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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

What‘s with the masochistic drive of software developers to open source their code and assist in the commoditization of their craft? Why is this not seen in any other profession?

I kindly ask you to stop and keep your code proprietary and hidden, for the sake and salary of the average software engineer.

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I don't know what other people's motivation is but for me after experiencing life at Google and elsewhere I really understood that to build anything at scale takes a multi-year effort building on the foundations already set. Google and Amazon don't get to be where they are by rewriting the entire stack every 2 years, yet as developers that's what we effectively have to do every time we leave a company. Only the large incumbents truly benefit from this compounding value and services development model. The rest of us just have to keep rewriting stuff from scratch and hope for opportunities to work at places with great technology.

Personally I feel like if we can open source building blocks that become the foundations for our development then we can build more interesting things on top e.g you're not going to build redis, postgres, etc again, but what are the things we build on top of them? We have a lot of open source infrastructure but not much in higher level categories. One day we'll get there, but it takes multiple people trying time and time again before we get there.

> but what are the things we build on top of them?

Countless other software developers and me build those things. If what I am currently building becomes available for free, as usable open source, I might lose my job. The company that let me go can increase their revenue and reduce their costs. You gain nothing, maybe some clout and fame.

Open source is harmful to the average developer. After years of this, we'd just be happy to reinvent StringUtils, EmailValidator and FileUtils classes every few years and take home our decent salaries.

So I'll start by saying, I've spent the past 7 years working predominantly on open source, 4 of those years were bootstrapped and the majority of stuff I've written is basically given away for free. I fully understand what that does to my own earning potential but at the same time as a developer at every single company I ever worked at, I came to rely on open source for quite literally everything I built. Whether it was linux, apache, nginx, docker or asterisk or whatever else. Our entire industry is built on the foundations of open source and without it we end up in these silos where only the incumbents thrive, that's how we end up with platform centralisation and inevitably struggle to break free with no alternatives.

I think now is the time for us to start moving beyond just open source infrastructure and into open source services. Yes as developers that means the things we write will change, yes some of us will have to reskill and learn new things but that's also just how evolution works in engineering. Whether its code or whether its cars, we, the current generation will be displaced by automation and large scale solutions.

Traubenfuchs' profile appears to indicate it's a GPT-3 bot.

I am sorry that you feel threatened by open source projects. An "average" developer isn't harmed by open software, quite contrary. We all benefit from it.

Your business might want to reconsider its specialization, if all of your "hidden" work often gets built by a student in their free time, on the other side of the world, for free.

We are all standing on shoulders of giants. I don't think there is any software developer who can credibly claim they have not benefitted from open source software one way or another. So one of the virtues of open-sourcing your work is about paying it forward.

hear hear

To be able to build something of actual value & worth. I don't want to spend time reinventing HTTP libraries, datetime libraries, regex libraries, language interpreters, parsers, image libraries, logging, metrics, etc. while trying to build SpaceX.

Times every 2-3 years as I switch companies.

A craftsman sharing blueprints for screws or instructions for wood joinery isn't putting themselves out of the business of constructing furniture.

SWE is so far down at the bottom of the hole of having the tooling we need we could do this for a few more decades and there'd still be oodles and oodles of work to do. Right now we're digging tunnels with spoons.

Does that mean your servers don't run any Linux distro and that you compile your code purely with proprietary compilers? It's not about stealing someone else's job, it's about helping the state of the art grow naturally. So much stuff we all rely on every day has been built on top of previous work of someone else.

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