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931 points sohzm | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.855s | source | bottom
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tombert ◴[] No.44460923[source]
Things like this are why I have become disillusioned with Open Source, and why latest projects have been closed source. The GPL is a good enough idea but it is basically impossible for anyone to realistically enforce. If a corporation is selling an optimized binary, then it can be almost impossible to prove that there was any violation of the GPL without viewing the source.
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rfl890 ◴[] No.44460940[source]
Well, if you're writing open source because you want to write open source, then none of this matters. If you are worried about corporations stealing your work, that should drive you away from OSS. OSS should stay "hobbyist" for the individual developer.
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tombert ◴[] No.44460972[source]
Sure but it sort of devalues labor.

If a corporation is stealing your OSS code (and violating a license) then that implies that they think your code has value, they might have paid a person to write that code but instead some hobbyist built it for free and a corporation steals it.

A few months ago, I made a pull request to LMAX Disruptor, which was merged. I was initially excited because even if my PR was simple it’s still a big project that I contributed to. But after a few minutes it occurred to me that I just did free labor for a for-profit trading company. If they merged in my code then must have thought it had some value, and I decided to dedicate my time to saving this multi million dollar company some money.

My PR there was pretty simple and only took me like 30 minutes (if that), so I am not going to cry too hard over this, but it’s just something that made me realize that if a company is going to use my work, they should pay me. I don’t think it’s wrong or weird to want to be compensated for my labor.

I am still a hobbyist. Turns out you can still be a hobbyist without sharing everything you’ve ever done on GitHub.

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bigfatkitten ◴[] No.44462035[source]
I submitted a PR to fix a bug in cloud-init a while ago.

It was in my interest to do so, because it means I benefit from fixed packages in the Linux distributions I use. This saves me a ton of time in not having to maintain my own packages with my fix included.

If it helps Canonical make money, then it’s no skin off my nose because I still got the benefit I wanted.

I’m not going around fixing bugs that don’t affect me, or adding features I don’t need.

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tombert ◴[] No.44464813[source]
That’s why I made the patch to Disruptor as well, because I needed the change and I didn’t want to maintain it. I’m not saying that that’s valueless but I still think programmers should not be giving free labor to corporations.

Canonical is at least a little better since they’re a much more FOSS-first company as opposed to a trading corporation, but my opinion still is the same with them.

Also, completely unrelated, if anyone at Canonical is reading this, your hiring process is terrible. Making people write nine-page essays about how smart they were in high school and then forcing them to take some absurd pop-psychology IQ tests and then multiple dedicated projects is insane. Whomever designed the interview process there should genuinely be ashamed of themselves and consider literally any other career.

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1. tptacek ◴[] No.44470242[source]
Does Canonical really make candidates take IQ tests?
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2. tombert ◴[] No.44473161[source]
They make you take the Thomas General Intelligence Assessment. It's not strictly "IQ" but it's still an "intelligence" metric.

The entire process is absurd. I wasn't joking when I said that the application required me to write a 9 page essay to even move forward. It took me two hours, and then I'm told I have to do some pop-psychology horseshit to prove my "intelligence" to these assholes.

I don't really like insulting people if there's any chance of the person actually seeing it, but I genuinely have to question the competence of anyone who thinks that this is a good use of the company's or candidates time. I genuinely think that the world would be better if they chose a different career.

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3. kiitos ◴[] No.44474661[source]
I have worked with a statistically significant number of ex-Canonical engineers and have not come away with a positive impression of that organization.
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4. tombert ◴[] No.44475513{3}[source]
I was pretty disappointed by their entire process, and I guess if their goal was to weed out candidates who don't want to spend days indulging them in pop-psychology bullshit and writing multiple projects after writing nine pages of answers to questions, then they achieved their goal.

I would have loved to be paid to work on FOSS stuff, but this interview process was too stupid.

5. bigfatkitten ◴[] No.44477317[source]
Some of the smartest and most capable people I’ve ever worked with came from government agencies where you send in your CV, write a max 700-800 word spiel about why you’d be a good fit for the role, and then do a 30-60 minute interview if you look good enough on paper to be shortlisted.

It’s a surprisingly efficient and low-bullshit process.

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6. tombert ◴[] No.44477429{3}[source]
Yeah, I have never worked for the federal government, but I have family that does and they said the interview process wasn’t too bad at all.