On Thursday, 19 October 2017 at 01:32:14 UTC, codephantom wrote:
The open-source community is mostly driven by
'volunteers'...who work on what they want to work on, when they
have some spare time to work on it. I think too many people do
not understand this, and so come in with bloated expectations.
...
They go out of their way to make the 'installation and learning
curve as smooth as possible'..for beginners! And they are
responsible for setting those kind of expectations up in
peoples minds..at the 'beginning'! This is not the mindset you
want when you enter the open source community...
I guess this is ok, if you're only every going to encounter
commercial solutions when you go out into the real world...but
the world has changed a lot..and you're actually more likely to
encounter non-commercial, open source software these days.
...
open source, and D too, did not come about as a result of
C#/Windows/VS users being disappointed with their language
and/or tooling ;-)
+1
Although these days, it's not like the contribution of
enterprises to open-source is nil. In 2013 (I didn't bother to
find latest stats), 80% of contributions to the kernel were from
developers employed to work on it.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/175919-who-actually-develops-linux-the-answer-might-surprise-you
And of course commercial open-source software is a thing.
When I started my career after university at SBC Warburg, banks
outsourcing technology services was just beginning. And I read a
study from a couple years back about the consequences of
outsourcing - and it said that very often there was a one-shot
reduction in cost, followed by an enduring loss in productivity
growth. Why? Because it's very hard to improve things when you
don't control the whole process and when you don't receive
information from the environment by getting your hands dirty.
And outsourcing and using tools that do everything for you
automagically are somewhat similar in that respect. Of course
it's worth automating what no human should be doing. But if one
completely loses touch with the layer beneath, that comes at a
high price. And when you've automated everything, you may also
find that the remaining problems are beyond the ken of any living
human to solve, particularly when that human no longer has the
experience of solving the simpler problems that are now automated.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2841313
Developments in society move in cycles and waves. From the 1990s
until recently, yes, it made sense to think about making things
easy that should be easy. Today, we've lost a bit touch with the
underlying reality, and as far as I can see the pendulum is
swinging back a bit.
I just hired someone to work on devops who liked the old ThinkPad
keyboards and didn't like the new ones. But the old machines are
now a bit dated, and yet there is no way to buy the new machines
with a classic keyboard. So he tried plugging an old keyboard in
and it didn't work, so he did what anyone normal would do. He
reverse engineered the firmware and patched it - only to patch it
he also had to reverse engineering the patching tool because it
was signed. Some might say that this demonstrates nothing more
than a lack of pragmatism and commercial orientation. But I
don't think that's the case at all. It's an unreasonable stance
to take, but one that's very sane indeed. GK Chesterton said
that 'all progress comes from the unreasonable man'. And if you
have this kind of attitude then you recognise that you can change
things in your environment - one no longer has this feeling of
learned helplessness the moment that it is necessary to do
something that can't be easily accomplished from within Visual
Studio. It's just code, after all.
And we're in an age where some of the most significant commercial
problems come from the dynamic business environment - where you
end up having to do something you didn't plan for - and from the
complexity created by layers of abstractions. So if you're
adaptable and not afraid of understanding the things you depend
on, and if they are themselves designed for you to take apart and
understand, there's just a chance it may be one source of
enduring commercial advantage...
