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I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be

I've never really worked at a place where we had any spare time for open source project development, nor time to opine on the social issues of the day. Must be nice, but I feel like a very small, privileged few actually live in that world. The rest of us have work to do.

cabaalis 9y ago
Nor have I. As a manager/co-owner I can't think of a reasonable business-friendly way to allow my developers to spend work time on OSS. I would love to, of course, but our systems really do not facilitate community involvement.
- rcfox 9y ago
  The majority of my contributions have been around projects I use for work. Bug fixes, extending functionality, performance enhancements, etc.
  - adekok 9y ago
    That's the real answer. If you spent 1/10 of an engineer on an open source product, and 100 other companies do the same, your company gets much more than it puts in. And because it's open source, you know how to fix it, and you can fix it. I know of multiple billion-dollar companies who can't get the time of day from Cisco, HP, etc. for bug fixes or new features. The vendors attitude is: Bought 10M of product in the past year? Meh... piss off. We're working on important customers.
- Deestan 9y ago
  > I would love to, of course If you did, you'd have found a way for it to work. Making a pretty cool deploy script? Document it and put it out there as OSS. Making a class/module to sort items semantically? Make it OSS. Someone made an IDE extension to syntax highlight WebVTT files? Make i OSS. Made a file lister/selector for JQuery? OSS. Integrating 3rd party X with 3rd party Y? Opensource your module for it. Unless all your developers do is hack stuff badly together in a monolithic mess, some of it can be opensourced.
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    I read parent comment as referring to contributing to an existing active open source project vs just making things you've built open source.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    It's one thing to write the code, but another thing to publish as open source. There's overhead: coordinating the PR in an existing project, responding to issues, writing a decent README, looking at PRs, etc in your own.
postnihilism 9y ago
Your company almost certainly makes use of multiple pieces of open source software. What do you do when you need a feature that doesn't yet exist in one of them?
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  He probably opens an issue and then complains why the project maintainers don’t give it priority. He is too busy to do privileged OSS work.
  - brooklynrob 9y ago
    That's exactly the situation I described in my long comment a second ago. It's also worth point out that it's not always as simple as reviewing/testing PRs and accepting them (which also takes time). Sometimes prioritizing a PR, especially if it is not something that was on the roadmap to be released just now, means having to write a bunch of new code and features to make it work.
  - gkya 9y ago
    There arent many places that would allow you to contribute in your work time. Stop these guesses about the guy and quit attacking him for those stuff you invented.
LeoNatan25 9y ago
This smells like a small-minded startup-bubble nonsense to me. If you have time to use open source software, you should make time to also submit fixes and open some of your work. That’s not to say startups don’t contribute, but my experience is that a lot of startups—usually led by inexperienced managers—see contribution as giving something for free instead of charging. Small-minded nonsense indeed.
- ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
  Lots of companies use open source code but don't actually require any changes to be made. A lot of industry standard open source software requires no code modification of the source for the vast majority of applications. Examples being Nginx, Python, Apache Web Server, Tomcat, pretty much any enterprise level application. So many people use it that for the 99%, the code already exists, with 99% of the use cases being heavily tested. Now they could be donating some amount of money, but that's in no way required.
  - LeoNatan25 9y ago
    All good. But then, the same people could contribute code non-pertinent to their product as open source. As someone else said in a comment here, you can always find what to open source. There is really no excuse.
- crispinb 9y ago
  > This smells like a small-minded startup-bubble nonsense to me Small-minded, no doubt (though "business"-minded rather than specifically startup). In my national context (Australia), the vast majority of companies, small and large, operate purely in the fundamentalist capitalist mindset. There is no 'should' (conceived ethically) in their stock of concepts. It literally doesn't exist (where it occurs it's just a PR exercise, which the PR department will translate into management's native dog-eat-dog language for their comprehension in meetings). Ideally we wouldn't work for such companies. But the stock of jobs at better places is limited, so by statistical definition 'most' of us won't be there.
richardknop 9y ago
A lot of open source work gets done outside of regular jobs. And it also contributes to burn outs. In order to maintain my projects I am spending a subtstantial amount of my free time and it takes its toll.
adekok 9y ago
I'm not sure why the downvotes, other than you express an unpopular opinion. My experience has been two extremes: 1) companies that use open source, modify it (to the extent that it's largely proprietary), and deride the open source community that competes with them 2) companies that use open source to leverage non-core functionality they need... and move on with their real value-add Companies in the style of (1) never contribute back. They see open source as the competition, even though they use it themselves. They don't understand that proprietary extensions are just that... proprietary software in a non-expertise area, that no one else in the world knows anything about. Instead, they spend more and more money "fixing" things which were already fixed in the upstream releases years ago. Companies in the style of (2) contribute back minor bug fixes or features which are pain points for them. They sometimes pay for other people to write new features. I say this as someone with 20 years experience working on both sides (corporate / open source) for companies doing both (1) and (2) above.
- matt4077 9y ago
  I think both of your "extremes" are flawed, but for a lack of time I'll just add the big one you missed entirely: 0) Companies funding the full development of large OSS projects. Examples: MySQL, Postgres, nginx, Chrome, Tensorflow, React, (Most of) Linux, Redis etc. etc.
  - adekok 9y ago
    You do realize I said my experience, right? Not "these two examples encompass all possible corporations".
CM30 9y ago
This is something I've been thinking about for a while as well. All these companies with regularly updated blogs, super active social media feeds, employees sent to present/attend every week or so and open source project development being done in house... Do they ever do any actual work? Because every company I've seen or worked for has wondered just how they have the free time to do all this stuff with bill paying client work to attend to or a product/service to maintain. Or do they simply have a one hour work week like a fictional character would? http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneHourWorkWeek http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneHourWorkWeek
- icebraining 9y ago
  It's just marketing. Rather than spend $$$ running ads they spend a few hours of their workers' time updating blogs and social media. Open source serves the same purpose, plus you might get some external contributions. And it might create a social environment that pushes your employees to work on their free time.

