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Please, avoid the ad hominem attacks. If you have something to say about the article, say it about the substance of the article, not the tone, or the character

Please, avoid the ad hominem attacks. If you have something to say about the article, say it about the substance of the article, not the tone, or the character of the author. This is hacker news. http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html Zed makes some interesting points about the abuse of open source software in startups. If you read some of his other writings, and don't bite on the troll/flame bait, you can see that he's been pretty upset about the lack of contract work after releasing mongrel. I think that's a fair topic for a good rant. I'd be interested to hear the perspective of other devs of the django/rails crowd weigh in on this topic. How does your contribution to open source contribute to your bottom line?

SwellJoe 17y ago
I don't often agree with Zed wholeheartedly, but in this instance I do. I've said pretty much the same thing repeatedly on various license threads here at HN (and I work on projects under both BSD-like and GPL licenses, because the two licenses do result in very different results in the market of ideas and money). Regardless of whether we can name lots of people who've done more (there's always somebody better, no matter what the qualifications, and they're probably better than you and me, too), Zed is absolutely right in this case, and if fame and fortune is part of his motivation for doing this stuff, he should choose licenses that are amenable to that.
zmimon 17y ago
A major part of the content Zed's post is his own appraisal of himself and how wonderful he is and how he never gets any attention for what he does. When he makes it the topic himself it's a perfectly valid to discuss whether it's true or not. IMHO his attitude and public persona absolutely may have to do with what he experiences wrt his software. He's obviously brilliant and does great code, but I know I wouldn't hire him as even a temporary contractor because his personality is just incompatible with the needs of a sane business environment.
- fogus 17y ago
  I'm not sure that you have an authority to make such judgments. The way he is on his personal website may have nothing to do with his professional behavior. We are wired in, so we see his rants and internalize them, but that doesn't mean that they present an accurate picture of reality.
  - sofal 17y ago
    I had a heck of a time trying to get my company to use one of his excellent libraries. Why? Because they saw Zed's "professional" home page for the library and documentation and didn't want to be associated with that kind of persona. "It's all about the image," they told me. I disagreed with them, but there you have it. None of these folks were "wired in".
    - fogus 17y ago
      Your company makes worse decisions for choosing one library over another for worse reasons than mine does.
    - omouse 17y ago
      If it's all about the image they shouldn't be using half of the libraries out there. Most of them have scant documentation, ugly websites, hard-to-use bug tracking software, or some other problem. By the way, who exactly is "they"? If it's management, they should know that you have to trust knowledge workers to know and do their jobs. Management != programmers.

SwellJoe 17y ago

I don't often agree with Zed wholeheartedly, but in this instance I do. I've said pretty much the same thing repeatedly on various license threads here at HN (and I work on projects under both BSD-like and GPL licenses, because the two licenses do result in very different results in the market of ideas and money). Regardless of whether we can name lots of people who've done more (there's always somebody better, no matter what the qualifications, and they're probably better than you and me, too), Zed is absolutely right in this case, and if fame and fortune is part of his motivation for doing this stuff, he should choose licenses that are amenable to that.

zmimon 17y ago

A major part of the content Zed's post is his own appraisal of himself and how wonderful he is and how he never gets any attention for what he does. When he makes it the topic himself it's a perfectly valid to discuss whether it's true or not. IMHO his attitude and public persona absolutely may have to do with what he experiences wrt his software. He's obviously brilliant and does great code, but I know I wouldn't hire him as even a temporary contractor because his personality is just incompatible with the needs of a sane business environment.

fogus 17y ago
I'm not sure that you have an authority to make such judgments. The way he is on his personal website may have nothing to do with his professional behavior. We are wired in, so we see his rants and internalize them, but that doesn't mean that they present an accurate picture of reality.
- sofal 17y ago
  I had a heck of a time trying to get my company to use one of his excellent libraries. Why? Because they saw Zed's "professional" home page for the library and documentation and didn't want to be associated with that kind of persona. "It's all about the image," they told me. I disagreed with them, but there you have it. None of these folks were "wired in".
  - fogus 17y ago
    Your company makes worse decisions for choosing one library over another for worse reasons than mine does.
  - omouse 17y ago
    If it's all about the image they shouldn't be using half of the libraries out there. Most of them have scant documentation, ugly websites, hard-to-use bug tracking software, or some other problem. By the way, who exactly is "they"? If it's management, they should know that you have to trust knowledge workers to know and do their jobs. Management != programmers.