In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard

[wft]

(This is about people I've read on Twitter and some blogs, so it's likely I'm very biased.)

It has become fashionable of late to complain how ungratifying the work of opensource software maintainer is. You can't swing a cat in Twitter without hitting one of such threads. Just one example with maybe better writing style than most.

While I get the general gist of what these people are trying to convey, and there is a very much valid point to it, the sheer quantity of such threads over a relatively short period makes me wonder about motivations those people really have.

Almost a decade ago, having a real growing project on Github was a major résumé augmenter. Participating in open source was a major point. But so were credentials from some coding bootcamps when people realized that you don't need to rot in college for 4 years to get that entry level programming job and learn the rest on the job. A couple years ago the internet forums became infested with people jumping onto the coding bandwagon as a way to make money fast, as they somehow thought a programmer does nothing but sit at a computer all day playing video games and occasionally typing in some code, and it earns him a six-figure salary.

The predictable end result of that coding camp boom was that some companies started saying straight that coding camp alumnis need not apply. Another outcome was a number of tasty copypastas about the phenomenon.

The people complaining about OSS maintenance burdens are all relatively young, all have a story of how energetic they were entering the OSS world, and how bitter and burned out they all became when it became obvious that there's no money, and marginally growing fame means exponentially growing requests for help, bugfixes, and ponies. Oh, and there's no sex in it. Like, at all.

But guess what, the support for proprietary software is also full of people feeling entitled because they paid $4.99, and people who complain but are unable to write coherently, and the fact you're paid to deal with them doesn't make it any easier at all.

(The set of people complaining of maintainership burnout curiously has a pretty large intersection with people seriously believing communism works, and also with the set of people suffering from some personality disorder or other. I think two latter sets make 80% of Twitter accounts manned by live people. I'm not hinting at anything, wink wink.)

[pie_flavor]

For me the thing that always makes it worth it is pissing someone else off. I plan to port all of my FOSS Sponge plugins to Spigot, but sell them there as closed-source, and put a big fat banner on the page that says that you'll get them for free if you switch to Sponge, and put an extra license clause in the Sponge versions that forbids you from porting them to Spigot.

[error]

@wft said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

as they somehow thought a programmer does nothing but sit at a computer all day playing video games and occasionally typing in some code, and it earns him a six-figure salary.

[El_Heffe]

@wft said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

they somehow thought a programmer does nothing but sit at a computer all day playing video games and occasionally typing in some code, and it earns him a six-figure salary.

That is the direct result of the "everyone should learn how to code" bullshit.

Because it involves sitting at computer doing a lot of typing, just like your typical secretary, there is this belief that writing code is no different than your average clerical job. It's easy .... you're just typing stuff .... anyone can do that, right? And Google pays people a lot of money, right? So I should be able to make $150,000 a year . . . . . typing stuff!

[Unperverted Vixen]

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

I plan to port all of my FOSS Sponge plugins to Spigot, but sell them there as closed-source, and put a big fat banner on the page that says that you'll get them for free if you switch to Sponge, and put an extra license clause in the Sponge versions that forbids you from porting them to Spigot.

Aren't they no longer FOSS at that point, just OSS?

[marczellm]

@wft said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The people complaining about OSS maintenance burdens are all relatively young

Oh, so is that what "millennial" means?

How does that word even came to mean "these young people that I don't like/understand"

[_P_]

@marczellm said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@wft said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The people complaining about OSS maintenance burdens are all relatively young

Oh, so is that what "millennial" means?

How does that word even came to mean "these young people that I don't like/understand"

Gen-Z and the even younger generations don't even bother to learn coding well. They mostly hide inside their comfort zone in r/learnprogramming reddit and all kinds of "learn coding" discords feeling good at solving elementary programming tasks in an hour, and the best they can do is maybe code a shitty discord bot or two.

[_P_]

@El_Heffe said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

That is the direct result of the "everyone should learn how to code" bullshit.

