Mozilla Global Sprint 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Global Sprint 2018

github.com

214 pointsrobterthaddeus44 comments

Given that this is all driven by volunteer work, wouldn't it have made more sense to schedule the "sprint" on a weekend?

I bet no one will stop you to continue contributing on a weekend and later.

> Due by May 11, 2018

If you want to participate in this sprint, this coming weekend will be too late.

Bummer.

Can "sprints" be reconciled with volunteering? The joy of open source is that you can work on what you want, when you want. The moment that somebody tells you what to do and when to do it, it begins to look at bit like a job.

It's not like you get punished for not participating. It's just a motivation to actually do something and get some sense of community

Mozilla needs to cut down on the noise on the sprint's issue board, take a look: https://github.com/search?p=1&q=label%3Amozsprint&state=open...

There's so much baloney like this:

- How can we solve X problem? Where X is a global problem that potentially has thousands of stakeholders and use cases, requiring millions of dollars in time and effort.

- Can you fill out this survey?

- What flavour of ice cream do you like?

- Start your own hackathon/organize your own event!

- When is someone considered a senior Ruby developer?

- What have you done with your skills?

- Write us instructions on how to use X tool. Where X is an industry standard tool that has thousands of hits on google about how to use it.

When did the open source community get this watered down?

Part of Mozilla’s aim with the Sprint is to help people/projects outside of engineering apply “open” principles -- to educational resources, to civic projects, etc. That’s why you see some light-weight, non-technical issues. But there are plenty of more typical coding projects to work on! You can try searching by project or language to find those.

Actually, they have. If you follow the link on OP, you'll see 93 selected issues, not the 941 noisy ones you linked.

They're actually putting some effort into this as well. Not just creating a place for a ton of random junk, pat on the back, "good luck, go figure".

EDIT: Your filter is just "label:mozsprint" across all of GitHub. That's pretty likely to include noise that Mozilla cannot do anything about.

Wow, that’s actually a pretty cool initiative. An extra push to start giving back to the community. I’ll find myself a project and start contributing!

what exactly is Mozilla doing except having created a github issue tracker?

Here's background on the larger mission: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/05/07/mozillas-48-hour-ha...

Unless I'm missing something, the answer from the link is ~nothing and/or taking credit?

- Curated a list of bugs/features/issues that are accessible to noobs as well as veterans

- Coordinated with project owners that wanted to be involved

- Setup a structure for mentoring and leadership on projects

- Broadcast the initiative

- Focused the project list on things that would build a "more healthy internet"

Is it possible to participate without registering an account with GitHub Inc?

Finally, an opportunity to engage in uncompensated labour!

Well, that's the most hostile possible interpretation.

Maybe it's tongue-in-cheek?

Or you could say it's an opportunity to improve mission critical code that tons of high valuation companies use every day for free ;)

You've already been compensated with massive amounts of free, open source technology that you use every day, probably every time you interact with your computer. Now you have an opportunity to do a little work for it.

EDIT: harlanji's response, below, is the much better one IMHO. I let the parent frame it as a question of compensation. As harlanji points out, that was the wrong question.

Open source software is mostly written under well funded projects. Users shouldn't feel like they "owe".

Nobody said anything about "owing." Simply that we've been "compensated" via tremendous value hence as programmers there's no need to feel exploited for providing "free" labor.

Life gives what one gives it. Pretty appalling attitude up above. I was never more rich than when I did everything in the open.

Not all projects are well funded, the openSSL heartbleed fiasco comes to mind.

Most of them didn't start as such, and only got funding after years, sometime decades, of free work.

And even then, half of the work is still done for free.

And that's only for the most famous one. E.G: the huge majority of free libs in JS or Python are purely pro bono.

And even after the money arrived, some very popular software have very little money compared to the produced work: eg: the PSF.

All in all, my entire computer contains millions of euros of software I didn't pay.

It's sad enough you don't want to participate, but it's a choice we must respect. But don't be discouraging other people actually giving something, it's insulting.

When I first used firefox I was just some kid in high school. Me and many of my peers used firefox for years free of charge. We shared it with out parents and grandparents.

I would consider this as contribution to this wider community beyond just Mozilla's bottom line.

Most people in free software don't regard compensation as their primary motivator to work. Personally, I'd hate to spend so many hours of a finite lifetime on things I don't care about beyond a paycheck. As soon as you have enough money for your purposes, it's incredibly freeing to do things that satisfy your actual motivations.

An accompanying explanation would've been nice. For future visitors [0]:

> Mozilla’s Global Sprint, a distributed work/collaboration sprint on open projects from around the world!

> Every issue in this repository represents a project seeking contribution.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/global-sprint/issues/299

Unless I managed to completely miss something, I see no mention of the copyright issues that likely ensare a good percentage of those who would otherwise be their prime audience.

This sounds interesting to me, but having already waded through the issues once on my own, without some serious help resolving the legal aspect of this, the cost of entry is too high for impulse-based participation.

I'm so confused by what you're saying, do you not understand how software licensing works in regards to copyright? I thought by now its been pretty well understood by the community. The exception being obscurely licensed software.

The problem with copyright is that many of us are subject to broad agreements assigning the ownership of all our programming output to our employers. If we were to contribute to these projects without a clear legal framework in place authorizing us to do so, we open up all parties involved to significant legal risk.

If Mozilla had some kind of pre-packaged kit that we could take to our employers for approval, and that once filled out, had a clear scope of authorization, it would go a long way to giving me the courage to try walking the path to contributing again.

I'm not sure there, I see what you mean now. Thanks for the clarification. I'm not familiar with that case, maybe someone else here on HN would know. Usually most people just don't have to worry about that when contributing to open source. Also depending on the software license, it might trump the supposed claimed copyright of your employer, e.g. GPL code once GPL'd there's no going around it. Or other licenses which revoke your use of their code the second you try to sue. Software licenses are kind of smart in their own regard.

Sidenote: I personally would refuse to work for anybody who tries to own code I write outside of work with my own hardware / tools. Thankfully where I work we're very open source friendly, not only do we use open source tooling / OS' but in some cases we contribute back directly where appropriate.

Every place that I’ve worked at with a clause like that in the contract doesn’t get to employ me until it’s removed. Usually they can’t understand my objections, and has just been put in there by their lawyers, but it’s always come out eventually.

It just makes no sense why they add that in to begin with. Glad to know they'd take it out.

Anyone in SF or East Bay organizing together for this? I see a pin on the map in SF but can't tell how legit that gathering is. Is there anything happening at the Mozilla office?

I’ve set myself to drive down to Mozilla from SF and work on this:

https://github.com/mozilla/global-sprint/issues/307

Lots of Meetups happen at the pinned library in SF so it’s likely legit.

Shameless plug: Clojure Engs wanted, esp w Reagent or at least (atom) and UI experience. Streaming video, RSS, RasPi, oh my. Just me sofar, late reg.

This and your tinydatacenter page seems great. Also I like the styling of that page :-)

looks nice but would greatly improve chances if they had labels of what kind of help is needed

answering myself, went and read about 20 pages, they really need labels

One really cool project would be to make Firefox's webassembly compiler work standalone as a dynamic library. Even baseline compiler would be useful.

Do you mean the JIT compiler? If so, there has been some work fusing Eclipse OMR's JITBuilder to wabt here: https://github.com/wasmjit-omr/wasmjit-omr

It's probably significantly more primordial than what you want, but mentioning it on the chance it's useful.

A library with small binary size that is easy to integrate.

Supporting at least x86(-64) and ARMv7 (default + thumb2, 64-bit ARMv8 would be a big plus).

Something that would enable multi-platform plugins.

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