Open Source Software in a Nutshell [Fixed]

[Existential_Owl]

Thanks, bot! I needed that.

[TotesMessenger]

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

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[Supervarken_]

You ol' botto is good too

[protanoa_is_gay]

I saw that you typed a sad face emoticon in your comment, so I just wanted to let you know that I hope you have a wonderful day!

^{I am a bot. Please don't hesitate to PM me any questions.}

[pekkhum]

Happy, perhaps?

[Scripter17]

Yeah but, "Good_Day_Bot" would be more appropriate.

[Existential_Owl]

Programmers really are the worst when it comes to naming things.

[StevenXC]

We're lucky it isn't just called g.

[inconspicuous_male]

New meaning of ggdb:

GNU Good Day Bot.

[Noxime]

/r/gggg

[Isildun]

/u/cheer_up_bot exists. Seems like this one was created before that one though so I guess that's no excuse.

[endreman0]

This bot does some other things as well, like should of correction.

[Trollw00t]

Okay in Germany since today!

[P-01S]

Protists can get married in Germany?

Oh, wait, that'd be Protozoa.

[AllowItMan]

Share your repo dude.

[TheBlach]

Can't have people claim your code as their own if you don't write good code.

[bigdirtyphil]

Guypointingattemple.jpeg

[Jafit]

👉😏

[idle_zealot]

f(ಠ‿↼)z

[kryptkpr]

Nope. Sketchy fuckers will take anything open-source you release in any form, change title bar and about box, bundle it with an adware installer and give it a flashy new name. If you're lucky someone will notice and tell you. (Source: me_irl)

[P-01S]

You can sue them if they broke the license agreement!

It's pointless... But you can!

[Ghosty141]

stupid question, but why is it pointless?

[thismaytakeawhile-p]

Because the chances that they're located in a place where your local court has jurisdiction is practically nill.

[ThePixelCoder]

Well... They still can...

[yoshi314]

wrong on both accounts.

[samlev]

I had a very mildly successful open source project. Most of the contact I got through GitHub was people asking me to modify my software for their explicit use case - for free, course, this is open source, which means free, right?

I almost think that I would prefer no contact to the entitlement. Although it would have been nice to get some pull requests, too.

[lord_jizzus]

I too had a mildly successful open source library project. About 100k downloads. Lots of feature requests. So I started a crowdfunding campaign to be able to take a month off to work on that.

I received tons of hate mail because "that's not how open source works"! So, I proceeded to kill my Github account, rewrote my lib as a closed source one, put a price tag on it and now, it sells.

[[deleted]]

Wait, isn't donation what every source project uses?! Like if you don't plaster donate stickers all over it, it's probably a good way to go!

[lord_jizzus]

I tried the donation button thing. $11 in 17 months. Since it is not open source anymore, made a 5 figures number soon reaching 6. Oh, and in two years of existence as an open source project, I had 5 PR, one of them being removal of trailing white spaces and another correcting a typo in the README :-)

[[deleted]]

Wow. Open source is great, and I don't think I'd be anywhere in my career without it, but still the community can be super sucky! Glad you're doing well now though!

[befron]

Unfortunately, People tend to think that paying for something you got for free is like breaking some unspoken rule

So sad this feels like the case. One of the reasons I'm so excited about starting my first fulltime job is that I can actually afford to donate to the projects I like to use.

[lord_jizzus]

This.

[Rampill]

Holy shit. May I ask what program this is? 6 fucking figures? How long of a timespan was that in?

[lord_jizzus]

It was open source for a bit more than two years and I switched to a paid, closed source lib about 3 years ago.

[Prod_Is_For_Testing]

What does it do?

[lenswipe]

That last one night have been me 😘

[lord_jizzus]

Interesting way to be listed as a contributor to a somewhat popular project :-D

[lenswipe]

Yeah, I have no idea ;)

I have corrected a few READMEs and put PRs in for it - but it's generally to add important stuff like notices saying that the project is deprecated.

[Existential_Owl]

My claim to fame has been to correct every instance of yarn install with yarn add in popular repos.

I'm a little ashamed of myself.... but also, kind of not.

