After seeing this time and time again, and because I was getting older, I made a conscious decision to move into management. Be the change you want to see in the world, right? Now my output is mostly spreadsheets and powerpoint, but I enable my team to do good work as I insulate them from the bullshit. I can always get down into the trenches or work on a side project if I need to scratch that creative itch.
I happen to be doing a security assessment on some products (PuTTY etc) at the firm (Fortune Global 100) where I am interning.
It baffled me to read a directive from management that said that we should shy away from open-source projects - I must confess that I was somewhat frustrated at the sheer ignorance in the memo but your comment allows me to see a silver-lining. I hope that one day I can rise up to management and make decisions based on greater nuance than simply saying "OSS bad and insecure".
Note that large amounts of OSS is used in companies, but it's generally code that developers are expected to know well enough to dive into if need be. And code that is popular enough to be well tested for bugs and known that breaking errors in the framework will get fixes. Examples would be things like Python or Node.js.
As a manager a potential problem you can have is a major bug your team is responsible for that no one is qualified to fix and thus your only reasonable time estimate is unknown. Avoiding certain parts of OSS is often a precaution against this situation.
I have filed many bug reports for paid software over the years. The bugs were fixed exactly 0% of the time. If they ever gave a reason, it was along the lines of "you are a special snowflake, nobody else has had that problem, so it isn't worth fixing".
Eventually, I just stopped filing bug reports.
Things aren't better with OSS, either, though I resent went bugs get closed because they're old.
Our policy with D is we never close bugs, no matter how old they are, unless we fix them or no longer have users for it (like D version 1).
I'm picturing the guy who came up with this idea sitting at his desk surrounded by unopened bills.
Besides, I once got Oracle to fix a bug. It took months and I basically had to spell the fix out to them, but it actually is possible.
A few months ago, one of our young devs got a PR accepted to fix a tiny little Spark bug that had been bothering us for a while. The big boss meeting was happy, plenty of virtual pats on the backs and congratulations.
And then someone had to go and ask when we'd see the fix in our DataBricks cluster.
In my experience, the big difference is buying software (good luck with getting Microsoft fixing a bug in office or windows; no one even tries) vs buying a service. If we bought specialized custom software support for some expensive hardware, those companies jump when there is a question.
I know that’s what management believes but in reality it’s a complete illusion. I can’t recall a simple time where we got a bug fix within reasonable time from any of our 6, 7, or 8 figure software vendors. You get fixes only if you have paid for custom code but tickets against the actual product disappear into the void.
Reading between the lines of your questions: I'm not throwing spears at the lib maintainers; I'm pointing out that relying on 3rd party code may cause complications. In my case, I made a decision on each individual lib.
hahaha, you so funny
Unless the OSS in question has an enterprise support subscription that is useful, the best responsible actor for OSS projects is all (or a subset of) your employees. They know your workload best and know the issues that affect you most and can learn the skills needed to improve the OSS that you use. Having a diverse set of companies contributing to an OSS project makes it suitable for a more diverse set of use cases and circumstances.
We all see ourselves as the rare exception, the one bucking the status quo and doing things differently.
Quite often your efforts aren't visible to everyone, but it's visible to some and they're thankful for it!
Its really, really easy. If you think weekend courses are going to be too much because you remember Engineering in college, I can tell you from experience that they won't be.
Cause nobody every changes, loses their edge or falls out of touch with their tech roots, right?
We just need to get these clueless dinosaurs out of power before the current woke kids take over!