Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

First: No. See PG's essay about the Python Paradox.

Second: My understanding is that the licensing models of Microsoft become hideously expensive as you scale up. Why waste money?

Third: Ethics about proprietary software; I think it's considerably more ethical to use and advocate libre software.

edit: Fourth: Windows is harder to get @#$^ done in, IME. I've generally lived in the F/OSS ecosystem as much as I could for the last 5+ years; whenever I want to do something that I'd do in F/OSS in Windows, it seems like "everything is hard". The complexity required to do anything programmatic is significant compared to using Linux/OSX, even if you just measure in keystrokes/clicks. This is, I'm sure, partially due to my inexperience, but I'm reasonably sure that it's a combination of Big Enterprise Design Pattern thinking along with Cater To Non-Hacker thinking.

>Third: Ethics about proprietary software; I think it's considerably more ethical to use and advocate libre software.

That seems a rather strange argument to make considering that the vast vast majority of web services are not Free Software. Do people really feel like they are making the world better by using Free Software to make all those Non-Free web services?

Yes, if they contribute patches to make everyone's services more secure and error-free.

I don't have time to get into this in detail, but it runs as thus:

- I'm not giving money or support to proprietary vendors. I am, however, contributing by filing bugs and maybe hanging out on the mailing list for the open source system.

OR

- I am contributing money and maybe code to the open source vendor, in addition to above.

OR

- Even a comment about how your service is built on F/OSS system can significantly improve its standing in the world, if your service is well known.

Therefore, even though I have a proprietary licensed piece of software (due to lack of visible business model for xyz), I can provide significant help to the tools backing me up.

Actually, about the Python Paradox. If you're hiring for a C# stack but want a hacker attitude, explicitly mention the non-MS stuff you're using. So if you're using e.g. ServiceStack and Postgres on Mono instead of ASP.NET MVC on IIS and Windows, then make knowledge of that a big plus in your vacancy.

Sure, it's less obvious off of the job title than when you're hiring for $TRENDY_LANGUAGE, but it'll filter all the certified microsoft folks away, in favour of the crowd that looks further than what a single company prepared for them.

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