe a small, focused, reliable library that does one thing really well and never gets updated is actually the perfect OSS? This is something that took some getting use to working with clojure. You'll hear it a lot, a lot of libraries are simply "done". They do their thing and they do it well. The language itself prioritizes not making breaking changes so there is rarely a need to "maintain" many libraries that were last updated years ago. Habit still makes me pause when seeing it, but looking through the code will usually be reassurance enough or tell you that it was abandoned and needs work. There is also CLJ Commons[0] that takes useful/popular libraries that are done/mostly done and no longer maintained by the original maintainers. Usually the only changes are some performance updates with new JVM/Clojure features. Many of them are incredibly useful and haven't been updated in months or years. [0] https://clj-commons.org https://clj-commons.org