Maybe it became a burden to maintain, attracted the wrong users, or got used in ways you didn’t expect.
Would love to hear your experience - good or bad.
Maybe it became a burden to maintain, attracted the wrong users, or got used in ways you didn’t expect.
Would love to hear your experience - good or bad.
This is literally why i think AI coding cant touch dev jobs.
In theory you can code LOADS of projects. Want a panel widget on your desktop environment, dont even know what language its in? ask ai to produce it.
but when you have open source projects, people from all over the world bring their requests and problems to you. Some are great to just merge, others you have no clue what they are doing wrong but it's totally them; and you get paid in github stars? Now there's a bunch of open source projects that are just working for me every day, but i havent modified in years and they look stagnant.
but even in the non-open source realm, no dev wants to forever maintain a project. Its not a regret, just 1 dev can probably only be responsible for a handful of codebases/projects and ai coding isnt going to super expand this.
The big issue with this, even if it works perfectly every time, is that there is no one at the core of the project with some vision and taste, who is willing to say “no” to bad ideas or things outside the scope of the project. We’d end up seeing a lot of bloat over time. I’m sure AI will claim to solve that too, just have it code up a new lightweight project. The project sprawl will be endless.
That can literally be a system prompt.
"Here are the core principles of this project [...]. Here is some literature (updated monthly?). Project aims to help in x area, but not sprawl in other areas. Address every issue/PR based on a careful read of the core principles. Blah blah. Use top5 most active users on github as a voting group if score is close to threshold or you can't make an objective judgement based on what you conclude. Blah blah."
Current models are really close to being able to do this, if not fully capable already. Sure, exceptions will happen, but this seems reasonable, no?
Albeit I'm sure that most would likely not be willing to pay to have their code reviewed and accepted in a project; but on another hand, if I wanted to contribute to GNUCash and I didn't want to read the manual, or I found the manual hard to understand, it would be like paying for training. So it can in certain cases be win-win.
And if it is a feature that is wanted, then there's no worry about it being reviewed. Or having to pay because the value will be obvious to the creators who will take it on.
In other words: Pay the developer/maintainer to care about the feature you want.
Has this ever been attempted and successful?
Obsidian also has a rich plugin ecosystem with lots of open source plugins that are available and serve the same purpose (and you can use gdrive, dropbox, etc too).
It makes sense to me that they released a proprietary privacy and security focused plugin (that is their core business) and they don't want other plugins to be able to arbitrarily change the server that their plugin is pointed at.
Suppose they have a government customer who is using Obsidian Sync and the sync URL can be changed easily via configuration changes -- now the customer believes they are using Obsidian Sync, but actually their data is going somewhere else.
I don't think you would be surprised to find that e.g. a dropbox daemon has protections to make sure it is pointing at dropbox.com. Why would you expect Obsidian to be different?
(disclaimer: I work on a different plugin that adds file sync and collaboration features to Obsidian)
When I tried to copy my vault off iCloud, the copy failed and two years of notes were permanently lost.
I’m never putting anything of value in iCloud again.
The ipad is the real stick in the mud and I don't want to deal with an icloud staging zone for everything else, or try to get icloud syncing on linux/android.
Great suggestion to make in advance placeholders to contain side projects.
In what ways do you trust, and not trust, your colleagues?
How do you feel about that?
I've had experience with a similar "committee" (probably same company) and I concluded the safest path is to just not do side projects while employed with BigTech.
Sure, a company could not like you doing that and find a reason to fire you, but they have no valid legal recourse and you may even be able to sue them for wrongful termination.
We are one of the only states that prevents employers from having ownership of your brain on personal time.
Corpos have tried to claim ownership of things I did in my personal time, multiple times. I just show them this law and they back down immediately.
Having rights to my own brain is a big reason I live in California, cost of living be damned.
https://california.public.law/codes/labor_code_section_2870
IANAL, but know your rights!
> (1)Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;
So, if you work at $BIGCO, they will argue that since they have their fingers in everything, that anything you might work on "relates" to their business or actual or demonstrably anticipated R&D. This is a truck-sized loophole.
It also keeps open the option to sell to an incumbent (possibly helps maximize the value of that option as well).
And if it's not that, it's someone (who very well may be qualified) being unnecessarily passive aggressive trying to make a failure of your own seem like a show stopping nightmare that they'd never let happen.
What I really don't like is that sharing anecdotes like the above often invites equally annoying "tHaT's NoT mY eXpErIeNcE" type comments which leads to a sort of "who cares, just do the best you can and ignore everybody" mindset (which can be helpful at times, damaging at others).
Aside from all of that nonsense, it's great because you have other sets of eyes looking around that may see something you didn't. This is incredibly valuable if you're a soloist or small team working on a big project.
https://blog.getpaint.net/2009/11/06/a-new-license-for-paint...
I had death threats once for raising a github issue!
This was one of those niche industry specific things that no one would give a crap about if it was open sourced other than the competitor in the market.
Principal architect was tossed on the street for that one.
Long long (2016 ish) ago I released an Unreal Engine 4 plugin that let people embed chromium embedded framework views into the engine via textures, so you could make fancy HUDs or whatever.
Epic Games was kind enough to give me a developer grant for open sourcing and making it, cool as hell for a college student at the time, helped pay my classes.
The number of angry game devs who basically wanted me to solve all their problems for them for free was astounding, additionally another dev grant receiver was jealous that I got money close to their grant for “just making a crappy plugin”
(paraphrasing but that was essentially what happened)
No one is ever thankful lol.
Only one item became a bit popular, but was written for MS-DOS ages ago and I hear it is still used by 1 person :)
sexyman48•3d ago
bruce511•2d ago
Firstly your appeal to authority , and then using Steve Ballmer as your authority is perhaps not the best way to start.
Secondly you say that "no professional programmer" - but the statement is false. For starters it's a sweeping generalization which is trivial to show is untrue for at least 1 programmer.
Thirdly the existence of Open Source alternatuve does not make a product uncompetitive. You need look no further than Windows to see that's true. Indeed if we has to list all the commercial software that exists with an Ooen Source clone, we'd be here all day. I'd also argue that Joe public doesn't even know what open source is, much less factors it into a buying decision.
If you are building tools for programmers (already a tiny niche target market) then you need a hook other than Open Source anyway, cause programmers are a terrible target market.
I say this as someone who builds tools for programmers, and who sells commercial into a space that contains Open Source alternatives. And I do ok.
tliltocatl•1h ago