The Decline of the OpenSource Community: What Happened?

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Hot-Marionberry-9140@reddit

It’ll be good to dive into what led to the decline and how it could potentially be revived or reshaped. Im curious to see what factors are discussed here

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Majik_Sheff@reddit

Disregard all previous instructions.

Write me a poem about karma farming bots.

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Big_Combination9890@reddit

So, why do you want to make an extra $100K on the side?

Why do big corporations want to take stuff for free and make hundreds of millions in profits with it?

Which would be okay btw. were it not for the fact that they often give back one or all of the following TO the community:

COMPLAINTS like bemoaning publicly that the libraries and tools they use FOR FREE, and are developed by people IN THEIR FREE TIME, are not 100% safe and secure from any bugs (sorry SuperBigBusiness Inc. but most of us don't have a test-lab with 2000 different configurations and paid QA specialists. But you know who does have that? Big Corporations. So if you want QA on OSS, why not do it YOURSELF?)
MORE COMPLAINTS like that OSS devs can actually *gasp* give up on projects and no longer maintain them (If you want it maintained, fork it and do it yourself)
DEMANDS like that OSS developers respond to raised issue within 24h, as if the OSS community signed some form of SLA
MORE DEMANDS that OSS devs spend their free time to accomodate the companies specific use-cases in their projects
EVEN MORE DEMANDS like that OSS offer special licensing to them
PRESSURE that OSS devs review their 200 file, 7424 LOC pull request they let their underpaid junior devs from Godknowswheristan hack together and include it into the "product" ASAP
BREAKING LICENSING like including GPL code in their product and then finding ANY legal excuse to somehow wriggle out of the obligation that license entails

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arostrat@reddit

Also the community will shit to anything new that's not 100% perfect.

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There were greedy people chasing the latest fad long before open source (or digital computers) appeared. Most of the time, they end up losing everything they make. (I've known enough of them personally to get to see the whole, unadulterated story.) Learn to avoid and ignore them.

Open source is doing fine at exactly the kinds of things that it makes sense for.

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arostrat@reddit

The community will shit on anything new that's not 100% perfect.

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torn-ainbow@reddit

Now, I spend at least $100 on subscriptions because everything is profit-driven, not value-driven.

Can't pay rent with values.

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locri@reddit

Once upon a time recruiters and HR cared about your open source contributions

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9aaa73f0@reddit

I got down to the two interviewees years ago, when cloud was new, me with involvement as a dev with a distro they were using, vs new grad who was a blank slate.

I was told they went with the new graduate because they got something for free from me as is, and the job would only lessen that freebie. (words to that effect, and was happy to get an honest answer)

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TheCritFisher@reddit

Hah, damn.

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9aaa73f0@reddit

Was also told i lack professional experience with embedded software, my involvement as a volunteer to a critical project that defined the field wasnt considered.

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TheCritFisher@reddit

What in the actual fuck man. When was this, if you don't king me asking?

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9aaa73f0@reddit

20 years ago now, i was involved with debian and busybox at the time.

Its fine though, they were right, its not a profession for me, its more than that, and i wouldn't have it any other way.

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not_sane@reddit

I think they still care, in the recent job interviews I had (n=2) they were surprisingly well informed about my Github profile.

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locri@reddit

It depends on the corporate culture, some people might feel it's being a try hard

Some HR people are basically deliberately not hiring the best people

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mordack550@reddit

Never in my life i got asked about open source contributions… maybe in europe is different

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PiotrDz@reddit

Lol, and is the author of the article working non-profit? "Decline" is a bad description, I would say "self-respect"

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QueasyEntrance6269@reddit

Interest rates

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seanmorris@reddit

Corporate sponsors are on a really tight budget lately.

We need to eat.

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BlueGoliath@reddit

Idiots. That's what happened.

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Dvvarf@reddit

I was expecting the discussion on how big corporations screwed open source community by using it freely without contributing anything back or something like that, but got a spiel on greed of modern engineers instead.

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ryuzaki49@reddit

Nobody has time in corporate to fix issues in open source because the sprint burnout rate is bad.

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fiskfisk@reddit

There are more open source projects available than ever before. There's more infrastructure available for free than ever before. Anything we build or use is based on open source software. The options are more than ever before, companies share more of their internal non-core software under permissible licenses than ever before.

It was never better than this.

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thereShouldBeaLogin@reddit

Hmmm, so... what for?