Races to the bottom to … do work exclusively for free and not make any money out of the hopes that they become the most popular OSS toolkit, with an end goal of … what?
> Turns out they're as human as software engineers.
Lawyers start out as humans but something about going into law school and then private practice, and feeding them after midnight turns them into... something else entirely.
Arguably the same is true for some software engineers. One minute they're a good friend that you respect, next thing you know they're building killbots or AI non consensual porn generators or surveillance platforms that are illegal for government agencies to operate. Perhaps it happens more often to lawyers?
Plumbers are realistic and don’t live on ideals. They set their rates and set their hours. Lawyers; well if if only people behaved we could have nice things in life, but here we are with people trying to screw each other and misbehave…
Digital assets or work are a bit different in that making a second copy is trivial. It’d be different if every computer in the world were bespoke and needed its own bespoke software. So that makes OSS a viable option for those who can but we also can’t expect everyone to default OSS. We can default to asking that the service and prices be reasonable though.
Now I'm imagining a plumber who fixes a drain, then stands up a "fix drain as a service" website where people can put their credit cards in and their drain gets fixed remotely at effectively zero marginal cost to the plumber.
(And then, of course, the plumber gets VC money to expand the business and the drain fix becomes a drain fix subscription, and if you cancel or your credit card expires all your drains instantly block back up again.)
Coz just about everyone wants to be that one guy in Nebraska thanklessly maintaining this bit of digital infrastructure, apparently?
Yeah me neither.
I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.
then it is up to community to fork the project if they find it valuable and can convince people migrating to their fork.
many engineers actually work that way, right? We are employed for 12 months and give our availability fully to the company and we get salary for it, why isn't it allowed to others?
Races to the bottom to … do work exclusively for free and not make any money out of the hopes that they become the most popular OSS toolkit, with an end goal of … what?
End goal of complaining that no one pays for their efforts.
Validation, often. Stars and installs make self-worth integer go up, etc.
Greed, sometimes. Gotta get those usercounts high to get acquihired / to sell out / to flip on the paid subs for formerly free features.
I can’t remember the word for “prosocial through lowering cost to zero” is but sometimes that too.
> I can’t remember the word for “prosocial through lowering cost to zero” is but sometimes that too.
Wiktionary:
Benevolent, altruistic, unselfish, beneficent, philanthropic, selfless
Philanthropic! Thanks.
This works for a while. Then you - the programmer - grow up.
Wise customers know this.
But a programmer is born every minute.
Not so much these days.
> at they become the most popular OSS toolkit, with an end goal of … what?
Look at how any "FOSS + VC + for-profit" company in the last 5-10 years worked out, and you'll see the playbook.
bait and switch
Xz
A race to the bottom of… unpaid work that eliminates the paid work? Can you elaborate?
I mean.. isn't this basically open source?
We don’t need to speculate do we, there are tons of real non company run OSS projects
Now I personally wish lawyers and plumbers also got into the free work thing but here we are
Lawyers have a term for it, pro bono, and they do it for good causes. Turns out they're as human as software engineers.
> Turns out they're as human as software engineers.
Lawyers start out as humans but something about going into law school and then private practice, and feeding them after midnight turns them into... something else entirely.
Arguably the same is true for some software engineers. One minute they're a good friend that you respect, next thing you know they're building killbots or AI non consensual porn generators or surveillance platforms that are illegal for government agencies to operate. Perhaps it happens more often to lawyers?
Water is a key ingredient to the transformation. Nerds are less likely to shower than bougie lawyers, so we transform less often.
Plumbers are realistic and don’t live on ideals. They set their rates and set their hours. Lawyers; well if if only people behaved we could have nice things in life, but here we are with people trying to screw each other and misbehave…
Digital assets or work are a bit different in that making a second copy is trivial. It’d be different if every computer in the world were bespoke and needed its own bespoke software. So that makes OSS a viable option for those who can but we also can’t expect everyone to default OSS. We can default to asking that the service and prices be reasonable though.
Now I'm imagining a plumber who fixes a drain, then stands up a "fix drain as a service" website where people can put their credit cards in and their drain gets fixed remotely at effectively zero marginal cost to the plumber.
(And then, of course, the plumber gets VC money to expand the business and the drain fix becomes a drain fix subscription, and if you cancel or your credit card expires all your drains instantly block back up again.)
AI-slop PRs automerged in response to AI slop bug reports.
Coz just about everyone wants to be that one guy in Nebraska thanklessly maintaining this bit of digital infrastructure, apparently?
Yeah me neither.
I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.
Curl is so important that if it had a heartbleed and didn’t patch, someone would and people’d just apply it until it was fixed in tree.
Individuals don't but lots of companies do, so that they can threaten to rugpull it later if you don't pay them millions.
then it is up to community to fork the project if they find it valuable and can convince people migrating to their fork.
many engineers actually work that way, right? We are employed for 12 months and give our availability fully to the company and we get salary for it, why isn't it allowed to others?
A fork of a project that does security patches only is an interesting idea...
Since then a diff of the two projects will be a perfect list of security issues and will make designing an attack rather easy...
Only until the next feature lands in upstream, likely accompanied by some refactoring.
Please go ahead and fork curl
That’s just the status quo.
Isn't that what we have already?
Ah yes, people will just be clamoring to use hURL
Or the Rust re-write rURL
Rusted Cu surely makes that, rather, verdigrURL. (-: