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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

As I often say, open-source is the 7th wonder of the world. In no previous situation have humans worked together on a larger scale to create a software that powers literally everything in the world, and even a helicoper on Mars.

And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.

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Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies?

> And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.

I don’t understand how this relates to the scale of open source software or Apollo software engineers. I guess I know the Unix epoch is 01/01/1970, but how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? Those timestamp definitions came after the first several Apollo missions, didn’t they?

> Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies?

Yes, except that largely those projects are tangential to the "real" research. Larry Wall, creator of Perl and other useful things, is a linguist who was "studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it."[1]. Perl was just a side project.

1 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/225

> how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps?

I'm not certain, but perhaps the parent commenter wasn't being literal. Maybe just a way of saying that the Apollo engineers did their amazing work before what the rest of us consider to be the "beginning of time"?

Yes, GP here, it was a joke, Unix is so young that the moon landing is pre-historic to it, it already belonged to another epoch literally.

I took the joke from this comic: https://www.commitstrip.com/2015/10/06/before-timestamp-0/

I work at University and I only publish Open Source (GPL, MIT, or CCBy). It would be hard for my University to claim IP rights after I published something with these licenses.

At many universities (in the U.S. at least), on paper, it’s the technology commercialization department that makes the call about pursuing patent protection and the burden is on the PI to report all potentially patentable inventions before release so that the university has time to make the determination. In the case you describe, they’d in principle find you in violation of that policy, but in practice can’t because they don’t know about it unless you tell them.

Yes, I think you're right. It _depends_, as always. Mostly on the field, and in my case, on country. I am in Germany and Universitities are mostly State financed. There has been a pretty liberal trend at Universities in Germany the last 10 to 20 years, pushing towards open science for society (any society, not just Germans). We have such a department you describe, too, but no one has ever heard of it and its not really used, or lets say regulations exist but are not enforced. The University itself also pushes for Open Source publication and free sharing of results and technology, except for rare cases.

You do not nerdsnipe us! Not today - sir.

Wait a minute - is that true lol? I vaugely remember epoch time being a 32-bit signed integer, which seemed silly to me, but did they actually use that sign prior to 1970?

I'm guessing that "Unix timestamps" were not used before Unix itself became widely used, which would be after the Apollo missions

Yeah, I don't know the history here, though in thinking through this, it ocurred to me that of course computers might need to represent time before 1970 for some reason, hence the sign, but of course there is still the limitation of 32 bits. Time is one of those things that seems simple, but always seems to bite you somewhere - things like leap seconds or if Juneteenth counts as a business day always seem to throw a wrench in.

Nobody would consider the present as negative. Maybe he meant that previous work had to be coded as negative, after the zero was set.

Or maybe it's a joke. We used to say that some guy has his ID number in roman numerals... or used spears for the matter.

Have you seen the quality of most open source software? It’s a joke. Most of it is about people pushing their own agendas and self promoting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

There's so much good open source software that I'm not even annoyed at how wrong your statement really is.

Well they’re right in that all software is a mess, but oss is certainly not worse than anything else.

> Have you seen the quality of most open source software? It’s a joke.

Sadly, yes, you're not wrong. However, have you seen the quality of most proprietary software? No, you haven't, no one has, because it's proprietary.

> Most of it is about people pushing their own agendas and self promoting

Perhaps, but some of it is not, and that is the difference to proprietary software.

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