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The value in open source code was never the code. It was the trust that was created around it that it becomes a place for useful innovation, for trust, for vet
by the_mitsuhiko 9mo ago
The value in open source code was never the code. It was the trust that was created around it that it becomes a place for useful innovation, for trust, for vetting, for keeping dependencies low.
I can build my own curl in a week, but the value that curl gives me is that it's a multi decade old library, by a person that has dedicated his live to keeping the project there, keeping a quality bar etc.
The value of curl is not curl, it's the human behind it.
- collingreen 9mo agoThe human behind it, the community using it critically, and the years of battle hardening. The great open source tools out there have handled, worked around, or influenced away many many bugs and edge cases out in the real world, many of which you wont think of when initially designing your own. The silent increase in stability and productivity resulting from this kind of thing is as vast as it is hard to see/measure. It feels like the quote about expertise saying someone "has forgotten more than I'll ever know about [subject]". Thank you to everyone powering our collective work.