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So, some things that stand in the way of OSS: In some companies, using OSS or even commercial tools that solve problems is frowned on if it seems like a better

So, some things that stand in the way of OSS: In some companies, using OSS or even commercial tools that solve problems is frowned on if it seems like a better idea to roll a tool in-house. NIH is huge in many sectors (fighting against this myself at work), and a lot of the same folks who are reluctant to let other people's code into their work are also reluctant to give back to the community from which it came. In certain places, using OSS is a colossal pain in the neck. Certain enterprise problems are completely unaddressed in various ecosystems, and when they are addressed (say, Ruby's support of Kerberos and LDAP) they are usually just addressing the one or two pain points that that dev had at the time. People are usually not willing to properly solve a problem given limited time and resources. Even if they are willing to exert effort, many ecosystems can be completely unhelpful and unwilling to give people with domain expertise the support they need to make meaningful contributions. As an example of this, working on a small math library for the new language Elixir, I had at least one person (in an otherwise amazing and friendly IRC channel) continually asking "Wait, why are you doing any type of numerical stuff in Elixir?". Now, imagine that kind of reaction to enterprise features (much harder to get right!) in a different language, and you start to see why things are the way they are. I don't know if there are any ways of fixing this other than just doing it for the sheer joy of helping other programmers and knowing that, someday somewhere in some ledger, your effort will be rewarded--or at least marked as legacy some other sod has to work around. :)

zanny 12y ago
> People are usually not willing to properly solve a problem given limited time and resources. They are solving their own problems. It is bad enough when people are shoveling snow for everyone else for free, to think they would do it while their car is not stuck would be ludicrous. In that context, the only incentive that works is compensation for ones labors. If they want Rubys support of authentication protocols to improve, they have to do it themselves, or pledge some money and hope enough companies do it to pay for it to be done. > imagine that kind of reaction to enterprise features At least in the context of numericals, I think it is more "dont make a new snowdrift where there isn't one already, and we have already mostly gotten rid of a similar one in the numpy ecosystem". When free software developer resources are already incredibly scarce, them being wasted on project duplication sucks. Albeit, implementing features for certain programming languages is one of the least bad duplicated efforts. > someday somewhere in some ledger, your effort will be rewarded The whole point of the article is that being listed in the contributors file is not enough for 99% of developers and the 1% that do volunteer like that are being (voluntarily) exploited for their labor as a result, and software a a whole cannot sustain like that.

zanny 12y ago

> People are usually not willing to properly solve a problem given limited time and resources. They are solving their own problems. It is bad enough when people are shoveling snow for everyone else for free, to think they would do it while their car is not stuck would be ludicrous. In that context, the only incentive that works is compensation for ones labors. If they want Rubys support of authentication protocols to improve, they have to do it themselves, or pledge some money and hope enough companies do it to pay for it to be done. > imagine that kind of reaction to enterprise features At least in the context of numericals, I think it is more "dont make a new snowdrift where there isn't one already, and we have already mostly gotten rid of a similar one in the numpy ecosystem". When free software developer resources are already incredibly scarce, them being wasted on project duplication sucks. Albeit, implementing features for certain programming languages is one of the least bad duplicated efforts. > someday somewhere in some ledger, your effort will be rewarded The whole point of the article is that being listed in the contributors file is not enough for 99% of developers and the 1% that do volunteer like that are being (voluntarily) exploited for their labor as a result, and software a a whole cannot sustain like that.