Hacker News Reader

Comment by user_0001 | Hacker News Reader

Is there anything resembling "opensource" for any other area apart from programming?

I am not aware of any other trades / industries where people work on things to give away for free in their own time (and even be expected to do so in order to get a job)

View on HN

Certainly (though I'm not sure about the 'getting a job' part): Breeding of open-pollinated plants, mostly vegetables. Not as well known as OSS, but much the same ethos. I've had people ship seed across the world to provide germplasm breeding stock and done likewise myself, completely without any expectation of payment or even reciprocation.

I've seen lots of free photos and icon sets released. And typefaces. Often this is a good strategy to build a portfolio and get attention. It's certainly not done to the same extent as in the programming world.

Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap are two fairly significant ones.

(I suppose more for the first part of what you are asking and not so much for the second part, but then there are several companies paying people to make edits to OSM)

"give away" "get a job"

You do not understand why Open Source exists, how it works, or why people contribute to it.

Any "community" based activity such as neighborhood watch, habitat for humanity, barn raising.

No idea about other industries, but in game development artist expected have have relatively huge online portfolio in order to get a job. Of course most of that portfolio wouldn't be made of well-paid (if at all) works.

Of course it's not the same thing as releasing your work under permissive license, but most of content on sites like DeviantArt artists wasn't paid for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com