Why I DONT LIKE Open Source Software w/ Jonathan Blow | Prime Reacts

[@CHATFP]

A co-worker and I worked on a feature to make event listeners more efficient in a golang repo (our first google pull request, we were excited!). We found the problem, fixed the code and submitted a pull request but the build broke because of some internal testing tools they were using and instead of fixing our build the guy copy and pasted our code into his own pull request and self merged. We were livid.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

that is superior dick move

[@trumpetpunk42]

@guitarszen Jealous you can't be as big of an asshole as the people in that story.

[@Microtardz]

@@alexvitkov That's not what he meant. What he meant is that if they understood the license then they'd know the moment they submitted that PR it was now part of google's domain. Companies do this so that third party programmers can't pull a "Remove all of my work as it's copywritten by me and I no longer allow you to use it."

[@dieSpinnt]

@@Microtardz It simply has to be like you explained. Otherwise every such project would guaranteed to be stalled. Look at the timeline you are commenting on (and finding some excuses for this guy ... ): It just needs one dickhead like guitarszen who thinks he must call strangers names and over-react in this comically respectless way, including his attack on the "victim". What we can do in this case is to point out that the google employee plagiarized the work of others, which may turn into his academic self-destruction or not (O can over-exaggerate, too:P). License or not: This was an absolutely intolerable move of that "guy" from google. And so is the reaction of guitarszen. What an anti-social little child. No one needs like this. Also: Some actions from your co-workers around community driven projects may be mistakes, intentional bad or not, but legal. And then? The world-view of guitarszen ist just embarrassing, like he never interacted with other people. That someone "murders" your respect doesn't mean you have to do the same "eye for an eye" BS to others. There are actually people out there who make voluntary work and do it not because they need a "badge" to brag with or to have the possibility and intention to sue their fellow citizens for every little fart.

[@richardfairthorne7021]

@@alexvitkov I understand how you feel, but if you want to extend or use software, and you don't want the original author to be a dickhead, you have to specify that in the license agreement. If you want to exploit your extension for publicity or credit, my recommendation is that you make an agreement for that, or do not contribute your extension to the original code-base. If the original software is not pluggable, make it pluggable. Then build your software, and license/sell it as you wish.

[@paulholsters7932]

In summary: you can use every argument against open source very easily for closed source too.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

some of my worst experiences were in closed source, not open

[@ghosthunter0950]

Not only that many of his arguments are A LOT worse with proprietary software.

[@jblow888]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen Of course there are lots of incompetent people at lots of closed-source companies. The difference is that when running a company you *can* have quality control, and this is effected via hiring and firing policy, engineering direction, etc. This is still difficult and it's not too surprising that many companies do a bad job, and that companies tend to be ever worse at this as they get bigger. But from my perspective as someone who runs a small company and gets to decide what kind of people we hire, how exactly we go about programming, etc, there is just a degree of quality control far beyond what happens in an OSS project, and a corresponding degree of responsibility (if we make things that suck, it is ultimately my fault). So my viewpoint is not that closed source is fundamentally better on average than open, etc, it is that closed source *can* be better if executed correctly. When your development model is that you are curating PRs that come in, you can do a better or worse job at curation, but you're fundamentally limited by the quality of the input (and also by the quantity; once the quantity gets large, you can't realistically vet it at a decent speed without having a bigger team to vet it [which decreases quality]). When you're not paying the people producing the input, it is pretty hard to incentivize quality. (It is hard also when you are paying people, just, easier).

[@jblow888]

Oh, on the "creativity" point ... I think you will find almost no JavaScript frameworks are creative, but I wasn't even talking about those, I was talking about actual programs that people run. Take video games as an example. How many video games are developed closed-source, and how good are they, and compare to how many games are developed via an OSS development model, and how good are those? Now remove all the games that are just clones of other games, and see what's left to even compare...

[@kayakMike1000]

Well cyberpunk 2077 was a bit of a disappointment at launch.

[@mobalias]

If you have an issue with subitting pull requests to an open source project, you are free to branch off of it and make use of the changes yourself. There needs to be a quality gate somewhere.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

agreed

[@bobby9568]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen instead of bashing young engineers, Jonathan should go after managers working in tech who know nothing about technology while at the same time getting paid at least three times more...

[@derpysean1072]

​@@bobby9568 Nah man, typing codes and pulling up reports aren't the same thing. It's less productive for the manager to code instead of doing managing work. And the market decides their salary, if you are not satisfied with being an engineer, be a manager instead.

[@bobby9568]

@@derpysean1072 Who said something about the manager starting coding LOL! True, coding is much more difficult than pulling up easy peasy reports. The market doesn't decide, engineers are too stupid to understand their own value and hence the popular managers take the money while they let engineers work as their slaves. That is why engineers want to work at FAANG companies because they get paid a lot. Nice try though Mr. Derpy Sean the manager.

