Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cycomanic 1629 days ago
Don't get me wrong I'm a huge FOSS fan and proponent, but I think your post illustrates very clearly what is wrong with the state of OSS today. We are talking a language like python that probably underpins profits on the order of tens of billions a year and is largely maintained by volunteers in their free time and the foundation can hire one dev! Somehow companies managed to outsource all the work to "the public" while keeping the profits for themselves.
1 comments

That's the world we live in. Many banks have custom forks of Python and various other tools but they don't care to release their code. Illegal? Sure, but they're banks, they're kind of exempt as companies are.

A while ago someone posted here a post of Cray/HPE complaining to a bunch of volunteers on the GCC Fortran project that F2018 support was incomplete. The GCC team fully acknowledges its incompleteness, and knows that it is in fact, incomplete. It is not recommended for production applications. There are about 10 other compilers, some by companies such as NVIDIA and Intel, which would work perfectly fine and which have full F2018 support. But instead of using any of these, or seeing as the one complaining is on the committee that created the F2018 specification, going out and fixing it yourself, they complained to like 6 people because their government project was falling behind because of their inability to even comprehend that some group of internet communists will not do free work for them.

Literally idiotic. You're a representative one of the world's largest companies when it comes to this kind of stuff and perhaps one of the most knowledgeable people on Fortran alive. Go fix it or stop using beta products by internet communists for government contracts.