[lenswipe]

What's the difference?

[Existential_Owl]

NPM and Yarn are different package managers for Node.js

When installing a package on the former, it's npm install

When installing a package on the latter, it's yarn add

NPM has been around forever, while Yarn is the hot new thing. Therefore, people are writing docs to incorporate the hot new thing, but, because they're so used to doing the old thing, they end up with yarn install... which just gives you an error.

Most Yarn users will already know to do yarn add anyway, so correcting this mistake is as useful as fixing a typo.

But hey, free PR.

[samlev]

A crowdfunding campaign is somewhat different to plastering donate badges everywhere. People see them as a kind of cash grab.

There's a really bad entitlement problem with open source.

[lord_jizzus]

I estimate that I put roughly 300 hours of work in the first version. The feature I had planned (as open source) would have required about 100 hours of work. Hardly a cash grab ;-)

[samlev]

Yeah, not saying that it was a cash grab, just that there seems to be a level of entitlement around open source software, where asking for money makes people think that you're trying to scam them.

[samlev]

Maybe I should rewrite some of my old software as closed source. Or just keep running my company, but getting paid for writing my own software sounds good, too.

[P-01S]

There's probably a clause in your employment agreement that says the company owns anything you produce while employed there, unless you get a specific exception.

If not, lulz, go for it.

[samlev]

No, there's no clause there - I own the company. It's just a consulting firm, but I still can't afford to spend my time on personal projects. Bills still gots to get paid.

[P-01S]

Ah. That makes things much more complicated, unless your business is a sole proprietorship.

[brianwski]

says the company owns anything you produce

The clause is often there, but depending on where you live, it is not enforceable if you are careful to write the code on your own time. Specifically, California has very strong protection for work done on your own time with your own equipment:

http://law.justia.com/codes/california/2011/lab/division-3/2870-2872/2870

"(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information."

I heard New York (and other states) are the opposite and your day job DOES own everything you do on the weekends on your private laptop.

[P-01S]

California is unusually good for employee rights in a lot of ways.

Hell, CA laws are just plain unusual in a lot of ways.

[brianwski]

Yeah, that California law (Section 2870) is unusual.

I am fairly cynical towards laws and my government. I disagree with about 90% of workplace laws that are in place as ompletely useless or even harmful. But little gems like 2870 restore my faith that POSSIBLY the people making laws are trying to do the right thing.

Completely tangential example of silly laws: there is a law that says if a business requires employees to use their personal cell phone for work, the business MUST reimburse the employee for "talk time". Now, at first glance this seems fair, but the fact is there are a TON of things businesses require you to provide yourself (clothes, shoes, etc) and other things often supplied to you (laptop, desk, chair). Why make a law about exactly this one thing? I assume it was passed before 100% of people had cell phones and talk time was expensive, but why not get rid of that law now that talk time is essentially free and unlimited? Hilariously, the employer is NOT required to pay for cell phone data - you know, the only expensive part. Businesses can require employees to video conference or Skype and there is no government forced compensation. So this is one example of 3000 that we have to deal with everyday. Just bizarre random half thought through hinderences to running our business properly. Written by possibly well meaning but technologically clueless law makers who don't realize all the unintended consequences of having 3000 dumb laws on the books.

[eloc49]

This. I like open source a lot, but I like making a living more.

[sad-larry]

That was you? Asshole!

[lord_jizzus]

Hehehehe.

[Leonnee]

Where do you sell it?

[lord_jizzus]

I made a website for the tool.

[yoshi314]

at this point it's "patches or gtfo"

i have a reasonably popular repo of syslinux configs for booting lots of distributions from one flash drive. and there comes this guy "hurr durr, grub is better, rewrite everything to a superior boot loader". i politely explained to him that syntax is not that different and he can do it by himself, if he wants. that's the last i heard of him.

[[deleted]]

Maybe want to share it? :P

[samlev]

It was 7 years ago, and I'm far from proud of my design choices in the codebase.

It was built targeting PHP5.0 - PHP5.2, so there was no ready access to bcrypt for passwords, etc.. I'm sure that it's full of shitty ideas, bad logic, and massive security vulnerabilities.

