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Comment by infodroid | Hacker News Reader

The chart was created by Andy Lester, the creator of ack, who thinks that more open source projects should point to their "competing" projects because it's not really a competition: http://blog.petdance.com/2018/01/02/the-best-open-source-pro...

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Emphasis mine-

Excerpt: "Some might say that ag and ripgrep and any of the other tools I list on beyondgrep.com are competing projects, but I think that way of thinking is wrong. It’s only a competition if you see it as a competition. I’m not competing against anyone for anything: Clicks, dollars, popularity, etc. If someone uses ripgrep instead of ack, it doesn’t hurt me. It’s the difference between an abundance vs. scarcity view of the world. I choose abundance. I think most of us who work in open source do, too."

I never thought I would see the confluence of the "woo-woo" space abundance mindset and a blog post about an open source command-line utility. I must say I am intrigued.

If this explanatory medium doesn't substantiate the reasonability of a mindset of abundance in the minds of programmers, I don't know what ever will.

I don't read that as a name-it-claim-it spell. I read it as an accuracy claim. That the competition is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't know what's "woo-woo" about that.

What is woo-woo space?

I’d wager they’re talking about the whole “The Secret” abundance mentality thing. “Believe and you shall receive... somehow”. That sort of interesting New Age stuff. I put no credence in it myself in terms of their stronger claims, but hey, CBT reminds me of it in a lot of ways and helped cure my depression.

Author here. I don't know about "The Secret" other than it being an Oprah thing, what, ten years ago?

Abundance vs. scarcity has nothing to do with “Believe and you shall receive... somehow”.

Scarcity thinking means that you fear giving people credit, and letting others have success. You fear that praising others makes you seem weak. You think that if someone uses a different open source project than yours, that you or your project suffers. You might not even be aware of the thinking. You might just feel it reflexively.

Abundance thinking says that there is more than enough praise to go around. It says that your success doesn't hurt me in mine (unless in some tangible way it does). It says that you can use ag and I can use ack and Susan can use ripgrep and it's all good.

In this specific case, abundance says that I, as the creator of ack, don't need to own the "market". In fact, the creation of other tools only helps ack. It gives the ack team ideas for things we can implement in ack. Who am I to think that I'm the only one with good ideas?

It gives our users a wider choice of tools. I put my work out there publicly to help people. Why would I not want them to have a variety to choose from?

That's abundance vs. scarcity.

Well said. :-)

I've added a link to your feature comparison table to my REAMDE[1]. Thanks again for putting it together!

[1] - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#feature-comparison

Involuntary Neil Stephenson reference :-)

Oh I wasn’t having a go at you, merely answering the question posed by the parent and grandparent commenters here :)

Your view on the world shapes how you perceive the world (yes I've learned that in the tautology club) and as your reality is only what perceive, your view on reality shapes how you see it.

Not much woo woo involved.

I mean, if you're trying to make a living, it is a competition.

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