[@ultru3525]

@@derpysean1072 Ah yes, the market, well-known for making correct decisions, and definitely not crashing the entire economy every 10-15 years. Thinking that the guy signing your pay check actually deserves 3x your income because "the market decides" is no different from a serf thinking their lord deserves half their produce because "God bestowed upon him the divine right to my servitude."

[@sub-harmonik]

I contributed a pretty big pull request to add a feature into an open source project, and have been waiting for the review to get updated for 2 years (and after trying to get the reviewer's attention once or twice). But my solution was just to release my own fork of the software, which is one example of why open source is great. I don't HAVE to wait for developers/maintainers who can't be bothered or for who a review is too overwhelming.

[@frederikholfeld868]

Exactly. What would be the alternative in closed source? Create your own company and build the thing from scratch to make it better? Sure, it can be done, but what takes more effort and what are the chances :D

[@jabadahut50]

@@frederikholfeld868 this also runs into a lot of lawsuit problems even when done the right way, whereas in open source, the most they can do is complain at you.

[@sub-harmonik]

@@jabadahut50 there's sometimes a lot of gpl bs in 'open' source I'm not a fan of, but that's pretty much it

[@brian-mcbride]

Sometimes if it is a small project, the maintainer might not be checking. If it is a large project, it might be overlooked. It is so much free time to maintain a OS repo that it can get pretty overwhelming to keep it up. I won't pull anything in to the few I have unless they have testing in the PR too. Unit tests are (at this point) the best way to prove "it works"

[@sub-harmonik]

@@brian-mcbride it's a medium size repo with absolutely no unit tests of its own lol (it's pure data)

[@milosCivejovidar]

He makes creative PC games, sometimes spending years to make a single one, and has a relationship to his source code as a sort of an artist. His types of projects are totally incompatible with open source.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

pretty great break down

[@theairaccumulator7144]

To be honest his code is probably some yandere dev level stuff

[@saniel2748]

@@theairaccumulator7144 You are totally clueless

[@DemonixTB]

@@theairaccumulator7144 absolutely not lol, he streams programming very often you can look for yourself.

[@nontraditionaltech2073]

I love Jonathan Blow’s content. What actually got me listening to him was his programming language/compiler content.

[@TheFelipe10848]

The point you make at 13:50 is so true, I really feel that as a QA. Some devs really take bug reports personally, and as a QA I often need to try to be as kind as possible. It's really hard to do when the same bug pops back to life again and again due to bad practices, in those situations all I want to do is fix it myself lol

[@khhnator]

just add a disclaimer over every report you make

[@Meritumas]

I feel you! I moved from QA, test automation to software engineering (development) years ago. I see how many my coworkers behave exactly as you described. Is personal insecurity, psyche problems, inflated egos etc. What I can say, having tester hat helps me writing software (TDD, BDD style) tremendously! Good luck!

[@TheFelipe10848]

@@Meritumas Funnily enough, I just transitioned to a software development role as well, I would say that having been a tester helps a lot for sure

[@peteryates308]

"I don't like submitting PRs because people whose taste I don't like judge me" "If you object to criticism, you're just anti-engineering" It doesn't feel like he's consistent with himself here. There are plenty of levels that a contribution can be evaluated at; not just code quality/correctness.

[@isodoubIet]

Also "I don't like when outsiders complain about code" while being an outsider complaining about open source processes. Also interesting how he claims to dislike this gatekeeping but ultimately just suggests gatekeeping as an alternate solution.

[@hwstar9416]

not really? the problem here is that usually when a PR gets rejected it's not due to the quality of the code, but instead some arbitrary reason.

[@gordonofgecko]

Jon Blowhard is a professional opinion haver.

[@numeritos1799]

These clips are from different times, and although not taken of out context, he's thinking out loud more than anything. He does try to sound convincing though, but that's kinda his thing. He makes it sound like every opinion he shares is a super strong opinion which clearly they aren't.

[@edinalewis4704]

Being open to criticism doesn’t mean you have to be open to dumb criticism.

[@remirth_bergström]

For some reason I am drawn to disagreeable people with outlier opinions. I don't even agree with them necessarily I just learn a lot from their perspective

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

same. it bothers me to listen to their opinion, but i try to take it on as my own and work through it

[@sohn7767]

Even AI does trial runs of things it thinks are definitely wrong to learn : )

[@philipphanslovsky5101]

Great video + reaction

[@---bl3sr]

Cant say that i relate to that, but it is a thing that i find profoundly respectable

[@paulholsters7932]

The mediocrity of code: again: not a good argument either. Because closed source software can be mediocre too and there you can't even forge it so you can change it according to your own needs...

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

this is SO true

[@Lestibournes]

*fork?

