Comment by lbarrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbarrow | Hacker News Reader

Reading these comments, you'd think that everyone on GitHub was only there to beef up his or her resume.

Personally, I've made far more open source contributions at my current (awesome) job than I ever did while on the job market. I use GitHub because it makes coding more fun, and because I get a huge thrill every time someone tells me they used one of my projects.

I also don't understand the OP's hostility to the open source movement. If you don't want to share your code, then don't share it! That's totally fine. But I'm very conscious of the fact that almost all the tools I use every day -- Linux, tmux, vim, Ruby, Python, etc, not to mention hundreds of libraries and plugins -- were all developed by people in the open source community. Often these people were working for free or for far below-market wages. Whether or not OP likes the OSS movement, modern software development is built on open source tools. Personally, I feel an obligation to try to give something back, even if it's something as small as a REST API wrapper.

I think you're misconstruing what the author has said, as he does not appear to have "hostility to the open source movement", as he has several open sourced projects on his github.

Did he express discontent with a specific type of advocate? Yes. But he explained why, so it should be something you could understand by reading what he expressed.

He basically shares the same view as you: if you don't want to share your code, then it should be totally fine. There are people who do not agree with this, and this is where he draws a distinction.

I agree with the OP's statement that if you didn't contribute to the code (and you didn't pay for it, etc), you shouldn't have a say in whether or not the software is open-sourced.

However, I think that unless the programmer has a good reason not to open source something, they should default to releasing it. I have a couple reasons for this.

One, it's impossible to predict what other programmers will or will not find useful. I have lots of code on GitHub that is not in any sense production ready. I don't care -- maybe someone will find it helpful.

Two, as I said in my previous comment, whether we want to admit it or not, we're all using and benefiting from open source software all the time. GitHub -- the site we're arguing over -- would never have been possible without Git. I feel indebted to the people who came before me and made all this possible, and I don't understand people who react to the subtle pressures to contribute with hostility.

The person at the bottom of this comment list said "I have about 6-7 repos in GitHub...all private. I will never give that out in a link. I don't mind you looking at it in front of me, but I'm not giving anyone access to it." I just totally don't understand this attitude. Code isn't money. I'm not diminishing you by reading your code. And, as the last 30 years of blazing success in open source software has shown, the benefits of the open-source ecosystem are far from abstract. They're the foundation of everything we do.

>I just totally don't understand this attitude. Code isn't money. I'm not diminishing you by reading your code.

I think the argument goes:

Then why is any code proprietary? If I'm interviewing at a company, I should be able to see that company's code prior to working there.

I also think a general issue is that practices such as this and employment agreements where the company owns any work you do off hours make it harder for people to jump from being employees to working for themselves (both in mindset and in practical ways).

"I just totally don't understand this attitude. Code isn't money. I'm not diminishing you by reading your code. And, as the last 30 years of blazing success in open source software has shown, the benefits of the open-source ecosystem are far from abstract. They're the foundation of everything we do."

Code is money. Some people are developing products not just frameworks. Some people are paid for developing open-source stuff while others do this as a hobby. It's a personal choice. Open-source is not the only way and it's not the best. There is still no open-source project that would match Photoshop, Windows, MS Office in quality.

Please see my response to @datalus below which addresses my thoughts on when I open source code.

Agreed, we all benefit from open source, I think it's almost impossible to avoid an open source tool at some point in your career now as a developer. I love Git and have a lot of respect for Github as a company. My intentions in my post was to address how people misuse such great platforms potentially.

Also, please see my response to @mafro below which addresses your final point.

+1

TheCowboy summarized my intentions well. I have no hostility towards open source. I know what you mean when someone stars or forks a repository. I created a boilerplate project for Sinatra applications (a Ruby micro web framework) a few years ago and forgot about it, although now 20+ people are using it. Since then my Ruby has improved greatly and I want to give them something more so I am working on a version two of that boilerplate project for them. This is how I'm using Github, to try share my knowledge (what little I have compared to some). If you choose to use my Github as a job application requirement, understand your intentions and my intentions are very different thus exposing the flaw in how recruiters use the tool.

I had someone comment on my Github commit for the blog post itself and I'll copy it here so you can see my response: https://github.com/rziehl/from_the_terminal/commit/497939af2....

I have nothing against any tool or belief, just the misuse of that tool or belief.

I suppose my github page is resume worthy filler, but honestly, I use it to track code for me.

I use gist as a backend store for a fairly large code snippet database and my github page essentially helps me peruse that quickly.

And I also get a thrill when I see someone has forked/starred a repo or gist.

+1

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