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by ants_everywhere 276 days ago
> More like the unpaid open source community volunteers who the Fortune 500 leech off contributing nothing in return except demands for free support, fixes and more features.

People who work on permissively licensed software are donating their time to these Fortune 500 companies. It hardly seems fair to call the companies leeches for accepting these freely given donations.
3 comments
48terry 276 days ago
> People who work on permissively licensed software are donating their time to these Fortune 500 companies.

They can use the software as they like, that's what the license is for. I don't recall a license or contract where I have to care about their problems, however.

If they depend on my software and it makes their product blow up in their faces and they're losing more money per minute than I'll ever make in my lifetime? Sucks to be them. I'll handle support or fixes when I very well feel like it, I'm off to play Silksong.

They can, of course, fix this attitude problem of mine by paying me.

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michaelmrose 276 days ago
No. People should be expected to be aware of the dynamics on which their fortunes depend. This is true of individuals and its certainly true of giant companies with thousands of employees.
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JensRantil 276 days ago
It's not just time. A lot of devs simply don't have the experience of dogging into third party sourcing code or understanding how one contributed to open source.
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ants_everywhere 276 days ago
By "a lot of devs" do you mean devs at these companies?

If so I think this is a good point. It's easy to see from any one open source project's perspective how a little help would go a long way. But it's really hard to see from the perspective of a company with a massive code base how you could possibly contribute to the ten gajillion dependencies you use, even if you wanted to.

People will say things like "Why doesn't Foo company contribute when they have the resources?" But from what I've seen, the engineers at Foo would often love to contribute, but no team has the headcount to do it. And acquiring the headcount would require making a case to management that contributing to that open source project is worth the cost of devoting a team to it.

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em-bee 275 days ago
it's really hard to see from the perspective of a company with a massive code base how you could possibly contribute to the ten gajillion dependencies you use, even if you wanted to

counterpoint: you don't need to actively contribute to all upstream projects, but you do need to be prepared to maintain, fix, or replace any dependency you have. if you can't do that, you should pay someone to do it. if you can't do that either then you should not be using the dependency in the first place.

yes, it can happen that you underestimate the resources needed for that, or that a project you use looked very stable and supported, but suddenly you can't find anyone who has the knowledge to fix the issue you have, but then that's simply bad luck. it can happen with company backed projects too. you need to deal with that. have no sympathy if you can't.

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trolleski 276 days ago
jUsT uSE AI, dUh?
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