[@eeriemyxi]

But why are you assuming he likes the nature of closed-sourced software? The general idea of closed-sourced software is that you reward your maintainers with something of value; that is, your maintainers can be, and mostly are, solely driven by that rather than passion alone. That may be entirely different than alternative models he may agree with while them still not being the popular model that "open source software" mainly follow.

[@UGPepe]

open-source doesn't have to mean you have to contribute to the upstream, you can just fork and do your own thing and merge the upstream periodically if you want

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

this is true. it can be difficult though because the software moves beneath you. in fact, most of my software woes came from this

[@Di3Leberwurst]

So often that you would be able to just find what the fuck you are doing wrong or what doesn't work when you can just look at the source code. Not being able to just puts you at the mercy of whoever is developing the software.

[@jongeduard]

I dare to even go a step further and say that many of the mentioned problems, if not most of them, are basically closely associated with Github, a platform which itself is closed source and owned by Microsoft. I would like to see a comparison between the different open source collaboration platforms that exist, including Gitlab and the several mailing lists that exist as well.

[@steamer2k319]

​@@ThePrimeTimeagen "Critical Basket Weaving" sounds like a portmanteau. The 'critical' part sounds like art/language analysis where everyone gets to have their say about how e.g., a book made them feel and what it's "meaning" is with regards to their feelings and the community they represent. Literary criticism is a common topic in the social "sciences" programs of various colleges. From those roots sprang programs like "critical women's studies" and "critical race theory" etc. Basket weaving is an older meme stemming back maybe to the hippies? It's part of a broader set of stereotypes that would also include drum circles, singing Kumbaya and eating granola. Again, it's a picture of extreme inclusion where nothing is actually expected from anyone, therefore all can be welcome.

[@alexlowe2054]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen You're right. Which is why I think Johnathan is wrong. Any contributions to an open source repo are also an implicit maintenance burden. There could be a ton of reasons why changes are rejected, like implicit maintenance burdens, or conflicts with future roadmaps, but he doesn't mention any of those as valid reasons for rejection. It seems like Johnathan is complaining about project management because he disagrees with the direction the project is heading. Which is exactly why open source is superior to closed source, at least for outside observers. If you disagree with the original maintainers enough to fork the project, accept the full maintenance burden of the codebase, and rebuild the entire community around your fork, you have that opportunity. It's not easy, but maintaining a highly public project is never easy. But it can be done. Many successful projects like Jenkins and Libre Office came out of previous failed open source projects. Even though the original project died, the code lived on. With closed source projects, you don't even have the opportunity to fork the codebase if you disagree with the original maintainers.

[@KonradGM]

one word: Blender

[@jorionedwards]

Add-ons are awesome, as anyone can make and share it without Blender Foundation needing to approve of it.

[@muhammadzainabbasbaloch3200]

Blender is dope... Without it we would have to pay thousands of bucks for propietary softwares like Maya, Cinema4D for hobby projects and non-commercial use. Blender is still not the best but it is taking over very fast. I love open source❤......

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

blender the greatest program over that is the hardest to use

[@RenderingUser]

+ godot to the list

[@RenderingUser]

​@@ThePrimeTimeagen I'd disagree Blender is like the vim of 3D software. Massive learning curve, incredibly comfortable and easy to use after. Also crap ton of community addons

[@DevLeonardo]

In Open Source you don't throw some code in a PR and expect it to get merged. Bonus points if that's your first interaction on that project/community. Create an issue first, talk with the maintainers and make sure you're on the same page. Your code gets reviewed and some changes are requested? You decide if it's worth discussing/updating your code or if the project/community is not for you. Reviews are there to "protect" the project, whether you agree with what you're being told or not.

[@max_ishere]

I had my changes accepted then reverted with no explanation (even in the commit message) and the maintainer just wrote their own version. That's ok but I was a little bummed there

[@DevLeonardo]

@@max_ishere that sounds like a really frustrating experience, I'm sorry! However, I wouldn't blame "Open Source" as a system. Trolls, as well as disrespectful maintainers, might be everywhere unfortunately.

[@orbatos]

​@@max_ishere This is not an open source issue though, it's a communication issue. Do you actually think This doesn't happen in corporate?

[@sk-sm9sh]

@@max_ishere your change still has contributed as the maintainer had a chance to learn from your change until they found a version that they're more happy with. The end goal should be the working project not some few lines of code that happened to be committed by you personally that run there.

[@orbatos]

@@Jamey_ETHZurich_TUe_Rulez given they are in the history this is easy to point out and prove, so name and shame as appropriate, they are literally violating their own license in the case you outlined. This is still not an open source issue however, it happens even more in corporate environments.

[@androth1502]

the thing is, JB is an elitist and the idea of having to submit code to the approval of somebody he believes is beneth him causes him great distress.