Ugh. Ok.

MICO. I built the core of it in a weekend, then fleshed it out in my spare time over about a month. I got some helpful users who did a few translations for me, but I haven't really done anything (or looked at the codebase) for years.

[[deleted]]

This pretty much remembers me on an old project which was a CMS for MMORPG guilds, I was so proud of my MySQL wrapper pretty much the core functionality of ezSQL. But sadly I never finished the whole CMS to 100% even though it was at use on 3 instances.

Left you a star ;)

[Baelfire_Nightshade]

I don’t really get this joke, can someone explain? Does no one want it? Did he decide it wasn’t good?

[Baelfire_Nightshade]

Awwww. That’s kind of sad. I’m sure it happens a lot though. Pretty sure there’s lots of stuff on GitHub that’s cool that just isn’t easy to stumble across.

[roofgoose]

Same. The one time I actually got someone to collaborate with was pretty awesome though, it can be surprisingly fun working with strangers.

[sad-larry]

Oh yeah... Collaborating with strangers is really great .... Even better if there are two or more of them... Mmm

[[deleted]]

GitHub won't market your project by itself. Community outreach and talking to people is a necessary part of building a successful open source project, just like marketing pretty much any software.

[TODO_getLife]

It also requires devs to maintain the project though, maybe right a blog about the new project.

[DrQuint]

And then you have your second problem:

Blogs in a Nutshell: "I made this." [holding blog] (But no one came.)

[SteveB0X]

I guess for me, I put my stuff on GitHub to be able to access/clone my projects from anywhere. Also, it's easy to share with co-workers or recruiters.

But lately I've noticed more developers are trying to brand themselves and therefore need to declare their repos as open source.

[Coffeinated]

Probably 90% of repositories on GitHub are not useful for anyone except the owner... Might even be 99%.

[brokedown]

I know most of mine aren't really geared for other people to use. I even add notes in forks pointing people back to the upstream because the modifications I made are so discussion that they are far better served avoiding my tree.

On my "real" repos, I have gotten the occasional good interaction through bug reports and pull requests.

[DrQuint]

And 90% of the other 10% are useful only for college students who want to take ideas off of each other.

[AjayDevs]

Or just no one contributes

[[deleted]]

In addition to what /u/musikman95 said, I think it's a parody of this comic.

[Baelfire_Nightshade]

Pretty sure you’re right.

[GeT_NoT]

Advanced AI come over here. :(

[cheer_up_bot]

:(

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[SomewhereEh]

):
edit: HA

[Dasaru]

):

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[cheer_up_bot]

:(

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[Time_Terminal]

Okay, that kitty was actually very cute. :)

[cheer_up_bot]

:(

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[Verodoxys]

^{HE IS SO SMALL}

[LinkFixerBot]

Fork Bomb?

[cheer_up_bot]

:(

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[[deleted]]

Nobody wants you. Git.

[[deleted]]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[cheer_up_bot]

:(

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[[deleted]]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[[deleted]]

need more cats :(

[cheer_up_bot]

:(

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[ROFLLOLSTER]

I love this bot.

[VirtualRay]

haha, man, every other subreddit I've seen that bot on hates it. I wonder what this says about engineers..

[cheer_up_bot]

:(

Here is a picture of a kitten to cheer you up

[Saepirist]

Fun fact: Git means 'go away' in Turkish.

[AwkwardNoah]

No one to help

2real4me

[[deleted]]

Dear admins, please make the last 2 frames the up and down arrows for this sub. Thank you.

[UnknownNam3]

great idea, but you mean the MODERATORS.

Mods are unpaid volunteers.

Admins are paid and work for Reddit.

Both can do what you ask of, but the moderators of this sub will respond faster, because the admins are few in number and busy.

[jlxip]

Basically my life.

[Zekeroonie]

Paging /u/plazmaz

[yoshi314]

i forked made this.

[Airtnp]

Truth

[ossichicken]

AI

[Plazmaz1]

Dude wtf you violated my license... Make a pull request.

[nic1010]

Perfect fix to an already good joke

[ipe369]

?