Comment by tetha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tetha | Hacker News Reader

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She's a fairly young seemingly career politician heading a fairly new government initiative. This feels like a very negative read with that context.

Reading this like I'd read something from my CEO:

> No, they don't. This is just made up. Developers develop with open source software. They do not spend 2/3 of their time "adapting" it.

Many of our devs jam few-line functions into Spring Boot / JPA / Hibernate / Flask / FastAPI / Django /Some other framework, updating these frameworks, configuring these frameworks. We have a few admins poking configs at PostgreSQL or other OSS solutions. It's not that wrong to call it like that.

> This persons does not understand what python or curl are. They do not "go down". This is just someone not having a single clue what they are talking about.

If you don't build, fix and maintain the software on your own, US embargoes can take down any SaaS solution, and cut you off of binary distribution (I know a guy who couldn't install binaries on an IP that was flagged as russian), source distribution (people getting banned from GH), patches, ...

It does not go down in the traditional sense, but if you have no devs of something in the EU, you can easily get cut off of security updates and get exploited with known problems from a hostile side. If you have your own devs in there it's at least less clear who cuts of whom and who keeps what security problems around in the libraries for whose benefit.

All in all, this reads like a managers take on stuff, but then again, 20M is on the level of pennies at that scale and overall an orientation to OSS and open standards is a good thing imo.

If you want to, you can twist her words in ways that they make sense. I do not believe that she has a sufficient understanding of these technologies to adequately phrase herself. This is, as you say, manager speak.

You can also find out her educational background, which includes no technical qualifications. "Adriana holds a master’s degree in public policy and governance from Maastricht University and a bachelor’s degree in sociology and political science from Goethe University Frankfurt."

A person with these qualifications has absolutely zero business heading a government fund. At minimum I would want this person to either have a technical degree or some industry/FOSS experience. I don't think it is unlikely, that this women has not written a single line of code in her life.

The reason is that only such a person can adequately understand why these projects need funding and what the consequences of not funding them are.

I read their website and it is extremely embarrassing as well.

>"Lineare Algebra ist für viele Prozesse in der Mathematik, den Naturwissenschaften, der Informatik, der maschinellen Bilderkennung und dem maschinellen Lernen unerlässlich, da sie es Entwicklerinnen und Forscherinnen ermöglicht, Berechnungen extrem schnell durchzuführen."

To paraphrase: Researchers use linear algebra because it makes their calculations fast.

You can look at it this way, or you can look at it in a way that, shes the one who convicned politicians to create a fund for OSS. And may be woth time, they will get better.

If you look at the projects they fund, they are good projects.

I believe that it is inherently dangerous to have managers, who do not understand what they are managing. You are correct that the sovereign tech fund has funded some good open source projects, although I disagree with some funding choices. I would have greatly preferred if someone with some technical background were leading this, who themselves has the ability to coherently talk about the subject.

> To paraphrase: Researchers use linear algebra because it makes their calculations fast.

Mh, if I am contrarian: Optimization of linear algebra is an established important subset of numerical computer science, because you can reduce many important problems to sets of linear equations. I studied that for a semester in many details. Many simulations, fluid, weather or mechanical were at least initially implemented as sets of linear equations because linear equation solvers were well-researched and optimized. Because they were fast and had a predictable range of error.

So yes, LinAlg makes other research go fast.

> A person with these qualifications has absolutely zero business heading a government fund. At minimum I would want this person to either have a technical degree or some industry/FOSS experience. I don't think it is unlikely, that this women has not written a single line of code in her life. > > The reason is that only such a person can adequately understand why these projects need funding and what the consequences of not funding them are.

Though her job could easily be to be the competent at politics and communication, not code. She may fail at the level you are looking at, but many techies at $work with more chops fail in the other direction much, much harder and don't get anything besides frustration.

>Though her job could easily be to be the competent at politics and communication, not code.

It is extremely difficult to adequately communicate about something you fundamentally do not understand. She is either lying or disastrously misinformed when she claims corporations do not fund open source projects, which are provided for the common good. This statement alone should disqualify her, because it shows that she is either lying or does not understand the point of her work.

The truth is that many important open source projects are either completely, partly or mostly supported by corporations, who provide this software for the benefit of the general public. Her prediction about the "tragedy of the commons" is not universally seen in reality. What is simultaneously true, is that many important open source projects are not funded by corporations or at least completely underfunded.

If the key leader of such a project claims that the later is generally true, any serious political debate will make her look like a liar and fool, when her opponent point out the numerous examples of the later.

Funding open source is not important because corporations just endlessly consume open source projects and never giving back. It is important because, some open source projects are neglected and inadequately funded. Not making that distinction is political suicide if you ever have to defend your budget.

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