[@RedOchsenbein]

Well, accepting PRs allows to find some new people for the team... there are fenced off open source projects having serious succession problems which might not have happened if they'd be more open to contributions.

[@VladimirTheAesthete]

Whatever the state of open source might be, the fact that the highest quality proprietary software (Office, Adobe Suite, Sony Vegas) universally goes down the "SaaS" rent-seeking route shows that it stagnates at a pace far worse than that of open source.

[@sanjayidpuganti]

Good point.

[@TheSulross]

the entirety of all cloud data centers, where most software of note runs, is a rent model where mega corporations leverage a gamut of open source software - they are the ones that monetize open software whereas everyone else attempts to monetize open source software are just rounding errors relative to these large corporations. At the end of the day, the most high profile open source software is filling the coffers of a handful of mega corporations, and that's about it.

[@0xCAFEF00D]

@@3_smh_3 I'm not sure it's right to describe highly profitable companies as having a shitty business model. It's more like they're poorly aligned with serving the good of mankind.

[@JanVerny]

People love to complain about SaaS, and sure, it sucks for those who have to pay for it.... but how else do you reasonably finance sustained SWE effort? As a business, if you're selling single license forever, that's just not sustainable.

[@ghosthunter0950]

@@0xCAFEF00D it's a shitty business model obviously from the perspective of the consumer. I can't believe I have to explicitly clarify this.

[@reinoob]

People think "open source" is some sort of movement but in reality is just code that is open for people to see, suggest changes or fork. It's not some movement or entity that people work for. It's voluntary and free

[@carlpittenger]

there certainly is a free software movement; you should be able to do more with software than just look at it.

[@NostraDavid2]

Don't confuse "open source" with "free software" (free as in "Libre", of course).

[@reinoob]

@@NostraDavid2 no, open source means the source is open to public, free software means it's free of charge

[@mirakle9375]

​@@reinoob Not at all. "Free as in free speech, not free beer".

[@jonathanalonso6492]

​@@reinoob Open-Source = code is available to the public Free software #1 = the software has no cost to acquire/use Free software #2 = the software has no limits on what you do with it FLOSS (Free/Libre Open-Source Software) = code is available to the public, the software has no limits on what you do with it, still can be charged to access the binary itself if you have never interacted with the code before (not always).

[@UGPepe]

you nailed it: you can't apply political analogies to software because software isn't scarce/rivalrous and politics is about assignment of property rights to rivalrous goods

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

exactly. its really hard to try to make this into a single philosophy because it isn't the same thing.

[@RenderingUser]

The only thing that can be scarce are developers themselves instead of the software

[@aftalavera]

Just read what you just wrote and meditate…

[@tedchirvasiu]

@@aftalavera 🧘

[@TraceMyers26]

Can you expand on what you mean by "software isn't scarce/rivalrous"? People's attention (and money, if the software is sold) is scarce, so software organizations have to compete for that attention. As an open source developer, you're competing for attention from whoever owns the product. That owner's attention becomes more scarce as the product gets more attention from users, because competition to contribute increases. There's a ton of scarcity and rivalry in software, unless you're just making something for yourself. Even then you have your own time economy, but that's a tangent. Also, people would mostly agree that systems of power transference (voting or whatever) are political, which is not only about property rights. Political decisions involve our bodily autonomy, ideas of justice (how much spending should be done to solve a murder case?), and many other things. But, back to goods... how is software itself not a good?

[@PierreThierryKPH]

Saying a rejected PR is wasted time is like saying a failed scientific experiment is wasted time. That's wrong and short sighted.

[@alexandertownsend5079]

True, failure is a great teacher.

[@eeriemyxi]

The comparison makes no sense at all. A failed scientific experiment, to me, is an experiment that quite literally is a failure from the perspective of discrepancy between observations and expectations. However a PR may be rejected due to the maintainer simply not agreeing with the "experiment"; that doesn't mean that the experiment is a failure, it just concludes the maintainers don't like the idea. The PR itself might still be a fully-functioning change that another group people would like to have.

[@JT-mr3db]

2:45 It's not hard to start a dialogue with the repo owner about a change you have in mind, get their take, and then get to work with some pre-validation that your efforts will be merged or at the very least seriously considered. Lack of communication from an owner gives you a good indication of what to expect.

[@steves9250]

Unless you are the repo owner doing it part time and have fifty people trying to get your attention.

[@JT-mr3db]

@@steves9250 If a repo owner doesn't get back to you after attempts to make contact then i would consider that not having pre-validation, and probably an indication your efforts may lead nowhere.

[@Waitwhat469]

For real. I asked a dev if packaging as Guix would work with their goals. They said no. That's it saves some time for me.

