Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkmk3 | Hacker News Reader

Working alone for 12 months seems kind of rough to me. It being whatever you want to work on is nice, but I don't think I would find it as fulfilling as just finding a new job where I can actually work with a team.

I also haven't worked on open source, not really, I could imagine there being communities that would make it significantly nicer to work on.

View on HN

Plenty of opensource projects are built by communities. If you want to do opensource work with peers, you can always work on llvm, rust, Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel, wayland, SQLite, postgres, docker, OpenSSL, or all sorts of other high impact, important projects that run the world.

Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams.

And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.

SQLite doesn't generally take public contributions, you'd need to get hired by them to write code there </nit>.

And it’s not actually open source, at least definitely not Open Source.

It’s public domain, so open source as defined by OSI.

There definitely are nuances to licensing vs public perception.. what makes you say it is not adhering to its license?

https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

Not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent, but when I’ve seen this argument in the past it’s usually meant as “they’re not using GPL so nothing stops someone from copying the code, creating something new, and then not being forced to distribute their source.”

Essentially they usually mean it’s not Open Source if at some point the source code of downstream projects could be closed source.

The word for that is usually "copyleft".

Yep. Or “free software” / FOSS. The term Open source was largely popularised by Eric Raymond and the OSI. It was coined with the release of the source code of Netscape navigator and was famously - and controversially - always business friendly.

Doesn't this theory apply to almost anyone with the capability to dual license. Which I thought was any project that had agreement from the original authors.

Cool, good to hear. Seems like people do make friends in the space, and there is obviously a lot of cooperation involved in getting a change into a shared codebase.

Still wondering about what the actual community aspect of it looks like, beyond individual issues. Probably the best way to find out is to contribute ;)

Well, maybe not SQLite. The three man developer team is very hardcore about keeping all contributions public domain/CCZero, not just open source, and so they very rarely accept contributions because they pose a risk, however small, of jeopardizing that status.

Fair enough. Maybe Postgres would have been a better example.

I don't understand this sentiment. How are there developers that need to be around people? I spent 6 years alone in my house working from home only really visiting family once a week. I met someone and she moved in now sometimes I miss living alone lol

It'd be incredible to be paid to do whatever I want for a year. I have a billion projects I want to do but don't have time for.

In the gentlest way possible, you're not normal. Most people crave social contract to a greater or lesser degree.

That's actually my experience, too. Last July I've decided to take a year to work on https://lunni.dev/, but doing it alone was fun only for the first couple months. (Well, not alone alone—I do have a chat with a couple of my friends who use it, which helps a lot, but it still sucks to do it without a cofounder.)

Now I can barely do anything at all (re: Lunni, not in general), so I've decided to focus on finding a job instead (as I have maybe 3-4 more months of personal “runway”).

I agree, but there are whole teams at Google working on open source projects, and they probably have starter projects?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com