spacelizard

Because it's free as in freedom, not free as in price. Most popular free software is written by employed developers working for companies.

This is exactly what I mean though. The term "open source" has become so incredibly politicized that it doesn't mean anything any more. I used to use the term in business contexts but I don't anymore because of this. The real issue is how they treat others. For me a good metric has been if a company is willing to focus on empowering the customer and giving them freedom and liberty.

I've noticed that hammering "why" only seems to work at mid-sized companies -- in the case of a fortune 500, then the whys are usually significantly disconnected from what most employees are doing, unless you're talking to the board or senior management, in which case you are probably being paid to determine the why. In the case of a startup, everyone seems to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off frantically trying to determine the "why" but no one is really sure of what it is.

You can tell a lot about a company by their attitude on this. The fact that "you should let your users have freedom" is still a controversial statement in those type of companies should tip you off as to how they treat their customers.

Also, the fact that we still often have to use "open source" as a euphemism for "free software" in these type of situations illustrates the point even further. Freedom or liberty does not matter to these companies. It's not even about money or greed to them as they often give away their software/services without charging. All they care about is establishing complete control and dominance of the market.

If we believe prisons are to act as a sort of operant conditioning for the inmates, then the punishment IS supposed the rehabilitation. However, as you probably know, many folks do not respond to this type of conditioning.

There is no malice, this is just what happens at big companies. When you have 10 layers of management, everyone is expected to fall in line because this is the only way it can work.

On the contrary, this was an obvious power play by the recruiter to get the candidate to agree and submit to whatever arbitrary KPI has been passed down by the HR manager, regardless of whether or not it's meaningful. I would not take anything away from this other than that the candidate was probably not a good fit for the position anyway, as they don't seem to gel well with the BS corporate politics. Some do, some don't.

I disagree, a good office culture extends beyond meatspace. I've worked at plenty of companies where the general atmosphere was... not good. These are places where the "hallway conversation" was either nonexistent or didn't extend beyond small talk about TV or the weather. If your employees aren't comfortable sending instant messages to each other, they definitely aren't going to be comfortable being in the same room together.

Why is Electron still such a memory hog? Wasn't the Chromium Content module supposed to dramatically reduce footprint by only providing the bare minimum to render a web page?

The real privilege that derives from this is being able to live without being bombarded with advertising. To be able to have a meaningful conversation with a business that isn't predicated on them trying to analyze your behavior as part of a demographic group. To not be bucketed into a predefined economic segment based on your life experiences.

Scratch is intended for older children who already have a certain level of literacy. There is another product, ScratchJr, for younger children that uses an icon-based UI: http://scratchjr.org/

The transition path between them is indeed what you described.

It does, but it has a lot of the same problems as MS Office, some worse. The scripting/macro system is arcane, proprietary, and only works in the cloud. The files aren't in an easily parseable format. You can export them to OOXML/ODF, but then you're stuck with parsing some ridiculously complex markup. As far as I know the version history is not exportable either.

The problem with Soundcloud is that grew too big and as a result aren't building a site for their core customer: indie artists. Take a look at the front page, all it shows is tracks and artists that are already hugely popular. The features they are focusing on seem to be a hodgepodge of things taken from Spotify and Last.fm, but without any real value-adds for someone who's just uploading music. I recently made an account for a new project I'm working on and all the organic traffic I'm getting is just spam. Bandcamp is now the place for unsigned artists to go to promote/sell indie music.

Look at the incentives of the people who made Bonzi Buddy and Comet Cursor. That kind of crud and malware will continue to exist as long as spying and advertising are the prevalent business model, which they still are. This isn't going away with a walled garden, in fact the device manufacturers welcome it with open arms.

They also face considerable risk for sticking around when an employer has expressed interest in underpaying and overworking them or just outright firing them. If you're hiring people at 50% of their desired pay, then you're generally only going to get 50% of their skill. This is a double-edged sword. Employees also have an inherent need to accomplish things, and if you're not using them to their full capacity, that's also a risk of them leaving, or being completely checked out at work.

It's difficult when you don't have a lot of free time to spend doing random mundane interview questions. It's doubly frustrating when this is because you're spending a lot of time doing work on free (libre) software and technical recruiters can easily see tons of your code and communication style openly on Github and whatnot, but for various reasons this isn't adequate for them.

The goal of a capitalistic government is still unfortunately to have a wholly predictable economy. There is competition, but only until a winner is declared, i.e. a monopoly is granted. After this the rents that the winner charges can be raised and lowered freely, but in a controlled manner, in order to manage where and when the value is actually generated.

This gets weird with software businesses as these companies tend to insulate from losses relatively well. This coupled with the fact that in some markets there is no way to generate additional value without a huge public investment happening upstream (utilities) is why a lot of VC goes so crazy for it. Keeping the cash flowing is the only way to avoid being taxed profusely – All you can do in some situations is raise rents and spend hastily, for better or for worse.

I do. There are all kinds of things wrong with requiring 20 years of study just to be able to have a chance to do a job properly. If done properly, we can reduce that time significantly.