[@dantenotavailable]

The problem with JB's PR alternative is that the actual idea behind PRs is that it gives you a path to bring new blood into that inner circle (Not just making that up... that's something Linus pointed out). In some cases (e.g. Google) that's not necessary. But generally companies do Open Source because they want to open up the chance that other people will help with the maintenance. Functionally if you don't agree with the taste of the entrenched inner circle then you probably shouldn't be trying to join the project. One of the criteria for selecting new blood necessarily involves making sure they're not going to diverge from the project's style.

[@ashkiin8493]

Man, I am not joking when I say I could literally watch a couple hours of you reacting to jonathan's out of context rambles every other day. It's the perfect balance of crass truth seeking and thought inducing exploration. I love your attempts of adapting it to your own experiences and perspectives, seeing how true it could be in broader than intended areas. And even how you make it more palatable for more sensitive personalities, without losing his intended nuance. It ends up taking away some of the overly frustration filled tones he can have which can end up taking away from his takes at times. I'd love to see you two in a room/call some day for a couple hours, just hammering down each other's thoughts on software, mentality, work ethic and the like through your own lenses and without jumping contexts. Truly some of my favorite videos to just poke the old brain a bit

[@PhilSamoylov]

14:30 The sad part about the Actix debacle is exactly how inadequate the community response was. While the maintainers idea of "safety" didn't mesh very well with what community is used to, the form in which this was communicated to the maintainer was bad enough to make him step aside, which does not sound like a sign of a healthy and welcoming community rust project aspires to cultivate

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

^--- THIS RIGHT HERE

[@lesto12321]

I disagree, I think is more a case of "dont tolerate the intolerant". Maintainer get told there is a security issue in unsafe code + PR to fix it, maintainer brush it off as not an issue, a remote attack get demonstrated, maintainer decide to rewrite the patch still in unsafe, AND the cycle repeated. IIRC there was a demonstration for remote execution in both cases. And considering that was one if not the most used framework at the time, people using Actix got (in my opinion correctly) pissed off by the reckless behavior of that maintainer. And PR comment bombing aside, I dont think there was too much toxicity about it? I dont recall people being irrespectful or worse, but maybe i just follow different social circle than you do

[@marcusrehn6915]

@@lesto12321 I dont remember the maintainer saying anything wild. Remember that actix was not his fulltime job. I dont think that anyone has a right to say how he spends his time or runs his project, to be frank.

[@dynfoxx]

@@marcusrehn6915 I think most people would agree with you and did agree. Its his project and he has control for the most part. The people talking to him didn't really argue that. Most people showed him respect and understanding, only trying to explain the issue. The argument was never that he shouldn't have control over his project though. The argument was his code was incorrect and it was. People were taking time to fix it and point it out. His responses weren't the best but that happens especially when you are a non native English speaker. The real issue was that of communication. He didn't fully understand unsafe Rust. That's understandable. In the end he just got tired of working on the project. The most annoying takeaway from this was that neither party was really in the wrong. Both sides can do there best, be correct and still suffer at the end of the day. Frankly that just how life works and it sucks.

[@TheNewton]

Everyone's welcome until you point out how unsafe the house is, then your a jerk that should stay outside. Systems of people do not like being informed of systemic issues caused by those people.

[@notuxnobux]

Sqlite is an example of a closed developed model but the software itself is open source. One of the reasons they do this is for patent/copyright issues. They want to make sure that the code is not copied from elsewhere.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

interesting. and i really like squeel lite

[@andrearaimondi882]

@@ThePrimeTimeagenI despise SQLite the way it’s being used nowadays

[@Comeyd]

@@andrearaimondi882why?

[@andrearaimondi882]

@@Comeyd because it’s used for shit it was never intended for. SQLite was intended for extremely simple things such as configurations, local storage on limited hardware, etc. instead I see it now used for things such as full on database applications and it doesn’t even have proper data types, making everything incredibly difficult. It’s nonsense.

[@testacals]

also, the dev requirements for sqlite is super specific and they need total backward compatibility.

[@mintx1720]

The solution is to breed super programmers that can do everything without outside help.

[@theinsane102]

it's funny but this is what Jon's entire argument comes down to

[@Niohimself]

How would one even make super-programmers? Do you just train 1000 people, pick the best 1%, and tell the rest that they are trash and just wasted 10 years of their life so they should go change careers?

[@yancgc5098]

More good programmers and less mediocre ones would be nice

[@k98killer]

The latest VS Code update included a "bugfix" which was actually a feature change: instead of leaving Python docstrings highlighted as strings, some guy created a pull request that changed them to be highlighted as comments, which is incorrect. There has been a lot of pushback for suddenly changing all the themes in VS Code to incorrectly highlight docstrings. The guy thought he was correcting a wrong behavior, but it ended up being just his personal preference being foisted upon everybody else. So now there is a pull request open to revert his change, and there is an issue about making docstrings and block comments separate tokens for highlighting purposes.