cabaalis 9y ago

Nor have I. As a manager/co-owner I can't think of a reasonable business-friendly way to allow my developers to spend work time on OSS. I would love to, of course, but our systems really do not facilitate community involvement.

rcfox 9y ago
The majority of my contributions have been around projects I use for work. Bug fixes, extending functionality, performance enhancements, etc.
- adekok 9y ago
  That's the real answer. If you spent 1/10 of an engineer on an open source product, and 100 other companies do the same, your company gets much more than it puts in. And because it's open source, you know how to fix it, and you can fix it. I know of multiple billion-dollar companies who can't get the time of day from Cisco, HP, etc. for bug fixes or new features. The vendors attitude is: Bought 10M of product in the past year? Meh... piss off. We're working on important customers.
Deestan 9y ago
> I would love to, of course If you did, you'd have found a way for it to work. Making a pretty cool deploy script? Document it and put it out there as OSS. Making a class/module to sort items semantically? Make it OSS. Someone made an IDE extension to syntax highlight WebVTT files? Make i OSS. Made a file lister/selector for JQuery? OSS. Integrating 3rd party X with 3rd party Y? Opensource your module for it. Unless all your developers do is hack stuff badly together in a monolithic mess, some of it can be opensourced.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  I read parent comment as referring to contributing to an existing active open source project vs just making things you've built open source.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  It's one thing to write the code, but another thing to publish as open source. There's overhead: coordinating the PR in an existing project, responding to issues, writing a decent README, looking at PRs, etc in your own.

postnihilism 9y ago

Your company almost certainly makes use of multiple pieces of open source software. What do you do when you need a feature that doesn't yet exist in one of them?

