Open Source Software Wall of Shame | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Software Wall of Shame

github.com

27 pointsAlir3z424 comments

This seems odd. It feels unfair to shame companies because they may or may not contribute to a handful of projects you've picked out. I'd also encourage the author to do a bit more digging. The first entry calls out Instagram for allegedly not contributing to Django but they have a fork of it here: https://github.com/Instagram/django and without doing much digging, it's easy to say they've contributed at least once.

Several of the companies listed make incredible contributions to OSS.

Most of these companies and probably all of them contribute to Open Source for sure, but they don't contribute back to the projects they use.

Instagram being a golden sponsor of Django (https://github.com/Alir3z4/oss-wall-of-shame/pull/3) but still it's not officially claimed that it started to sponsoring yet.

A 3 years old fork of Django doesn't seems to be a real contribution. Have a look at instagram and its size and tell me a 3 years old fork of their web framework of choice, something that made them $$$ is something to be called a contribution.

Contribution is not only code, it can be $$$, hosting, hiring a developer to work on the project or many many other ways.

Uber is a douchebag company, who knew? On a serious note, there is no obligation for any user no matter how big to contribute anything upstream in open source. If that were the case, we would be in big debt to the maintainers of the Linux kernel, GNU, OpenSSL, and so much more.

Thats kind of the point of open source. It's free for anyone to use.

It's like shaming people for not paying for the free candy that you hand out.

In BSD-style licenses, if you make changes you can distribute them with a new license. In GPL-style licenses, the source for any modifications must be distributed along with any modified binaries. In AGPL-style licenses, the source for any modifications must be available to users, even if no binaries are ever distributed. So, in some cases, I'm sure not contributing upstream is actually illegal.

I can understand why lots of companies would use open source software but not contribute changes: if you already have your employees sign away their IP to the company, then there are legal complications to figuring out how to contribute, and if the company is publicly traded then internal modifications to open source software in order to support features that have not yet been announced may constitute an information leak if contributed upstream (and thus give illegal trading advantage to maintainers, etc). It's a big can of worms.

What is the source for not contributing? (how do you know that an Uber employee has not contributed back ?)

Also - contributing to open source is a lot more than code. (Good) Bug reports, docs, and evangelism are all valid forms of contributions.

I work for a company that uses open source. Sure, we might have the resources to contribute, but... the "fixes" we implement tend to be hacks particular to our overly complicated and Rube Goldberg-esque infosec infrastructure that I guarantee would have us on a different wall of shame all together if the code ever saw the light of day.

Besides, code leaving larger institutions outside of the tech industry has other hurdles involving things like compliance and lengthy legal reviews...

Careful what you wish for, you may shame them into contributing back.

"Wall of shame"?

And maybe these companies did not have anything to contribute back?

Uber uses Celery, but I can't imagine their main worries being fixing bugs on Celery (or even better, fixing them in a contributable form)

Several companies have internal fixes and workarounds for OSS, and that is fine. Because not everything belongs upstream

They also have other open source things here http://github.com/uber, why shame them for not contributing to the specific things, which they may as well use vanilla

Would this not also depend on whether those companies make any changes to the software that would be worth contributing back?

There are millions of websites using MySQL and Postgres that make money but don't contribute back?

Add nginx/Apache to this list too? would cover most of the internet then.

When a software library is released with a license such as MIT or BSD it says: use this for whatever you want as long as you preserve this notice. There is NO requirement to "contribute back".

Yeah, Uber sucks. I’ve deleted their creepy app and won’t use the service until they go ahead and up they game.

BuuuUUUuuuut, this shaming is not an information-rich presentation. It would be interesting to see a presentation on which big, heavily-invested companies are not good OSS citizens, but this is not that presentation.

To be fair to Uber, it would be in their interest to give back once they turn a profit. Instagram doesn't seem to turn a profit (as far as I'm aware).

So this is just an attack on companies that can't give back. Amazing insight.

So this company has a team that stalks unfriendly journalists to find some dirt on them, and thats okay but if they don't contribute to Celery they have really crossed the line?

Seems like somebody has been looking at what Über is using.

If he wants to make a meaningful wall of shame he should start listing every other company. Because this is more commonplace than just Uber.

this list is not complete enough, tons of companies should be in there but I need time and suggestion. Once a while I come up for new companies to put them there, but I just forgot to do.

Uber came to my sight first.

How does the author know if the listed companies never contribute?

When a company throws a biscuit at the wall, believe me they announce so loud that others can hear it very well.

When they contribute, they make it sure everyone knows about it.

Didn't Instagram also co-create React.js?

looks like an attack against Uber

Uber doesn't particularly need to be attacked. Their business model is basically to violate employment law; as a result, their days are numbered.

My thoughts exactly :D

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