And we also said "everyone should learn how to maths". Look at how many people who forgot all their mathsresent the world for making them to learn the maths during their 6+ years of mandatory education!

Seriously though, the main issue is that some business have been hyping the "learn coding" business (or "learn STEM" in general) to earn their profit, and they do that by, besides promoting "everyone should learn how to code", massively exaggerating the "learner" superiority status. You know that feeling when you're doing a task in one of these places, and they keep showering you with getting stumped is part of learning!. I've seen many people coming out with that kind of "learner" superiority by keep reminding everyone else around "I'm an enthusiastic learner!" but not actually working their ass off doing the actual tasks, or using their brain to look at the docs and understand what they've just written 10 seconds ago. And their passivity and egotism is insurmountable: they shoot their questions out as soon as they encounter it, without working it out first (or they thought they did but what was done was literally just the first thing they could think of). They're literally the most toxic learning peers you can have around.

(I may or may not be talking about Codecademy and Brilliant )

[pie_flavor]

@Unperverted-Vixen said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

I plan to port all of my FOSS Sponge plugins to Spigot, but sell them there as closed-source, and put a big fat banner on the page that says that you'll get them for free if you switch to Sponge, and put an extra license clause in the Sponge versions that forbids you from porting them to Spigot.

Aren't they no longer FOSS at that point, just OSS?

The Spigot version and the Sponge version would be two totally separate pieces of software. The Spigot version would be proprietary and sold per copy. The Sponge version would be open-source and free.

[pie_flavor]

@_P_ said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@marczellm said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@wft said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The people complaining about OSS maintenance burdens are all relatively young

Oh, so is that what "millennial" means?

How does that word even came to mean "these young people that I don't like/understand"

Gen-Z and the even younger generations don't even bother to learn coding well. They mostly hide inside their comfort zone in r/learnprogramming reddit and all kinds of "learn coding" discords feeling good at solving elementary programming tasks in an hour, and the best they can do is maybe code a shitty discord bot or two.

As opposed to a shitty CRUD application.
There was a day when actual computer science was important, and that day is in the past.

[_P_]

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@_P_ said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@marczellm said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@wft said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The people complaining about OSS maintenance burdens are all relatively young

Oh, so is that what "millennial" means?

How does that word even came to mean "these young people that I don't like/understand"

Gen-Z and the even younger generations don't even bother to learn coding well. They mostly hide inside their comfort zone in r/learnprogramming reddit and all kinds of "learn coding" discords feeling good at solving elementary programming tasks in an hour, and the best they can do is maybe code a shitty discord bot or two.

As opposed to a shitty CRUD application.
There was a day when actual computer science was important, and that day is in the past.

But it's not like they know at all the modern stuff that mostly replaced actual computer science either, like machine learning and deep learning... or even things like scraping websites and calling other website's APIs

[dkf]

@thegoryone said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The idea of programming earning you a 6-figure salary is very US Bay area centric.

FTFY (and for how dysfunctional this industry is).

[BernieTheBernie]

@El_Heffe said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

sitting at computer doing a lot of typing, just like your typical secretary, there is this belief that writing code is no different than your average clerical job

Exactly that's what I thought about software development some almost 40 years ago... Studied something much more interesting then (Genetic Engineering). And some when later, I made that dumb software crap my daily job. Still astonished how few people are able to work systematically, only tinkerers around me who just change some code some where and the else where, until they think that it works on their machine...

At least, I get some money for that dumb job.

[anonymous234]

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

and put an extra license clause in the Sponge versions that forbids you from porting them to Spigot

I hope you're not depending on anything GPL because it might have some disagreements with that clause.

[Mason_Wheeler]

@dkf said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@thegoryone said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The idea of programming earning you a 6-figure salary is very US Bay area centric.

FTFY (and for how dysfunctional this industry is).

I"m making 6 figures at this and I've never lived in the Bay Area.

[Mason_Wheeler]

@anonymous234 said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

and put an extra license clause in the Sponge versions that forbids you from porting them to Spigot

I hope you're not depending on anything GPL because it might have some disagreements with that clause. ever, for any reason.

FTFY

Stallman and the GPL have done more to harm the adoption of the principles Stallman believes in than his opponents ever will. By making the GPL more about pushing an extreme anti-proprietary ideology than about actually getting used, they actively make GPL software more difficult to get used.

Fun fact: the term "open source" was originally coined in the 90s by a bunch of developers who believed in the basic principles of openness but not the extreme ideology, and wanted a term to differentiate themselves from those GPL crazies over there.

[_P_]

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@anonymous234 said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

and put an extra license clause in the Sponge versions that forbids you from porting them to Spigot

I hope you're not depending on anything GPL because it might have some disagreements with that clause. ever, for any reason.

FTFY

Stallman and the GPL have done more to harm the adoption of the principles Stallman believes in than his opponents ever will. By making the GPL more about pushing an extreme anti-proprietary ideology than about actually getting used, they actively make GPL software more difficult to get used.

Fun fact: the term "open source" was originally coined in the 90s by a bunch of developers who believed in the basic principles of openness but not the extreme ideology, and wanted a term to differentiate themselves from those GPL crazies over there.

Yeah, just like bitcoin.

Apparently when these tech bros aren't worshipping Linus or Google they spend the time advocating for stupid political movements disguised as software movements instead.

[TheCPUWizard]

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

As opposed to a shitty CRUD application.
There was a day when actual computer science was important, and that day is in the past.

Well that would be "Software Engineering" rather than "Computer Science"

[dkf]

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@dkf said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@thegoryone said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The idea of programming earning you a 6-figure salary is very US Bay area centric.

FTFY (and for how dysfunctional this industry is).

I"m making 6 figures at this and I've never lived in the Bay Area.

Yes, but you have experience and so on…

[dkf]

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

There was a day when actual computer science was important, and that day is in the past.

Sure, there's lots more work for people grinding out the same old shit, day after day, but there's still quite a bit about that requires genuine technical innovation. That's where CS becomes quite important (and software engineering is useful everywhere as soon as you go beyond the first hacked together prototype).

[Mason_Wheeler]

@dkf This is true. I've been actively, deliberately studying and learning to code since the 3rd grade.

I once heard an anecdote about a piano player who gave a masterful performance at a concert. Afterwards, a star-struck young man from the audience came up to him and said "wow! I would give half my life to be able to play like that!"

The musician looked at him solemnly and said, "yeah, that's about what it took."

[Mason_Wheeler]

@marczellm said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@wft said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The people complaining about OSS maintenance burdens are all relatively young

Oh, so is that what "millennial" means?

How does that word even came to mean "these young people that I don't like/understand"

@discobot xkcd milennials

[Mason_Wheeler]

@error_bot xkcd millennials

[error_bot]

xkcd said in https://xkcd.com/2165/:

Millennials

2165: Millennials - explain xkcd

)

[Mason_Wheeler]

Argh, I can never remember which bot does what!

[error]

@error_bot !help

[error_bot]

Commands:

!amazing-super-powers

!awkward-zombie

!bash

!deep-dream

!waifu-2x

!deep-mask

!super-resolution

!neural-style

!colorizer

!in-painting

!pix-to-pix

!places

!celebrity-recognition

!neural-talk

!dilbert

!explosm

!mandelbrot

!help

!jargon-file

!blakeyrat

!fox

!jeff

!dinosaur-comics

!s-m-b-c-comics

!perry-bible-fellowship

!penny-arcade

!random-integer

!random-string

!random-uuid

!magic-the-gathering

!secret

!tv-tropes

!uptime

!xkcd

!wolfram-alpha

!cash-in

!roulette

!define

[error]

I need to clean that command up a bit.

[error]

Basically: @discobot can do copypasta and inferior dictionary definitions, @error_bot does everything else.

