|
|
|
|
|
|
by ctstover
3777 days ago
|
|
|
Really? The whole thing used to be about fun. Like, "hey look at this!". Do you really need press secretary and events coordinator? If you were running a business, yes. That was the entire concept of enterprises like Red Hat and Canonical, even parts of Intel and IBM. That is, repackage and support semi-organized hackery. Again, we don't want to devolve into the bureaucracies F/OSS usurped. (Ideas + fun + seeking prestige + curiosity) * tenacity = occasional glory. |
|
|
Of course you can put anything you want up online (and you should!). But, if you have (or expect to have) millions of users, then one person sitting alone saying "ME ME ME" doesn't cut it.
It stops being less about fun when your company loses $10,000 per minute of downtime and you suffer an outage because you are operating "at-scale" (256 GB RAM to 1 TB RAM, thousands of clustered servers, multi-datacenter replication, etc) but your software is only tested on the primary developer's macbook air.
Rejecting the feedback of people with actual experience running large scale systems in favor of one person's unexperienced narrow viewpoints is just bananas. Large scale software can't operate under single minded "open source fascism" anymore because our computing world is too complicated these days.
With millions of users you'll have people using your software for critical systems needing things like uptime, reliability, timely security fixes, timely bug fixes, etc. When you start getting 50 requests a day for changes, you will seem inept just telling everyone "lol its my software i do whatever i want you should just go away and fork it you can't tell me what to do."
It's professionally irresponsible to run a project with millions of users without a scalable team of equal contributors.
The argument against companies running their systems on top of poorly maintained/developed/supported open source software (while still expecting free and immediate improvements/fixes) is an entirely different article though.