I've noticed Facebook seems to be really good at spamming me with useless notifications, it even somehow manages to do it after I've unfriended 90% of the people that I am not close friends with and blocked most notification types. Yeah I could prune my friends list even further and only check it passively, but then all I'm stuck with is basically an incredibly bloated email/chat service that is loaded with ads. Then again this is the 21st century, a lot of other tech products seem to fit that exact description too. In any case, I'm a lot happier after deleting it.

I agree, and it would be nice to have those things done. Free software has a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem now where there is a lot of demand for certain things like you mention, but it's difficult to find funding to actually do them. I don't know what the way forward is, but it's something our community needs to be better about.

>The GPL licence just causes more pain and frustration to developers.

I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for developers to comply with it, especially those who are used to operating in an environment where most software is proprietary. This is the world where corporate licenses and contracts end up regularly end up into triple-digit page lengths. It's where the answer from management to the question "can we use this third party software?" usually defaults to no regardless of the license. So as long as there is this kind of restrictive proprietary licensing, I believe there will be a need for copyleft to counterbalance it. Sometimes there is a real risk of a rogue organization trying to take free (libre) code in order to crush the community with it.

The fact that there is so much software out there that uses non-copyleft free software licenses I think is testament to how many, many of our techniques and algorithms have become trivial and commonplace. This is good that friction is being removed in these cases, no matter what license the downstream developers are planning on using. It's the sign of a mature industry.

Don't be fooled by the showboating, behind every attempt at executing these aggressive strategies is a crumbling organization rife with disharmony and malcontent. They would not be focusing on what other companies were doing nearly this much if they did not feel threatened by it.

This will continue to be the norm in industries where the marketing cycles are so short and high-stakes. Firms get burned by picking the wrong contractors. Contractors get burned by spending a lot of time bidding on the wrong projects. These problems will continue to get worse as the stakes rise, as there will be even less time to make decisions properly. The project management debt they mention doesn't go away, it increases exponentially.

The article suggests industry shifts more towards project-based economies as they progress, but I think this is wrong. The examples of Hollywood and video gaming are both outliers, because both of these industries have put up huge resistance to lengthened product cycles. In part they perceive it as reducing competition. And it's true, but personally I am starting to wonder what all this competition is actually getting us. Prices for customers are dropping, however we seem to get a lot of sequels and recycled content in the name of cost-cutting, and then a lot of extraneous fighting over who gets to release what on what platform just to push royalty charges up. And what do we have to show for it? A lifetime of fickle and perpetually unhappy customers? Please make it stop.

The only solace that I have is that a lot of this is still driven by the hardware arms race. This won't end, but we will start to see more consolidation as the industry continues to mature.

This article also leaves out:

- waiting for compiles

- waiting for the CI server to finish running tests

- waiting for network transfers

- waiting for VMs to spin up

- waiting for slow algorithms to process data

- et cetera

Even if it were physically and mentally possible to problem-solve 16 hours a day, we are still not at the point where our processes and machines can keep up with us, and we probably never will be. The dev-test cycle in itself is very time-consuming and repetitive. I don't know any way of solving this that doesn't involve spending even more time writing a lot of unit tests.

See Replicant: http://www.replicant.us/

Unfortunately it is not well supported yet, as porting it to any given device seems to require rewriting several proprietary Android drivers.

>don't burn bridges

Once you get ejected from the cool kids' table enough times for random reasons, you see how not worth it is to put up with their bad behaviour. In the case of TFA, sometimes it's someone else that burns the bridge and there isn't anything you can do. I doubt this post is going to make him any less hireable, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

However, employers should be uneasy about things like this, and not just because of him. Employees have these things called "opinions" and they will happily voice them if given a platform. If we want to continue having a culture where we can hire inexperienced executives and just let them do whatever, we have to be ready to accept the risks associated with it.

>Otherwise I just have to wonder what the real motive is behind making a public statement like this.

What is the motivation for blogging about anything? I am extremely disappointed that we are still stuck culturally in this situation where we can't have healthy public discourse about these things, where private businesses can get away with whatever they want and then proceed to threaten people for even trying to talk about it. Maybe it is sour grapes, so what? The emotional highs and lows are part of the package when it comes to startups, and hiding them doesn't do any good.

What happened is that the marketing departments from a bunch of proprietary companies realized what was going on and amped up the bullshit. This is a good thing, it means they feel threatened by the concept of free software, which they should. They have been threatening us, the users, with ridiculous licenses for long enough anyway.

The fact that these companies fear the AGPL so much is probably reason to start using it more. They won't respond to anything less at this point, they need to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. They have made it clear by now, there is no other way that they will even consider the concept of respecting users' freedoms. This will continue to be the case even with organizations like the Linux Foundation, which, if you look at who their biggest sponsors are, it becomes pretty clear which agenda they are going to be expected to push.

Someone was working on one for a little bit, but seems to have stopped: https://github.com/minexew/Shrine

May be a good starting point for anyone else interested.

> So much of the online world is premised on feedback loops and empty rewards, like levels in games or even karma points on Hacker News. You get "praised" by these systems just for using them. It can become an addiction like gambling can become an addiction. It becomes easy to lose perspective and waste time pursuing something that is ultimately valueless.

This isn't endemic to the internet. Businesses have this problem and they have it way worse. And they lie about it too – no manager is going to tell you up front that you're walking into a dead-end job, and that a few years down the line you'll be poorer than you started and with no useful skills to show for it.