LeoNatan25 9y ago
He probably opens an issue and then complains why the project maintainers don’t give it priority. He is too busy to do privileged OSS work.
- brooklynrob 9y ago
  That's exactly the situation I described in my long comment a second ago. It's also worth point out that it's not always as simple as reviewing/testing PRs and accepting them (which also takes time). Sometimes prioritizing a PR, especially if it is not something that was on the roadmap to be released just now, means having to write a bunch of new code and features to make it work.
- gkya 9y ago
  There arent many places that would allow you to contribute in your work time. Stop these guesses about the guy and quit attacking him for those stuff you invented.

LeoNatan25 9y ago

This smells like a small-minded startup-bubble nonsense to me. If you have time to use open source software, you should make time to also submit fixes and open some of your work. That’s not to say startups don’t contribute, but my experience is that a lot of startups—usually led by inexperienced managers—see contribution as giving something for free instead of charging. Small-minded nonsense indeed.

ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
Lots of companies use open source code but don't actually require any changes to be made. A lot of industry standard open source software requires no code modification of the source for the vast majority of applications. Examples being Nginx, Python, Apache Web Server, Tomcat, pretty much any enterprise level application. So many people use it that for the 99%, the code already exists, with 99% of the use cases being heavily tested. Now they could be donating some amount of money, but that's in no way required.
- LeoNatan25 9y ago
  All good. But then, the same people could contribute code non-pertinent to their product as open source. As someone else said in a comment here, you can always find what to open source. There is really no excuse.
crispinb 9y ago
> This smells like a small-minded startup-bubble nonsense to me Small-minded, no doubt (though "business"-minded rather than specifically startup). In my national context (Australia), the vast majority of companies, small and large, operate purely in the fundamentalist capitalist mindset. There is no 'should' (conceived ethically) in their stock of concepts. It literally doesn't exist (where it occurs it's just a PR exercise, which the PR department will translate into management's native dog-eat-dog language for their comprehension in meetings). Ideally we wouldn't work for such companies. But the stock of jobs at better places is limited, so by statistical definition 'most' of us won't be there.

richardknop 9y ago

A lot of open source work gets done outside of regular jobs. And it also contributes to burn outs. In order to maintain my projects I am spending a subtstantial amount of my free time and it takes its toll.

adekok 9y ago

I'm not sure why the downvotes, other than you express an unpopular opinion. My experience has been two extremes: 1) companies that use open source, modify it (to the extent that it's largely proprietary), and deride the open source community that competes with them 2) companies that use open source to leverage non-core functionality they need... and move on with their real value-add Companies in the style of (1) never contribute back. They see open source as the competition, even though they use it themselves. They don't understand that proprietary extensions are just that... proprietary software in a non-expertise area, that no one else in the world knows anything about. Instead, they spend more and more money "fixing" things which were already fixed in the upstream releases years ago. Companies in the style of (2) contribute back minor bug fixes or features which are pain points for them. They sometimes pay for other people to write new features. I say this as someone with 20 years experience working on both sides (corporate / open source) for companies doing both (1) and (2) above.

matt4077 9y ago
I think both of your "extremes" are flawed, but for a lack of time I'll just add the big one you missed entirely: 0) Companies funding the full development of large OSS projects. Examples: MySQL, Postgres, nginx, Chrome, Tensorflow, React, (Most of) Linux, Redis etc. etc.
- adekok 9y ago
  You do realize I said my experience, right? Not "these two examples encompass all possible corporations".

CM30 9y ago

This is something I've been thinking about for a while as well. All these companies with regularly updated blogs, super active social media feeds, employees sent to present/attend every week or so and open source project development being done in house... Do they ever do any actual work? Because every company I've seen or worked for has wondered just how they have the free time to do all this stuff with bill paying client work to attend to or a product/service to maintain. Or do they simply have a one hour work week like a fictional character would? http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneHourWorkWeek http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneHourWorkWeek

icebraining 9y ago
It's just marketing. Rather than spend $$$ running ads they spend a few hours of their workers' time updating blogs and social media. Open source serves the same purpose, plus you might get some external contributions. And it might create a social environment that pushes your employees to work on their free time.