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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I think the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX, and the kind of people nVidia wants to hire don't want to contribute proprietary blobs to Linux when they can just work for the competition on open-source stuff. Thus, nVidia is kind of forced by the market to let the engineers make at least token contributions to Linux.

(This is also why DRM never works; the type of person that could implement it correctly wouldn't want to implement it correctly.)

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I would say this is either driven by Gabe Newell or Linus Torvalds's middle finger.

Grenades sometimes hit their targets, flowers never miss.

Good thing grenades are on the short list of things that count if they're close!

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/frankrobin140160....

I had a teacher who said "horseshoes and hand-grenades." Continuing the "h" sounds, I added hydrogen bombs :)

Flowers fade, but you'll be hard pressed to forget a grenade.

Touché

This demonstrates complete ignorance of modern DRM and who has worked on it. You could not be more wrong. One word: Tarnovsky

Also, nobody really cares if they work on proprietary code. Such developers are rare.

What I have noticed is that once smart people are exposed to open source programming they have big problems going back to the modus operandi of closed source.

A good middle-ground seems to be doing like github: you keep working on your closed projects using open-source technologies and methodologies.

Huh? Github is not open source. It does not promote open source methodologies or technologies.

No, but it bases it's primary service, and the first half of it's name on an open source project.

Admittedly, it does a lot more than that as well, and I love it for what it is, but it couldn't really exist in it's current form if it weren't for open source.

EDIT: In addition, almost all of the public code on Github is open source, and they have a bunch of open source repositories themselves. https://github.com/github

GitHub has released a lot of open source code: https://github.com/GitHub

Indeed my point was that Github itself is not open source but uses open source technologies (git and various bots) and methodologies (distributed team, lazy coordination, it ships when it is ready). Have a look at http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g... for more information.

I think this open-source-like way of operating makes their great coders happy to work on a closed source project.

Gitorious is though, so I always recommend it, even though it doesn't have a lot of the baked in features of github.

Uh.. what? Github is probably the place to put your code nowadays.

Writing code that goes into proprietary software is like writing a book which can read only your editor. Programming (at least in some areas) is like art, you want the world to see your code, what you've done there. Give me a name of one famous programmer. I bet he is writing free and open source software.

"famous" != "great". For every famous programmer who cares about recognition and does open-source stuff to get her name out there, there's a great programmer who cares more about getting paid to do awesome things, and isn't particularly concerned with public recognition. There are thousands of astoundingly good programmers who you have never heard of, and many of them are working on closed-source projects.

You, for example, are one of them.

Rich Hickey[0], in addition to making open source software[1], also produces closed source software[2]. Similarly, Joel Spolsky[3] is involved in a fairly high profile[4] closed source project. That's just off the top of my head.

[0] https://github.com/richhickey

[1] http://clojure.org

[2] http://www.datomic.com

[3] http://www.joelonsoftware.com

[4] http://stackoverflow.com

I was under the impression that we admire Joel Spolsky for his management and essay writing skills. Have we seen any of the code he's written directly so we can judge his coding prowess?

Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg.

Yes, Larry Page is a good programmer, but I wouldn't say that these people are brilliant coders, they are famous because they are successful entrepreneurs. I was writing about people who are known for being a good programmer. My examples (not in any order): Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Steve Wozniak, Salvatore Sanfilippo (Redis), Jeremy Ashkenas (CoffeeScript, Backbone.js), Daniel J. Bernstein, Alan Cox, Zed Shaw, Igor Sysoev (Nginx), Andrew Tanenbaum, Ken Thompson, Philip Zimmermann...

There are of course many brilliant programmers who are not into open source (like Philip Zimmermann), I don't deny it.

It's easier to be known for being a good programmer if people can read your code, so if you make a list of good programmers you should expect open-source people to be overrepresented.

A few people off the top of my head who are noted for being good programmers but whose code is I think mostly not publicly available: Peter Norvig (though I doubt he's writing much code nowadays), Paul Graham, Sophie Wilson, Charles Simonyi (though it'll be a while before he's forgiven for "Hungarian notation").

(I should add in the interests of fairness that while I was typing that list my brain was angrily trying to remind me of Jamie Zawinski and Don Knuth, both of whom are much more open-source types.)

> It's easier to be known for being a good programmer if people can read your code

Yes, that was my point, I don't say there are no good closed source programmers, just it's much easier to be known/respected as a good programmer by writing free software.

Norvig and Graham both wrote books full of code, with either the book or the code freely available, and AFAIK their books first made their reputations. I'm sure your point is correct that open-source people are overrepresented, those just aren't optimal counterexamples.

Isn't gates considered an excellent coder?

Anyway, John Carmack.

A lot of John Carmack's code is open source. Also, what he used to do at id was not particularly groundbreaking; and the "open sourced" (by talking about novel algorithms for 3D rendering) the groundbreaking stuff at his popular multi-hour-long keynotes. So you can think of Carmack as someone who does open source, albeit in a different way.

I would disagree that Carmack's work at id "was not particularly groundbreaking".

Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake were all absolutely ground-breaking. Probably ditto for the megatexture stuff in Rage.

Think back to Facebook at launch. It was better-looking, more performant and better designed than all its competitors. Zuckerberg isn't just a good businessman.

It's fun to hate on Zuckerberg, because it's Facebook. But the guy produced brilliant stuff that was ahead of it's time.

I can't. I wasn't in college in the US at the time :(. That may have been a bigger factor though...

Philip Katz of PKZip fame (may he RIP)

Zed Shaw should be on the entrepreneur list.

I think that's more to do with closed source software usually being published under the name of a company, rather than the individuals behind it; so there's less opportunity for a closed-source developer to become famous.

John Carmack and Michael Abrash.

>the reality is that most software engineers are starting to get tired of Windows and OSX

I agree with you about Windows but note that outside of the U.S. very few software engineers ever even get to work with OS X.

Really? Every developer I know in the UK who doesn't develop for an MS stack is running either Linux or OS X, and that's been the case for the last ten years.

I was in academia in Japan and there cygwin and Windows were the favorite tools.

Some of the people used Linux in VMs, on the other hand, some new students installed XP on their notebooks. In 2012.

And I think this was even a rather progressive lab, I suppose industry only uses Windows.

Japan is a Windows loving country so its hardly representative.

Well actually Silicon Valley is an OS X loving region so its hardly representative.

Indeed, they are both extreme. So, what was your point?

Have you been to a software conference outside of the US? Certainly in Europe it's Mac dominated.

I have.

The majority of developers (in Europe or elsewhere) work for large companies and are not the kind to go to software conferences. Note that this doesn't mean they write CRUD; I know people who do amazing GPGPU stuff that will never see the light of day outside their BigCo's internal use. They are the ones Nvidia should be targeting with their drivers.

I'm yet to meet one such developer who'd use a Mac for work. It's my anecdote vs. yours at this point, though, so I might be wrong about Mac users being a vanishingly small minority in this group (but likely not by a huge margin given how the corporate world is).

Edit: It is also quite possible that not all of the developers who present at conferences with Macs use those at work if their workplace isn't BYOD.

I haven't been to any conferences, but I am employed to write for Windows and Mac OSX. Happily, on a Mac with a Windows VM. In the UK too!

But I think you are correct that the majority of development work is in the MS world for business. At least that is the case if you look for work - everything is .NET

At KTH in Sweden GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) is dominant.

Not the case at all. Travel to Europe and see for yourself. :)

Untrue.

BTDT, signed the NDA, and the DRM I know is as good as it realistically can become.

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