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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

2007 wasn't that long ago, and these type of maintainership issues aren't new – they were a thing when I was starting out in the early 2000s as well. What changed are the stakes, and also the amount of effort bad actors are willing to spend to mine their cryptoblahblah or whatever.

And sure, I understand why people feel a responsibility. And it's fine to take this responsibility too. I'm just saying: there is no need to.

The entire point of this Free Software/Open Source is to give people the freedom to do whatever you want with some piece of software, without having to be beholden to the original author. That's pretty much the entire point.

Anyone in the world can be a maintainer for xz. By forking it and applying useful patches.

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2007 was 17 years ago, and it was another world. This time 17 years ago, the iPhone had not been released. Facebook was still new and hot, the first big operation to be unashamedly built on PHP (!). GitHub didn't exist, opensource happened on mailing lists, Sourceforge, private Subversion repos.

It was definitely another world. I do agree that maintainership issues were already there, but I think they were smaller in number. Between the explosion of projects and the explosion of users, they are now on a different scale.

MySpace, Yahoo! Mail, eBay and probably other large scale operations were all built on PHP long before Facebook and I don’t think any of them were particularly ashamed about it.

I doubt eBay was originally built with PHP - when it was founded in 1995, the very first PHP version had been available for barely 3 months. I expect the original EBay was mostly Perl, which was the standard at the time.

The others I don't know, but MySpace was not a particularly big operation. Before WordPress, most sites started as PHP at some point were expected to migrate to something else, because maintainability of PHP3/4 projects was a big challenge (hence the "shame"). Facebook was the first company that simply refused to do that, and focused on improving PHP instead.

PHP was a popular stack at that time ? Wikipedia and Wordpress existed and were very popular and unashamedly PHP.

What PHP lacked and Ruby had was rails like framework , the team from 37signals singlehandedly shifted the momentum out of PHP with their work on rails.

> 2007 wasn't that long ago

It was almost 20 years ago, and no, I generally agree with the person you're responding to that OSS has changed significantly in these regards since the early-to-middle 2000s.

I'm not even disagreeing with the rest of your take, just poking at this idea that time hasn't passed and changed things. Some days I look around our industry and feel like it's nowhere near the one I was working in before.

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