Flattery-Driven Open-Source | Hacker News Reader

Flattery-Driven Open-Source

ppinera.es

26 pointswallflower5 comments

I see no problem with someone developing something for fame and glory and not really want to put lots of effort into maintainance.

It if it gets popular, the community (aka users) can maintain it. If the community also does not want to put in the effort to maintain it, they cannot really complain about the original author also wanting the same.

The only problem is when the original author doesn't want to maintain things, and also rejects help with maintenance. If that occurs, a motivated community can fork things and continue.

This theory assumed things that are useful could always gather enough interest, an exception was demonstrated by openssl several years ago, and also https://xkcd.com/2347/

I see this said a lot about openssl due to heartbleed but there's not that much to maintain in established crypto libraries and openssl is certainly maintained if not basically omnipotent in security libs.

I wouldn't say anything nice about the UX that resulted after a few decades or building for embedded but for the most part it does what it claims on the box.

That could absolutely happen. But this scenario is no more the fault of the original author than everyone else that had a choice in using that software, but also refusing to maintain it themselves.

Just my thought after reading the OP...

Writing a program used to be an activity for mostly introverts. But today, programming are becoming more social and open, and a lot of "extrovert" things are happening (especially in GitHub and others). There are many beginners today who want to be a programmer in the same reason why many people who want to be a rock star: to get noticed. In this situation, it becomes a kind of competition; People start gaming the system. But it only becomes a problem when you're in the same competition with others. There are still people, I hope, who just follow their passion and inner aesthetics and keep producing ever strange software (TempleOS comes to mind, I guess), just like music and other forms of arts. Overall, I don't think the current trend is that much concerning. There will be the Nickelback of Open source (I don't really know the band well but I keep hearing their music being very generic while they're making a lot of money), but we should keep searching and appreciating small artists. It can be balanced.

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