Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

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You and Bigstrat2003 are arguing a technicality, and you're technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point. Skrebbel and Layer8 are focused on the cultural associations of "open source" development, and this mismatch is causing everyone to talk past each other.

The original post in this thread was:

> This is because Carmack doesn't really do OSS, he just does code dumps and tacks on a license ("a gift"). That's of course great and awesome and super nice, but he's not been painstakingly and thanklessly maintaining some key linux component for the last 20 years or something like that. It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice! But it's not what most people who are deep into open source mean by the term.

Skrebbel probably shouldn't have said that Carmack "doesn't really do OSS", but what they clearly meant was, Carmack doesn't participate in the sort of community development as the Linux kernel or Apache or whatever.

More succinctly, Carmack only contributes his code to OSS, but not his time, and shouldn't impose his values on the wider community that contribute both.

> technically correct, but in context I think that's somewhat beside the point

Talking past people to argue on semantics and pedantry is a HN pastime. It may even be it's primary function.

Code gifted absolutely includes the time taken to write it.

case in point

As pointed out in the OP comment, it's basically 'money for jam' by the point he releases the source code:

> It's an entirely different thing; he made a thing, sold it, and then when he couldn't sell more of it, gave it away. That's nice!

Carmack has extracted as much profit as he could care for from the source code. The releasing of the code is warm fuzzy feelings for zero cost, while keeping it closed source renders zero benefit to him.

its*

Well done

>“Primary” function

If that was the intent don’t you think it would be stated somewhere, or in the faq?

>“Talking” past

It’s only text, there’s no talking past. You can’t talk past someone when the conversation isn’t spoken. At best, you might ignore what they write and go on and on and on at some length on your own point instead, ever meandering further from the words you didn’t read, widening the scope of the original point to include the closest topic that isn’t completely orthogonal to the one at hand, like the current tendency to look for the newest pattern of LLM output in everyone’s’ comments in an attempt to root out all potential AI generated responses. And eventually exhaust all of their rhetoric and perhaps, just maybe, in the very end, get to the

I lol'd.

This. ^^^

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