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by krisoft 915 days ago
> Aren't there lots of UK white-hats who would freely lend their services to help improve the library's infrastructure?

You mean freely as in for no compensation? This is a massive public body. Do they pay the people who bolt together the shelves the books sit on? I believe they do. Then they should pay the people who audits their security posture too.

> Is it secret knowledge, or something?

Mismanagement and incompetence if you ask me.
2 comments
seagullriffic 915 days ago
> You mean freely as in for no compensation?

I do. The BL is a national institution, and, like the NHS, would attract masses of free labour if they asked for it. There are volunteer developers and data scientists who work for charities in their spare time to help improve society.

Not everyone's so greedy that they must be compensated for every breath they take.

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krisoft 915 days ago
> Not everyone's so greedy that they must be compensated for every breath they take.

It's not that they are greedy. It is that well performed job takes time, years and years. It is not a firefighting job you can do in your off hours on a weekend. We wouldn't ask the caretaker to work for free, we wouldn't ask the director to work for free, we wouldn't ask the desk clerks to work for free, so why are we asking IT people to work for free?

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jen20 915 days ago
Indeed so - though not only of the library. Government in general is limited in pay bands that do not even begin to compare to private industry, so it relies on people who are altruistic if they’re any good.
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toyg 915 days ago
The amount of skilled altruistic It professionals is vanishingly tiny.

The amount of not-very-good IT professionals, on the other hand...

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15457345234 915 days ago
> The amount of skilled altruistic It professionals is vanishingly tiny.

That's completely untrue. The IT industry is full of altruistic individuals, in fact almost the entire open source movement proves you wrong.

What's relatively unusual is this new crop of 'all that matters is TC' types who view the industry as a means to get loaded and who do not, in any way shape or form, embody the hacker ethos and the mentality of putting something out there for the public good because that's just the type of person they are.

The industry has been taken over by utterly despicable greedheads and that's why so much of it has become the way it is, unfortunately.

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krisoft 915 days ago
> What's relatively unusual is this new crop of 'all that matters is TC' types who view the industry as a means to get loaded and who do not, in any way shape or form, embody the hacker ethos and the mentality of putting something out there for the public good because that's just the type of person they are.

I said that people working a job should be compensated fairly. So they have a roof over their head, and don't worry about where their next meal will come, or what will happen with them when they are old. I'm glad that from here you jumped to the conclusion that 'all that matters is TC'.

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15457345234 914 days ago
I really wasn't responding to you personally, sorry if you felt that way. I was more responding to the state of the industry as a whole.
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toyg 914 days ago
The free-software community is vanishingly tiny; the slightly larger opensource one was built on the principle of not forcing anyone to be as altruistic as them (i.e. made it ok to be less altruistic). In both cases, the overall amount of actual participants is a small niche when counted against the totality of IT professionals. 90% of professionals literally just take.

I've been around since the late 90s and I reckon the greedheads have always been around. The difference is that they used to be easily recognizable by their suits, and now they are not.

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