[@k98killer]

Update: after 2 months, the change was finally reverted.

[@ex0stasis72]

​@@k98killerI'm impressed you remembered to come back and update your comment here.

[@k98killer]

@@ex0stasis72 it works out sometimes 🤷

[@ChamplooMusashi]

contributing to open source is a way to really be out a cut above a regular engineer on a resume though. it's not an entirely thankless process, espescially if you're someone who is using the library and the thing you're fixing is a problem you need to solve with the library in your own application

[@user-lv6rn9cf8m]

Also, like what... "thankless". Isn't having contributed something that's useful for people thanks enough? Why are we doing things even - to get credit for it or you know, ultimately lead humanity forward? Feel like both views are valid. And one of them is more noble than the other. As it is, copyright laws and how western companies view their ip rights... it really stifles human progress.

[@isodoubIet]

@@3_smh_3 Why?

[@matheusjahnke8643]

Well... nothing stops you from just patching the code on your end and never making a pull request. Technically you are contributing to open source. The biggest thing to note is that, if you redistribute something using your customized code, you have to include the source code too.

[@StruC]

A lot of Open Source projects give multiple people the rights to approve pull requests -which is basically a trusted inner circle- but they do allow for outside contributions. How is that worse and/or different?

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

unsure, his argument was hard for me to follow, but i am also trying not to be "mean" when i react... so...

[@StruC]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen I do agree with him when it comes to things like vim - with one guy on the helm. And given projects like neovim, others tend to agree with his takes in that case. But with a "trusted inner circle", which I feel like most big projects have, allowing outside contributions is what OSS is all about and specifically why it's great.

[@derschutz4737]

U can tell he hasn't really thought out his opinion, because it makes 0 sense.

[@StruC]

@@derschutz4737 I think he thought about it a lot but is over-generalizing.

[@derschutz4737]

@@StruC Thats exactly how you can tell someone hasn't deeply thought about it, they have an opinion based around a specific scenario and generalize it.

[@philippe_widmer]

Open source is the source of information and inspiration and a wonderful learning base for every developer. The resulting projects are an absolute added value and future-proof for a company that uses open source. A closed source vendor can turn off support overnight and that's it. With open source projects, you have the opportunity to fork and further develop the project.

[@insidetrip101]

I hear what you're saying, but closed source software generally has a much better track record for backwards compatability and future proofing. I hate Microsoft more than anything (except maybe Oracle), but I can't help but admit that they're the absolute best when it comes to backwards compatability. I'm maintaining code for a small company that has software written in the 90's, and it still just works. We're trying to sell them on rewriting their software, but its hard because their shit just "works" with little maintenance (aside from a bunch of scalability problems). I get maintaining your own code isn't exactly what you meant, but the point I'm making is no one uses windows thinking that the software they run on it today won't run on it tomorrow. That's basically an expectation, and Windows would not do that if it were opensource. Try running some 20 year old software on Linux or one of the BSDs. Its a huge pain in the ass relative to Windows.

[@naturegirl1999]

Making the code open source won’t magically hinder any of that, the code can still be shown, thus allowing people to learn how to make their code future proof

[@edinalewis4704]

Many commercial software licenses include a clause that you get a copy of the source if the company stops maintaining it.

[@voswouter87]

If you don't like the taste of the decision makers at an open source project, don't bother creating changes for them.

[@kronik907]

2:52 I put together a really shitty pull request (that I knew was not a great PR) one time to fix an issue in libre office that I had started and was open for months (and had been present for years) and had got no attention from the developers. They rejected the pull request but fixed the bug themselves within 2 weeks. I was honestly not mad at this outcome at all. And for everyone who now enjoys using your keyboard media controls for external apps when using libre office, you're welcome :P

[@dominikarndt6049]

It usually sucks to not get recognition for your work, but as long as the bug got fixed the PR accomplished at least its goal

[@zombizombi]

Try getting a PR merged into an open source project and there's a chance it might be - surely that's better than trying to get code merged into a closed source project.

[@MrSquishles]

closed source if you're a customer, you can just say add this feature or I'm bailing go broke. honestly I don't think I've seen that work too often there are some open gitlab container logging issues from paying customers, legitimate issues they've ignored for years. And that's a hybrid commercial open source venture, there are submitted prs they've ignored.

[@zombizombi]

@@MrSquishles I think you're confusing open/closed with commercial/free.

[@DJ_POOP_IT_OUT_FEAT_LIL_WiiWii]

@@zombizombi He's also right on another point. Faster and easier to add feature to closed source. When you have open source you always need to do proper interfaces in case someone starts relying on some part of your code creating dependencies.

[@asdfbeau]

Einstein was gregarious, as were Feynman, Bohr, Tesla, and on and on There's just a subset of engineers that are pricks. We're all jerks sometimes; the prick is the one who justifies his behavior by saying "well I just care so much/am so good at this!"

[@zacharychristy8928]

There are PLENTY of mediocre pricks too, haha. It feels like he's unintentionally arguing that people are only dicks if they're good at what they do, but I know a lot of CS students who didn't amount to much but were absolute assholes throughout their whole career.

[@thesenamesaretaken]

Henry Cavendish is a better example. Look him up. I guess Newton as well, though iirc he played with lead a lot so brain problems are no surprise in hindsight.

[@technite5360]

@@zacharychristy8928 One day he had the bad idea of defending a very stereotyped vision without knowing the Japanese video game market, with phil fish, with a very ethnowestern-centric stance... he received his first big wave of criticism, sometimes rightly so, he was already considered to be a person full of himself, since then I think he's received a lot of criticism for his way of taking people for idiots etc. some of them titillate him intentionally and troll him. This thing doesn't come out of nowhere on his part... it's a long process of criticizing the person that Jonathan Blow is and he twists it around to make it a general thing about great geniuses. But I find that it doesn't fit, should we separate the man from the artist was a big debate in France, particularly concerning Polanski... Blow's take is dangerous in my opinion, it is sometimes completely justifiable to formulate a criticism about a personality but it is up to the person not to take it or not... we didn't have to wait for Twitter for that, magazines, or even at school it already existed. It's human nature, not the most glorious : criticize. I wouldn't go so far as to make a Godwin point about collaborationist scientists because they had certain affinities with ideologies etc... Einstein is really the least problematic type in his personality... Anyway a person is full of contradictions and problems, but from there to say that it's toxic to criticize a person no matter what their field. weird. Like I said to a friend reminding me of past events, In the case of Blow, direct criticism is useless, and the guy is just doing his job and is old, It's good to watch it only and some of the videos on depression were good, you should rather look at PirateSoftware if you want to have a good time, he makes you love programming and doesn't send people packing when someone asks how to start programming a game. Everyone is different.

[@jonnyso1]

Open Source is not about everyone banding together and beeing accepting, no one is required to accept pull request from anyone, and if you just waste your time working on a pr without making sure you're on the same page with the mantainers you just played yourself. It's strength is that it enables people that disagree with something to just make their own thing the way they think it should be done, or if a mantainer or vendor tries to lock you out, or gives up on a project you can fork it, but that's the important part, you need to DO something about it and its not trivial. The worst part of the open source world are entitled users that just expect things to magically happen, don't want to pay for it, don't wan't to work on it, all they do is complain.

[@z1tterbewegung]

The thing about accepting pull requests from any contributions that take more time to approve than if people already could do faster is the fact that the way to onboard people to contribute is to help them out and some of them become good contributors .

[@jsbiff78]

Yes. The guy suggested "well, have a small group of contributors you trust and let them commit". Ok, well HOW do you go about adding new people to the project and allowing them to gain your trust? What about someone with a small bug fix or small new feature?

[@fabian57550]

I have barely started the video yet and I have to say, I genuinely believe that saying open source software lacks creativity is kinda ignorant... I mean just look at the progress being made in KDE, Gnome, etc. The Windows 11 UI is basically Microsoft KDE. Or Blender (open-source project literally used to express creativity) is used by Disney. I just think that this is a very weird statement

[@christophkogler6220]

It doesn't even make sense. Producing novel code for novel problems isn't creative? Is dude wanting them to write some new languages or something?

[@mintcar]

I got it in my head that he was just thinking of GIMP and Libre Office, like someone with really cursory experience with open source, but that can't be right, right?

[@isodoubIet]

I agree with your overall point, but KDE has always been based on the windows shell so that's a really weird example.

[@ara.foundation]

Thank you for saying that Open source coders are heroes of modern days. I am not an open source developer, but I also think that they are heroes.

[@AnthonyVoutas]

The idea that software quality and communication quality are unrelated or even inversely related strikes me as very strange given that software is fundamentally an effort to communicate (code is meant to be human readable after all)

[@Slashx92]

What are those opening arguments lmao. Jonathan Blow went from "he is pretty based" to "this guy really doesnt know what he is talking about sometimes" for me in two minutes

[@MrFujinko]

Learn from his mistake. Stick to what you do well. If you open your mouth too much you become like the rest of other people. Like a magician explaining his trick.

[@ExpensivePizza]

I ran an open source project for 5 years. There's a lot of good things about open source but the hardest part is definitely dealing with pull requests, especially when those pull requests come out of the blue and it's clear the contributor has put a lot of work into it. In hindsight I can honestly say accepting a pull request that doesn't really fit the project is far worse than rejecting it and hurting someone's feelings. Would I ever do open source again? Yeah probably, but I would go about it very differently next time around.

