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I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find th

I'm curious what industry you work in. Rarely have I run into a large problem that was tempting to solve with Stackoverflow/Github-driven development. I find the limiting factor is never "we don't have the code" and more "we don't know what code we need".

neilv 1y ago
I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code. But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor). For one reason, code is important, and valuable... There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc. A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working. There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow. Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI". We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution. In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important. I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.
- tkzed49 1y ago
  Thanks, it's an interesting perspective. I may have underappreciated the code volume/time requirements to execute especially in a startup setting. I think I see where you're coming from. I'd imagine in some applications, there is very niche/specific implementation on Github that is both expensive to reimplement and not permissively licensed. I can see the "AI laundering" angle there.
- dabockster 1y ago
  > accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.
  - Joel_Mckay 1y ago
    In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based. It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses. Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.) The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3 Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume: "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla) https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/ https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...
    - dabockster 1y ago
      That’s awesome that you were able to make it work. But not everyone has the ability, either logistically or financially (or both), to enforce copyrights on open source code. So we should assume there will be some big bad actors who will absolutely take advantage of that.

neilv 1y ago

I certainly agree that there are many important aspects to software development, other than just code. But I don't want to confuse the point, and accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" (or the limiting factor). For one reason, code is important, and valuable... There's plenty of evidence throughout many types of software development to suggest that a lot of money has to be plowed into simply producing bulk of code -- excluding domain or market understanding, requirements analysis, holistic system design, etc. A typical growth startup wasn't in a hiring frenzy for great analytical minds, but simply to scale up production of raw bulk of code (and connecting together legally-obtained off-the-shelf pieces). And they were often tracking quantitative metrics on that bulk, and consciously aware of how much all those code-monkey salaries were costing on the balance sheet. They paid it because code bulk was very necessary, the way they were working. There's also plenty of evidence of the popularity of copy&paste reuse for many years. Including from StackOverflow. Copying entire projects and subsystems has been much-much less common, partly due to the aforementioned not wanting to get caught doing it. But "AI" laundering is paving the way. See all the blog posts and videos about "I created an app/game/site in an hour with AI". We can also look at startup schools of thought, where execution is widely regarded to be everything (ideas are a dime a dozen). There is plenty of thinking that churning out code is one of the most time-consuming or frequently-blocking parts of execution. In both startups and established corporate environments, there are normally big lags between when a need for specific code is identified, and when that code can be delivered. Doesn't that look like a limiting factor, or at least it must be important. I think that's enough reason that we not dismiss the value of code, nor dismiss the importance of plagiarism of code.

tkzed49 1y ago
Thanks, it's an interesting perspective. I may have underappreciated the code volume/time requirements to execute especially in a startup setting. I think I see where you're coming from. I'd imagine in some applications, there is very niche/specific implementation on Github that is both expensive to reimplement and not permissively licensed. I can see the "AI laundering" angle there.
dabockster 1y ago
> accidentally be thinking "plagiarism of code isn't important, because code isn't important" Based on my life experience from the last 15 years, you should assume that any "open source" code you leave online is going to be plagiarized heavily. It's unfortunate, but the hard truth for a billion different reasons.
- Joel_Mckay 1y ago
  In general, the legal peril of contaminated copyrights made closed-source desktop coding less lucrative. Most if not all current desktop applications from major commercial vendors is at least in part server hosted, or online subscription based. It is simply a shift from shovel-ware to a service model, and does what DRM did for the music businesses. Personally, I often release under Apache license as both a gift and a curse... Given it is "free" for everyone including the competition, and the net gain for bandits is negative three times the time cost (AI obfuscation would also cost resources.) The balance I found was not solving corporate "hard" problems for free, and focusing on features that often coincidentally overlap with other community members. Thus, our goals just happen to align, and I am glad if people can make money recycling the work. =3 Why bandits are not as relevant as people assume: "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" (Carlo M. Cipolla) https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidity/ https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi...
  - dabockster 1y ago
    That’s awesome that you were able to make it work. But not everyone has the ability, either logistically or financially (or both), to enforce copyrights on open source code. So we should assume there will be some big bad actors who will absolutely take advantage of that.