Note that the author of the linked page is Fabrice Bellard. He created a PC emulator in JavaScript.
He's also made several other impressive hacks: https://bellard.org/
He's also made several other impressive hacks: https://bellard.org/
I've seen this in practice, so it's not theoretical. It's the main reason my friends don't even try.
But the reason is more subtle than that. Say you made BPG. If you don't have past accomplishments, people will tear you to shreds here. Yet the comments are all "Look at what this genius has made."
I'm trying, hard, to find a way to resist credentialism. A meritocracy is something I want to live in.
Look, the reason I'm writing this comment is because my friend just gave up on open sourcing their amazing project. Why? Because incentives. I've been trying to convince him to MIT the code, but I can't say I blame him for keeping it closed. And part of the reason is that the only people who get paid for writing open source side project software are those high-profile genius types that we're lauding on HN.
Credentialism. Reputation. Audience. These are harmful to a meritocracy. If you've made something good, no one should give a damn who you are or how many people like you.
I'm not sure what is called the kind of tabula rasa system you're advocating, but I don't think it's meritocracy.
The essence of meritocracy is that anyone can do something like this. And in this case, it's simply not true. No one would be paying attention if Ballard didn't write this, and that's at odds with the idea that you yourself could create it.
Another way of putting it is that in a meritocracy, each project should be judged on its own merits, independent of the author. Art is separable from the artist, but unless your culture values this, you get a clique of insiders.
An author has a promising idea but asks for people to invest early in order to iterate the idea to the point where it's strictly superior to existing alternatives. Investors want to know that the idea will bare fruit, and that the author will not abandon it. How do they evaluate the author's capacity to see the project through without resorting to the author's past history of seeing projects through, references, or credentials?
Moreover, what stops malicious actors from inundating us with garbage that takes longer to refute than to produce? We can't ban spammers because banning them is based on their past history, not what they're producing now. What if their next post isn't spam and has value?
Surely these considerations mandate that even if you believe people are insufficiently charitable to new entrants in the market of ideas, you can't throw the babies (credentials, reputation, audience) out with the bathwater. This is a good opportunity to position yourself as having made a provocative statement that will, of course, require some concessions to reason.
Nobody gets torn to shreds on HN for showing people their project, people get torn to shreds for trying to use open source and HN as a cynical self-marketing tool, especially when they can't back it up with something cool and interesting. Open source doesn't exist to further the career or finances or reputations of open source authors, it's just a nice little miracle when it does.
If someone makes something great, there's a teeny tiny chance it'll catch on to become widely used, and if that happens there's an even teenier, tinier chance that the creator will at some point get paid to work on it, but that's a tiny sliver of the open source world. If that's all your friend cares about, then the meritocracy is real and working. Someone who will only write open source to become rich and famous is clearly deeply confused about how and why any of this stuff exists in the first place, and until they grow up they can't be relied on to do good work for good reasons.
However, there's a silver lining. If instead of becoming the next Linus, someone simply wants to steer their career towards working on open source professionally, that's awesome and commendable. There are lots of companies and government agencies and so on that pay people to work on open source projects as their day-to-day job. That doesn't take social capital or name recognition, that just requires getting a job in one of those organizations, which span the gamut from tiny startups, to giant companies like Google/Apple/Microsoft/etc., to government agencies like NASA. Tons of people get paid to work on open source if that's what your friend cares about.
We all rely on open source tools, but lately they're coming exclusively from large companies that can afford to develop it. And that should worry us. It means we're losing the control we used to have.
In a scientific paper, the related work section doesn't present the past work of the authors, unless it's related to the topic at hand. There's a reason Ballard didn't mention himself (beyond signing the page at the bottom).
Do you have any evidence to support this?
In the age of GitHub and social coding I would have thought that open source is more individuals, and less corporate (percentage-wise) than ever before.
P.S. I work for my self and open source a fair bit. I tend to open source libraries rather than products, which is true for most companies. Facebook open source React, not Facebook.
Sure it's not everywhere, and sure I'd love it if more free software developers could afford to spend all of their time writing free software. That would be fantastic! But to say that it is worse now than it was previously? I'm afraid you are mistaken.
The thing you have to understand is that "control" in free software is different than control with other software. The "eyes" have it. If you are able to coordinate enough development, and you aren't working against the community, and you are producing things that people want, then you will be successful. Yes, a company that offers to pay people to do these activities is at a huge advantage. I'm not sure in what universe that's a bad thing. But the point of free software is freedom. If I don't like what you are doing and I can convince enough people to go in another direction, then I am free to do so. In fact, I don't even need other people... I can just do it myself, although it will take longer.
I don't know about you, but I choose to rely on tools that are free software. I'm not forced to do so. Although it is waaaaay easier than it used to be, I go out of my way to pick something that I know I can work on myself if I need to. Yes, I've read the code for both vim and emacs. I've written extensions. I've found bugs. I've fixed bugs in compilers, interpreters, desktop environments, the works.
It wasn't that long ago that I was forced to use MS tools in order to receive my salary. I vividly remember phoning up support one day, "I'm having problems with X. I have a reproduction scenario here if you like". "How many seats do you have?" "Seats? We're a platinum partner. I don't know how many seats we use." "Do you have less than 1,000 programmers there?" "Uh... Yeah, a lot less, but like I said, we're a platinum partner. We're supposed to have support" "I can't do anything for you unless you have more than 1,000 seats. But thank you for the bug report." "Just before we go, can I ask if the bug has been reported before? Is it likely to go into the next release?" "I can't answer that question unless you have 1,000 seats and then I can prioritise it for you."...
You get the idea. I don't care if free software is being funded by a company. I care that I can do something about it if my software doesn't work, or if I want to make an extension, or if I want to go in a completely different direction altogether.
If your friend does not think that they can make a business case for freeing up their code, then that's their decision. They don't owe me anything. It's their project and they can do what they want. If you are complaining that it would be nice that there were more viable business plans for free software, I'll join you on that -- but to be honest, I think most people don't look very hard before they conclude that it is impossible.
Then why not celebrate BPG? It appears to stand on its own as superior to older formats. Or celebrate Fabrice? I don’t know him, but his merit appears to be earned, I think.
Why do you think Fabrice bothers posting stuff when Google & Facebook & Microsoft exist? He could easily give up, fighting image & web standards is an impossible task for most people.
> my friend just gave up on open sourcing their amazing project
That’s too bad, but it’s extremely common because building an audience and solving real world problems takes a lot of work, work that’s not programming. Many amazing OSS projects fail for lack of adoption because they’re programming things that, as awesome as they may be, have no demonstrated need nor enough engagement or support to keep them going.
> Credentialism. Reputation. Audience. These are harmful to a meritocracy.
Credentialism I could agree with, but what’s wrong with reputation or audience? What is merit exactly, and how does it exist without reputation or audience?
Think carefully & be honest — how many software appps or projects do you invest your own time in that have no reputation or audience? There are people, early adopters, who try unknown things a lot. Most people aren’t early adopters and don’t want to spend their time waiting for bug fixes and improvements until the software they hope will work actually works. I’d say that not only is this natural, it’s necessary in a meritocracy.
Does he do public talks? I'd love to see him and shake his hand for many, many reasons.
To be fair his stack may not be as complete as the one we were aiming for, we spent a lot of time and money on the air interface.
I wonder why?