[admiral_p]

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@anonymous234 said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@pie_flavor said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

and put an extra license clause in the Sponge versions that forbids you from porting them to Spigot

I hope you're not depending on anything GPL because it might have some disagreements with that clause. ever, for any reason.

FTFY

Stallman and the GPL have done more to harm the adoption of the principles Stallman believes in than his opponents ever will. By making the GPL more about pushing an extreme anti-proprietary ideology than about actually getting used, they actively make GPL software more difficult to get used.

Fun fact: the term "open source" was originally coined in the 90s by a bunch of developers who believed in the basic principles of openness but not the extreme ideology, and wanted a term to differentiate themselves from those GPL crazies over there.

OTOH, Stallman is always right, or he will be, sooner or later. What you're saying is that basically you're fine, really, with a lot of the shit that goes on in the IT world. Consumer computing is as compartmentalised as ever. The GPL makes this much harder. If Linux weren't GPL licenced, never mind Nvidia's binary blobs and all the smartphone shit that goes on, everything would be a binary blob.

[Mason_Wheeler]

@admiral_p said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

OTOH, Stallman is always right, or he will be, sooner or later.

This is true. And if he weren't so horribly abrasive about it, maybe more people would listen!

[error]

I'll just leave this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhj8sh1uiDY

[El_Heffe]

@admiral_p said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

OTOH, Stallman is always right, or he will be, sooner or later.

No. Stallman is a crackpot who is best ignored.

What you're saying is that basically you're fine, really, with a lot of the shit that goes on in the IT world.

Nobody has ever said they are OK with the shit that goes on. That also doesn't make Stallman right, about anything.

If Linux weren't GPL licenced . . . . . everything would be a binary blob.

And 99.9% of the people in the world are perfectly fine with that.

[error]

@El_Heffe said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

And 99.9% of the people in the world are perfectly fine with that.

I would be fine with it if binary blobs were actually portable. Invariably I end up running on a platform where no compatible build exists.

---

Filed under: NodeJS specifically, because they bump their version number every week or so, and the npm ecosystem treats Windows like a second class citizen.

[Mason_Wheeler]

@El_Heffe said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

No. Stallman is a crackpot who is best ignored.

...except when he turns out to be right, and generally to have been right long before anyone else even noticed.

Read The Right To Read sometime. It was written more than a year and a half before the DMCA passed. Then look at some of the shenanigans that publishers have been doing with e-books and DRM.

[_P_]

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@admiral_p said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

OTOH, Stallman is always right, or he will be, sooner or later.

This is true. And if he weren't so horribly abrasive about it, maybe more people would listen!

And then you wonder why people listen to, I dunno, Linus or Steve Jobs or Carmark.

[_P_]

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@El_Heffe said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

No. Stallman is a crackpot who is best ignored.

...except when he turns out to be right, and generally to have been right long before anyone else even noticed.

Read The Right To Read sometime. It was written more than a year and a half before the DMCA passed. Then look at some of the shenanigans that publishers have been doing with e-books and DRM.

Are you seriously using that as an example? Because that couldn't be more predictable: publishing companies (especially textbooks, educational books and academic paper publishers) has been doing highly capitalistic shit since like forever. So basically you're saying something like "Stallman is a prophet because he predicted MAFIAA will control the internet beating down any distribution of their music and audio content", which is absurd because anyone with a brain would predict that. It doesn't take a Stallman to predict that, and him being right on that doesn't make him a psychic.

[error]

Capitalists gonna capitalize.

[Mason_Wheeler]

@_P_ said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

Because that couldn't be more predictable

Everything looks predictable in hindsight, but who else was actually predicting it in 1997?

[_P_]

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@_P_ said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

Because that couldn't be more predictable

Everything looks predictable in hindsight, but who else was actually predicting it in 1997?

You must think that nobody was predicting global warming back in 1997.

[Mason_Wheeler]

@_P_ Umm... no, and what does that have to do with anything anyway?

