The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders (wired.com) 71
Reader shanen shares a report (and offers this commentary): When the open source concept emerged in the '90s, it was conceived as a bold new form of communal labor: digital barn raisings. If you made your code open source, dozens or even hundreds of programmers would chip in to improve it. Many hands would make light work. Everyone would feel ownership. Now, it's true that open source has, overall, been a wild success. Every startup, when creating its own software services or products, relies on open source software from folks like Jacob Thornton: open source web-server code, open source neural-net code. But, with the exception of some big projects -- like Linux -- the labor involved isn't particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people. Recently, Nadia Eghbal -- the head of writer experience at the email newsletter platform Substack -- published Working in Public, a fascinating book for which she spoke to hundreds of open source coders. She pinpointed the change I'm describing here. No matter how hard the programmers worked, most "still felt underwater in some shape or form," Eghbal told me.
Why didn't the barn-raising model pan out? As Eghbal notes, it's partly that the random folks who pitch in make only very small contributions, like fixing a bug. Making and remaking code requires a lot of high-level synthesis -- which, as it turns out, is hard to break into little pieces. It lives best in the heads of a small number of people. Yet those poor top-level coders still need to respond to the smaller contributions (to say nothing of requests for help or reams of abuse). Their burdens, Eghbal realized, felt like those of YouTubers or Instagram influencers who feel overwhelmed by their ardent fan bases -- but without the huge, ad-based remuneration. Sometimes open source coders simply walk away: Let someone else deal with this crap. Studies suggest that about 9.5 percent of all open source code is abandoned, and a quarter is probably close to being so. This can be dangerous: If code isn't regularly updated, it risks causing havoc if someone later relies on it. Worse, abandoned code can be hijacked for ill use. Two years ago, the pseudonymous coder right9ctrl took over a piece of open source code that was used by bitcoin firms -- and then rewrote it to try to steal cryptocurrency.
Why didn't the barn-raising model pan out? As Eghbal notes, it's partly that the random folks who pitch in make only very small contributions, like fixing a bug. Making and remaking code requires a lot of high-level synthesis -- which, as it turns out, is hard to break into little pieces. It lives best in the heads of a small number of people. Yet those poor top-level coders still need to respond to the smaller contributions (to say nothing of requests for help or reams of abuse). Their burdens, Eghbal realized, felt like those of YouTubers or Instagram influencers who feel overwhelmed by their ardent fan bases -- but without the huge, ad-based remuneration. Sometimes open source coders simply walk away: Let someone else deal with this crap. Studies suggest that about 9.5 percent of all open source code is abandoned, and a quarter is probably close to being so. This can be dangerous: If code isn't regularly updated, it risks causing havoc if someone later relies on it. Worse, abandoned code can be hijacked for ill use. Two years ago, the pseudonymous coder right9ctrl took over a piece of open source code that was used by bitcoin firms -- and then rewrote it to try to steal cryptocurrency.
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"as the head of an open source project, you get attacked for not being woke enough"
Suuure that happens...
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You might have heard of a few...
Linus Torvald?
Eric Raymond?
Brendan Eich?
Richard Stallman?
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"Linus Torvald?"
Still in charge of the linux kernel I see.
"Eric Raymond?"
Given Raymond's incompetence (fetchmail anyone? CML2?) he shouldn't be in charge of any open source project anyway.
"Brendan Eich?"
He was a CEO, and yeah part of being a CEO is not being stupidly political.
"Richard Stallman?"
Stallman's still in charge of the GNU project.
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"Linus Torvald?" Still in charge of the linux kernel I see.
"Eric Raymond?" Given Raymond's incompetence (fetchmail anyone? CML2?) he shouldn't be in charge of any open source project anyway.
"Brendan Eich?" He was a CEO, and yeah part of being a CEO is not being stupidly political.
"Richard Stallman?" Stallman's still in charge of the GNU project.
The worst I've ever been treated as an OSS coder is corporate types I had never heard of before yelling at me as if I was one of their employees who had failed to meet the internal development goals of a company I did not know existed who was leeching off mine and other people's volunteer work on an OSS project without contributing anything back.
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The worst I've ever been treated as an OSS coder is corporate types I had never heard of before yelling at me as if I was one of their employees
I think I'd quite enjoy that the first time "And precisely *how much* are you paying me to put up with your shit?". But I'm sure it gets old very soon.
Re:And don’t forget (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And don’t forget (Score:4, Insightful)
His point was these attacks were so bad that nobody wanted to be in charge of open source projects which is obviously completely false.
I won't even get into the idiotic argument that these "woke" SJW-types you're all terrified of care at all about 99% of open source projects, which nobody has heard of.
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And, as you pointed out, half of my examples aren’t in charge of their projects after being forced out.
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What open source project did Raymond lose? Seriously, maybe there is something but I haven't heard of it and given you can't avoid Raymond's pompous boasting if you come to slashdot because the editors constantly give him space to do that, I think I would have heard something. And by the way, you don't need to be "woke" to find the ravings of that incompetent, narcissistic fruit loop sufficient to disqualify him from any sort of leadership position.
Eich wasn't a technical lead, he was CEO of a corporation.
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The premise of the comment may be a bit faulty. Free software programmers are not tired. Anyone who was tired and not enjoying the ride is free to hop off and presumably has already done so. As to the number of projects that are successful, obviously that depends on your definition. If you mean a giant project that brings corporate tie-ins and lots of money, there are a few. But they are generally very useful to everyone. Projects like Firefox and Chrome Browser, and LibreOffice for example. And yes,
You already forgot two posts ago? Anyone can look. (Score:3)
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The story is about open source software leads walking away. This guy responds by stating "Who WANTS that?"
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Re: And don’t forget (Score:2)
Public figures facing public criticism? Oh no!
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Re: And don’t forget (Score:2)
Fun fact: SJWs and whatever you think you represent, are the same type of personality. It is not a scale, it is a circle. Going up ftom the bottom center, the extremes meet at the top. Sane people are not anywhere on that line, but somewhere inside that *sphere* it wraps around, though.
Re: And don’t forget (Score:3)
I think the term you are looking for is political horseshoe.
Re:Portland (Score:5, Funny)
Why does everyone in Portland look like a lumberjack now?
I don't know, but we're okay.
Re: Portland (Score:2)
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Re: Portland (Score:3)
Because they're OK, and work all day and sleep all night ... ;)
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Re: Portland (Score:2)
OS got CoCed up (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OS got CoCed up (Score:5, Interesting)
The code of conduct has been a boon for open source developers like me. It used to be much worse, people coming and making ridiculous demands on your time, insulting you, trolling when you didn't give them what you wanted. Most of those people seem to have given up now. Just having a code of conduct file in the repo is like a scarecrow.
Even so it's still not easy. You get well meaning people making genuine contributions and then feel like you are letting them down because you don't have to time to review their code, to test it and merge it. I submitted a patch for libusb a few years ago, it got merged after a year and a half and a month ago they asked if my problem was fixed... I haven't responded yet because I need to clear a space, get the development hardware out of the box and try to remember exactly what I need to do to test it. I'll get around to it, one day...
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Oh, I don't know.. AniMojo and I see the world very differently on some particular aspects, but they seem to have a damn fine grasp of some of the intricacies of software/hardware in some of the posts.
There's absolutely no correlation between political slant and ability to do particular tasks, no matter what memes and cliches would have you believe.
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Re:OS got CoCed up (Score:4, Informative)
There's nothing wrong with a "Code of Conduct" as such, it's just another name for a code of ethics. . The Association of Computing Machinery [acm.org] code of ethics addresses a whole load of really important things like privacy, confidentiality, honesty and code quality.
If you have an important piece of software and you either do not have a code of conduct or your code of conduct does not address the need to mitigate and / or disclose security vulnerabilities then that is a serious oversight since you can have developers working on your project who are getting benefit from finding out about security vulnerabilities and not doing anything about them. Let's see what the ACM says about this
In fact, having a code of conduct which did not mention this, or requirements for quality standards would be worse than not having a code of conduct at all. That would imply that you did not care about causing harm to your users.
Perhaps you were complaining about codes of conduct which are unacceptably badly written?
Re:OS got CoCed up (Score:4, Insightful)
Codes of conduct are inherently less about what you do than how you do it. That's why they're called codes of conduct rather than codes of ethics. People who prioritize CoCs over actual work put the cart before the horse.
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Fortunately those writing those for open source projects are not programmers and do not take away programmers time, only their own. And the enforcement is usually as extremely vanishing as the breaches of good conduct.
The problem is worse with the war on words, but that seems limited to the US at moment, and even then are just simple search and replace nonsense.
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Times change and so does culture. Feel free to create your own CoC free fork.
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Re: OS got CoCed up (Score:2)
Tried to use my laptop with a 26" screen and 64-point font. Can't do it, so stuck with my phone jammed in my face. And retinal surgery and IOL implants aren't emergencies, because covid doesn't care, so probably another 2 years of being legalized blind, so fuck it. Time to enjoy retir
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Undo Focus on super large projects (Score:3)
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I think you're describing a different problem with focus there. Small projects are easy to complete with some degree of success because that's the limit of what one person can focus on. Even the large projects had to start with a small focused vision.
Anyway, the editor rejected my commentary on the topic, so I feel like I shouldn't say more. Apparently nothing salvageable there? Should I have mentioned that programming is hard work?
Big- and Small-scope programmers (Score:2)
I see two sorts of programmers. One can manage a small program in detail. It can be tens of thousands lines long, but not millions. I am one of these; you may be too. Then there are others who can happily stitch together lots of different pieces of code, and make something huge out of this. I sometimes can't even read their code: it is all classes and wrappers and producers and factories, and hard to find what actually does something. Or, you have the data you want *over here* but you can't see how to get i
Even with money things aren’t great (Score:2)
Space Station 13 is the poster child for this (Score:4, Insightful)
But the fact is that burnout is the real reason. Monetary gain is all fine and dandy, but when your designing a game system from scratch, even if its reviewed by 8 people, the processes is mind-numbingly heartbreaking as well as stressful. A perfect example is xeno. The idea is that science can breed slimes that have different properties and can be made into materials or just for the luls. The problem is that with the 10 or so slime colors we have only 4 have fleshed out mechanics and the running curse is that once you finish a slime color you never touch SS13 again
I can rant for days on how we don't control the back end. How Github killed our repo and deforked eveyone else in the process because we had "retard" in the comments. Or the constant ddos or trolls. Or when you get your own pr hard killed for reasons that seem stupid at the time. You have to love a project to keep going no matter how bad the trash fire gets. Because at the end of the day, you are proud of that fire and want to show it off to the world.
Re:Space Station 13 is the poster child for this (Score:5, Insightful)
When a project starts small it's easy to contribute lots of code to but the individual or team probably doesn't have a lot of time to handle pull requests or track down bugs that only affect other people's configurations.
When it gets big the barrier to entry for working on it gets much higher. You can't just contribute code, there is a huge amount to learn first. The quality of patches starts to deteriorate, and I'll admit I've been guilty of that. Had an SMS/HTTP gateway library that was being used in a project at work which didn't support some particular encoding that was used in the Philippines so I added support, but being a work thing I had limited time so did the minimum possible (receive only, no test cases) to get it working. Of course I submitted the patch as required by the licence and of course they asked me to do a proper job and not half arse it. I had to apologise and explain that I couldn't, and that was that.
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So ... (Score:3)
The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
Would this make proud Java programmers "jarheads"?
Re: So ... (Score:2)
I'm thinking more like "cupheads".
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That has nothing to do with a code of conduct. The biggest contributors are going to start small. There is a difficulty in quickly parsing the difference between an initial commit from someone who will seriously grow and a dilettante who will bail in minutes.
Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone can submit a patch to correct a bug found in an application. However, not anyone can specify the application architecture, or decide where it wants it to go.
Applications belong to the primary developers, who make relevant high-level decisions. Presuming that open-sourcing a code would outsource this complex decision-making job is naïve.
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RTEMS.org has been around as an open source project since the early 90s and I agree with you. It is the responsibility of the core developers to be architects, build the basic structure, and add enough value to that where others can use it but still have clear areas to contribute.
But that isn't all that is required to get contributions. You have to have low barrier to entry for both users and new developers, be nice and help them, be responsive to reviewing and merging, and have decent documentation. You ha
Neckbeards (Score:3, Interesting)
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The neckbeard probably is better than you.
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- The feature is still in there without any rewrites or patches applied to it.
- What actually happened was that he probably didn't understand the math behind the optimization algorithms that were on the project wish list. He felt hurt in his pride that someone implemented it before he figured out how to do it, since he had been boasting about having a working implem
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His sense of professionalism was tweaked, and also, correctly identified a breach of ethics.. That kind of behaviour has had me look askance at people before, and if they were serious in that approach, I simply took myself elsewhere and built better things for people that appreciated it more.
I now get to build some very interesting things for some very interesting people and thoroughly enjoy it. All because I shrugged, and left the irritating people to get on with things their own way.
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Sadly, most people are hard to work with at least some of the time. Making teams work is hard. There's a reason companies have management.
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Bloat and monoliticity are the problems. (Score:2)
Instead of small modules with a good interface that do one thing and do it right, we have disgusting abominations like office suites and browsers and JDK etc.
Programmed right, any small coder could contribute even to the core microkernel module.
In my experience, if you cannot code it up in a single day, fix all the bugs in a second day, and fully document it, in a third day, it's too big, you need to throw it away and make something new from scratch.
bootstrap is a bad example (Score:2)
Browser JS does OSS well: Interfaces help (Score:2)
The summary outlines the cases where this works: When a small team keeps the whole thing in their heads.
Github's full of JS "Popularity" b/c NPM has tiny libraries. Those tiny pieces are easy for a small group to maintain and easy to be replaced if they lose interest (Ex: Underscore --> Lodash).
With more intermediate interfaces, open source could bridge the gaps between the interfaces with small libs. The 100s of possible intermediate interfaces between 2 points risks duplication, but that's OK.
Ex: Grap
Open Source is NOT "socialism" but... (Score:4, Insightful)
it suffers from some of the basic problems and for a similar basic reason: Human Nature which tends to produce the Tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org].
Early on in the open source movement, people like Bill Gates tried to attack it by claiming it was "socialist" and "anti-capitalist" - many here should remember that it was a real thing that people with businesses selling close source software thought they could influence average people and politicians to oppose it by tying to Karl Marxs. That tie never existed except superficially; People were indeed working at their ability level and giving the results away - BUT there was never any government force involved.
We're mostly past the point of people objecting to open source code on those [quasi-polititcal] grounds, but it does not fix the underlying commons issue, which has in some ways become worse as companies have embraced this code for their products. It use to be the case that open source coders would work hard and see lots of people using their code with no compensation, people involved could get moral satisfaction feeling that they were helping others with their skills. Now, however, many such coders see big companies using that code to make piles of cash with nary a nod to the coders - that's less morally satisfying and will tend to amplify the negative effects of the Tragedy of the Commons.
There are problems here that have never been resolved and which will act as a natural governor of the rate and quality of Open Source code development. I'd love to offer a possible solution, but it'll take somebody wiser than I am to come up with one that truly works.
Employ the unemployed as open source coders (Score:1)
I think you meant 1959, not 1995 (typo) (Score:2)
The merits and values of open source lauded here - ... as a bold new form of communal labor: digital barn raisings. If you made your code open source, dozens or even hundreds of programmers would chip in to improve it. Many hands would make light work. Everyone would feel ownership... were sought in 1959 when IBM started SHARE. [wikipedia.org]
patreon (Score:2)
The money then comes to the actual developers...
My opinion (Score:1)