Removing ‘open source developer’ from my identity
medium.com
medium.com
This is something worth trying for most aspects of one's life. As soon as something is not in one's identity, it can change or be questioned without hurting so much. Being questioned, the thing can even be stronger since one can explain, with reason, why they are doing something, instead of "just" it being who they are.
It also helps avoid locking oneself up in predefined boxes, categories and perspectives.
Getting older, it probably allows one to adapt more easily to an ever moving world too.
By the way, suppose you put "open source developer" into your identity, go somewhere people don't know anything about software and computers. Now what? "open source developer" is not relevant to them, it will be hard to explain who you are. Do you cease to exist there? No, obviously. That's because something deeper into you, touching your core values, lead you to participate in open source as a developer in your world. But those core values could have lead you to something else too, in a different world or another path of life.
My opinion is: don't let too many things be in your identity. It makes you vulnerable and inflexible, without many benefits and probably blocks you access to useful introspection.
Related: Keep Your Identity Small (http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html)
How sad would it be if you didn't feel this way? The world is a big, complex, subtle, friendly, violent engine. There's no way for a 15 year old to see it all, understand it, experience it and so on.
15 year olds are focused on self, discovering things they like, things the don't. Things have to be categorised into a small number of boxes - good and bad, big and small and so one.
As we grown we get more boxes, and the boxes have lots of missing edges. A 15 year old sees Microsoft as evil, but MS fueled the computer society we have today. They certainly did not invent the Internet, but they made is available to the masses - mostly through good marketing. There were other options etc.
Open Source software, Free software, proprietary software, source code with commercial licenses - all are good, all bring benefits, and harms. The world is grey, and as we grow and mature we understand better how those parts work together.
So good for you - we are defined by who we are, not by what code we write. We can enjoy something, add to the collective good, without the need to moral panic about it being used for bad. Chainsaws are good and useful tools, and the world would be worse off without them - despite the odd serial killer using one...
When later I got into programming I hit an "advanced beginner" wall and was wondering how to proceed when I remembered yuvi. I looked him up on the internet and his blog was such an inspiration, his writings threw me into weird corners of the internet including HN!
I only knew him as a terrific open source contributor and right now seeing how his perspective had changed through time - I understand the true density of being an open source maintainer! Yuvi always has something for me to learn :)
Though it's clear that the author is trying to remove these labels from their identity, there are a bunch of ideological movements that strive for being more than just open source.
It'll be interesting to see which of these, if any, pick up momentum.
* Indieweb
* small Internet/web
* free software
* humane tech https://github.com/humanetech-community/awesome-humane-tech
Some people just want things that work, and choose to focus on other issues. That's fine too.
Go ahead and prove that.
I would say he is right. Most big open source projects have some company behind them.
WebKit, Flutter, Qt, VSCode, Tensorflow, React, WebKit, LLVM, Rust, Go, Kotlin.
Counterexamples: Blender (though initially it was commercial), VLC, Godot.
Its amazing how much easier its gotten to make a living working _with_ open source code over the years, while it's still often hard for the actual developers/maintainers to get any funding (e.g. ssl, ntpd, etc.)
It also seems that companies don't get generally get involved until some 'critical mass' is hit, leaving volunteers, uni's, and foundations doing the initial work (eg linux, apache, NSCA Mosaic, ssh, gcc, glibc/dietlibc/etc, php, perl, vim, nim, ruby, etc.)
Even taking from your examples - LLVM started as a uni. project, Webkit was forked from KDE's KHTML, and Rust was a personnel project for years before Mozilla got involved..
edit: god I need coffee. fix poor sentances.
> Webkit
Yes, commercial open source projects exist.
Parent and you say 'most'. Github says it has 200M projects on it, do you really think >100M of those are commercially funded? I don't think it is possible.