[Gąska]

@thegoryone said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The idea of programming earning you a 6-figure salary is very US centric. Nobody I've ever met in the UK shares that view.

It's funny because this idea is very common in Poland too. What's more, it's 100% true over here. (Though the currency is worth much less - still, it's over twice the national average.)

[Gąska]

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

Argh, I can never remember which bot does what!

@discobot used to have "xkcd" command that poked @error_bot to do its thing, but @error blacklisted mentions from @discobot.

[error]

@Gąska said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@error blacklisted mentions from @discobot.

@pie_flavor actually filed a bug report asking me to do that.

[Gąska]

@error I omitted some key facts to make the narrative smoother.

[jinpa]

@_P_ said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

I've seen many people coming out with that kind of "learner" superiority by keep reminding everyone else around "I'm an enthusiastic learner!" but not actually working their ass off doing the actual tasks, or using their brain to look at the docs and understand what they've just written 10 seconds ago.

Maybe that's my problem. I have seldom found the docs to be of much use. Trying to find the answer to the specific problem I am encountering at any one point by looking at the docs just seems to be like looking for a needle in a haystack, when you're not even sure that the needle is anywhere in the haystack, exceptions notwithstanding.

[dkf]

@jinpa said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

I have seldom found the docs to be of much use.

When the docs are useful, you tend to not remember them very much. Just like how you mostly don't notice software and hardware that's working correctly.

[admiral_p]

@El_Heffe said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@admiral_p said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

OTOH, Stallman is always right, or he will be, sooner or later.

No. Stallman is a crackpot who is best ignored.

He is also a crackpot. Nietzsche was a crackpot too.

What you're saying is that basically you're fine, really, with a lot of the shit that goes on in the IT world.

Nobody has ever said they are OK with the shit that goes on. That also doesn't make Stallman right, about anything.

Well, what is he wrong about?

If Linux weren't GPL licenced . . . . . everything would be a binary blob.

And 99.9% of the people in the world are perfectly fine with that.

Meh. That basically means that hardware is tied to the software according to the OEM's whims. Either that or the internal ABI/API must be fixed in time, which denies the opportunity to improve stuff with any sort of agility and you get basically Windows, and that's not something you can do in the OSS world for reasons of scale. Or macOS, and that means that app developers must submit to the whims of the OS Devs, which is why creative professionals all over the world update their Macs slowly, if ever.

[admiral_p]

@_P_ said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@Mason_Wheeler said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@El_Heffe said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

No. Stallman is a crackpot who is best ignored.

...except when he turns out to be right, and generally to have been right long before anyone else even noticed.

Read The Right To Read sometime. It was written more than a year and a half before the DMCA passed. Then look at some of the shenanigans that publishers have been doing with e-books and DRM.

Are you seriously using that as an example? Because that couldn't be more predictable: publishing companies (especially textbooks, educational books and academic paper publishers) has been doing highly capitalistic shit since like forever. So basically you're saying something like "Stallman is a prophet because he predicted MAFIAA will control the internet beating down any distribution of their music and audio content", which is absurd because anyone with a brain would predict that. It doesn't take a Stallman to predict that, and him being right on that doesn't make him a psychic.

The problem with Stallman is that he's unrealistic about lots of stuff. That doesn't make him wrong though. And anyway, you may not like the idea, but you probably agree with him more than you'd like to admit. It's just that you lack the... moraltoenail fibre to say no to modern day convenience. I mean, he still browses the internet offline, through Emacs.

[dcon]

@dkf said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

@thegoryone said in In which millenials realize maintaining open source stuff is hard:

The idea of programming earning you a 6-figure salary is very US Bay area centric.

FTFY (and for how dysfunctional this industry is).

I was about to post that. ( I looked ahead!) Don't forget, the Bay area poverty line is 6 figures! (from 2018)

the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s latest definition of the “low” income level to qualify for certain affordable housing programs stands at $117,400 per year for a household of four people in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties.