Development quotes of the week

[Posted February 20, 2019 by ris]

Getting open done right isn’t easy, and I can point to a number of times in my own experience when I’ve just wanted to grab a task and finish it rather than discuss it. But the payoff for real collaboration has always been better than anything I could have accomplished on my own.

— Brian Proffitt

In the distance, a gradual roar begins to grow in volume. A dust cloud is visible over the horizon. As it nears, the shouts of the oncoming angry mob can be heard. Suddenly, it stops, and a brief silence ensues. Then the air is filled with the clackings of hundreds of keyboards, angrily typing the owner’s opinion about generics and Go. The clans of Java, C#, Rust, C++, TypeScript, Haskell, and more - usually mortal enemies - have combined forces to fight in what may become one of the greatest flamewars of our time. And none of them read more than the title of this article before writing their comment.

— Drew DeVault (Thanks to Paul Wise)

If there is one tiny bit of hard learned advice I can leave behind from all this, it would be: Friends don’t let friends release full blown complex applications under the GPL – Keep it for hacks or corporate backed stuff.

— Mark Watkins

Development quotes of the week

Posted Feb 21, 2019 2:13 UTC (Thu) by brooksmoses (guest, #88422) [Link] (2 responses)

Does anyone have more context on Mark Watkins's comment? What I'm getting from the post is a picture of a sadly burned-out lead developer who is letting go of a project because it has become a problem in their life rather than a source of happiness, and he blames it in part on "poor software licencing choices," but it's not clear to me whether he's blaming this on something particular about the GPL versus things like BSD, or whether he's using GPL as shorthand for free- and open-source licenses in general.

It's a sad story, in any case. Unfortunately, it's not limited to software (open or not); I've seen very similar abusive entitlement from readers against science fiction authors when the next book in a series is delayed.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Feb 21, 2019 4:50 UTC (Thu) by bkuhn (subscriber, #58642) [Link] (1 responses)

A quick look at the project's Gitlab's page hints pretty strongly that he faced a lot of GPL violations that were difficult for him to resolve (note the statements asking for proper credit). I wish I could have talked to him before it got bad, as I could probably have helped, but I didn't know about the project until I saw this quote. Plus, it seems like most of the problems were completely license-unrelated, so it's exaggerating to take the quote out of context like this. Most of the problems his blog post talks about are community-relationship issues that come in projects with any license.

Development quotes of the week

Posted Feb 21, 2019 14:44 UTC (Thu) by jani (subscriber, #74547) [Link]

I won't even attempt to summarize any of this, mainly because I couldn't be bothered to read it all, but looks like it's all here:

http://www.cpaptalk.com/viewtopic/t174687/SleepyHead-Proj...