Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Fun (autonomy + mastery + purpose)! Don't forget that most OSS is still developed for fun, and adding things like this are totally fine in that context. Now, if you want to use thousands (millions?) of hours of development from hundreds of developers for free, you might have to put up with them having a bit of fun. The alternatives are to pay them to make very serious software [tm], use proprietary software or review the code yourself (not viable most times).

And I'm not being ironic or anything, really, literally the thing pushing a LOT of OSS is doing it for fun. If people keep complaining and blaming those OSS devs and it stops being fun then they will stop doing OSS, as many have done. Or it will be delegated to big companies like FB, Google, etc. where they get paid for the OSS they make, which is a whooole different can of worms.

(there is a thread saying something about a political stance, but I'm not qualified to have an opinion there and most easter eggs are for fun anyway)

Even if I'm pissed off with this particular incident since I was working on a project using this great library and I was scared by the little snowy button :) ... but I agree with you those people are doing it for fun. I used too but lost interrest in working for free. A lot of companies are making a ton of money using (among many others) my OSS project. Even my current employer (big if not biggest European software vendor) is using it on a major product they're selling for millions the funny thing is that they don't even know and prohabiting employees to work on open source even in their own free time.

This particular experience make me understand that working for free on open source is really a foolish idea. I was tempted by changing the license but since there are many others using it to build their business I thought it's better to just keep it as it is by respect to early adopters and users which any project is nothing without them.

For a healthy open source project the work needed it's not fun at least for me, it's not just about hacking/problem solving/design, you need actually to do issues triage, answer questions, documentation, extensive testing (with whole infrastructure for builds/releases/communication) those are not fun activities and in most cases done better than paid softwares (because people are passionate about their projects) and in addition to that I need to work fulltime on different (shitty) things to pay the bills and have time for familly ...

A lot of FOSS isn't fun. It's funded, by IBM, Google and other big players. Intel has an entire OSS department at their Portland office, and contributes tons of Linux kernel drivers for their products.

Sure there are some projects that are based on peoples' passions and have a few maintainers, but a lot of the bigger projects are big company middleware. It's a big difference from the FOSS movements of the late 90s. I wrote about it before here: https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-philosophy-of-open-source...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com