Until someone races to the bottom to do 12 months of availability.

t-writescode 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Races to the bottom to … do work exclusively for free and not make any money out of the hopes that they become the most popular OSS toolkit, with an end goal of … what?

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altairprime 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Validation, often. Stars and installs make self-worth integer go up, etc.

Greed, sometimes. Gotta get those usercounts high to get acquihired / to sell out / to flip on the paid subs for formerly free features.

I can’t remember the word for “prosocial through lowering cost to zero” is but sometimes that too.

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RetroTechie 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I can’t remember the word for “prosocial through lowering cost to zero” is but sometimes that too.

Wiktionary:

Benevolent, altruistic, unselfish, beneficent, philanthropic, selfless

	▲	altairprime 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Philanthropic! Thanks.

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simonask 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This works for a while. Then you - the programmer - grow up.

Wise customers know this.

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saulpw 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But a programmer is born every minute.

	▲	altairprime 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not so much these days.

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jarym 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

End goal of complaining that no one pays for their efforts.

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embedding-shape 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> at they become the most popular OSS toolkit, with an end goal of … what?

Look at how any "FOSS + VC + for-profit" company in the last 5-10 years worked out, and you'll see the playbook.

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codercowmoo 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

bait and switch

	▲	fragmede 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Xz

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nkrisc 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A race to the bottom of… unpaid work that eliminates the paid work? Can you elaborate?

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zaphirplane 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We don’t need to speculate do we, there are tons of real non company run OSS projects

Now I personally wish lawyers and plumbers also got into the free work thing but here we are

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fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Lawyers have a term for it, pro bono, and they do it for good causes. Turns out they're as human as software engineers.

	▲	bityard an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Turns out they're as human as software engineers. Lawyers start out as humans but something about going into law school and then private practice, and feeding them after midnight turns them into... something else entirely.

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mc32 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Plumbers are realistic and don’t live on ideals. They set their rates and set their hours. Lawyers; well if if only people behaved we could have nice things in life, but here we are with people trying to screw each other and misbehave…

Digital assets or work are a bit different in that making a second copy is trivial. It’d be different if every computer in the world were bespoke and needed its own bespoke software. So that makes OSS a viable option for those who can but we also can’t expect everyone to default OSS. We can default to asking that the service and prices be reasonable though.

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DaiPlusPlus 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI-slop PRs automerged in response to AI slop bug reports.

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pydry 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Coz just about everyone wants to be that one guy in Nebraska thanklessly maintaining this bit of digital infrastructure, apparently?

Yeah me neither.

I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.

	▲	bombcar 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Curl is so important that if it had a heartbleed and didn’t patch, someone would and people’d just apply it until it was fixed in tree.
	▲	inigyou 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Individuals don't but lots of companies do, so that they can threaten to rugpull it later if you don't pay them millions.

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throwaw12 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

then it is up to community to fork the project if they find it valuable and can convince people migrating to their fork.

many engineers actually work that way, right? We are employed for 12 months and give our availability fully to the company and we get salary for it, why isn't it allowed to others?

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londons_explore 9 hours ago | parent [-]

A fork of a project that does security patches only is an interesting idea...

Since then a diff of the two projects will be a perfect list of security issues and will make designing an attack rather easy...