[@n4bb12]

It's a good idea to first communicte with the project responsibles before creating a large pull request. Not only will this save you a lot of time, it will also get your PR merged faster since the owners are already convinced and on board.

[@UGPepe]

I'm in the opposite camp: I hate close-source software and usually just ignore it

[@0xCAFEF00D]

Speaking as a user or developer?

[@UGPepe]

@@0xCAFEF00D speaking as dev. as a user I dislike software more often than I like it, mosly for UX and performance reasons.

[@vladimirkraus1438]

@@UGPepe How are you making money as a dev? By producing open source software or by producing closed source software?

[@UGPepe]

@@vladimirkraus1438 closed-source, always, but it never was software targeted at developers. That software could've easily been open, its users wouldn't even know the difference.

[@UGPepe]

lemme put it this way: as a user I don't even care to make the distinction betwen software and hardware: either it works or it doesn't, and if it's more expensive and long-lived like say a car, either I can repair it or I can't.

[@richardfairthorne7021]

Adding a feature to open source is a contribution. Asking someone else to maintain it is a pull-request. Anyone can build an extension, but the original builder can decide whether or not they wish to maintain it. It is a democracy. People vote by picking a fork.

[@TorgieMadison]

17:30 There are enough humans out there. We don't need to accept assholes (or, in some cases, criminals) just because they have other talents. If we broaden opportunities and widen the pool of people we accept into this field, we'll find the ones with the talent *AND* the personality. Currently we accept great talent from mediocre people. With enough access to opportunity, we can choose to only accept great talent from great people.

[@cdarklock]

You don't waste your work when your pull request is denied. That is just the world saying "we don't need your work." And presumably you did the work because YOU need the work, not because you thought SOMEONE ELSE needs the work, so the payoff for you was always going to be that you get what you need. The rest of the world can have what you did for free, if they want it, but if they don't... you don't give a shit. You did it for you. You shared because it costs you nothing to share, and you HAD to do it, but now the next guy doesn't. If you really want your pull request added, you can abstract your work out into a plugin or addon for the package, or even fork the project. Nobody can STOP you from releasing your work. And as long as you don't fucking touch the GPL ever for any reason, nobody can MAKE you release it either. Most projects migrate from "just let anyone contribute" toward "there is ONE GUY who can commit changes" naturally. It's a sort of intersecting triangles thing: the number of people you LET contribute, which starts at "everybody" and ends at "one guy"... and the number of people who WANT to contribute, which starts at "one guy" and ends at "everybody." When the intersection of these is growing, everyone is happy, but when it starts contracting people get increasingly unhappy. Looking back at my experience on the Vista team, this isn't limited to open source. There was a time everyone at Microsoft wanted to put something into Vista, and eventually we had to reduce the team to focus on getting the project out the door.

[@jasonwhisnant5457]

Often being an asshole is not a part of who a super intelligent person is. It is a symptom of who they are. Very important distinction.

[@PierreThierryKPH]

Haskell, Elm, Idris, E are all open source langages that have been or still are innovating. A few open source libraries are just cutting edge application of scientific results, that's innovation too (like Polysemy). And a bunch of open source projects are really innovating outside PL, Sandstorm comes to mind.

[@mrechbreger]

I'm absolutely pro open source. I always release my professional optimized raw assembly code. I even prepare it for multiple architectures.

[@Phasma6969]

Ok 👌

[@mrechbreger]

@@jamesnewman9547 of course you are correct! don't take my post too serious.

[@SianaGearz]

"Part of the personality that you can't take out" does not excuse bad behaviour. Linus Torvalds has learned to limit the harsh language to very technical things and never insult a person any longer, indeed to try to make personal concessions to people. And so can anyone else, or should at least recognise any cases where they overstep the line as a personal flaw and try to counteract or fix it rather than just revel in it. In turn of course you can make concessions for people with communication limitations, and try not to assume that a person you're facing doesn't have them.

[@draftingish4833]

Closed Source you still have bosses saying NO! Has this guy ever worked for anyone ever :D

[@NameUserOf]

"If i critisize I can be judged in a negative way and i don't want that" *Linus Torvalds has entered a chat* *Let's go*

[@aleclowry7654]

Most new desktop environment features for closed source options like whatever windows and macos use tend to copy features from linux desktop environments. At least I've seen some newish stuff that comes from DeepIn

[@realEchoz]

professional yapper. i especially liked the part where he explained how proprietary software alleviates these issues, as if they are not omnipresent in all of software development. i think it was around 24:53

[@mbk0mbk]

In closed source also there is a project manager and often pr are declined esp if you want to push new ideas or fix issues that no one told you to do or make new features etc. You can't even branch out to use tools you want use with it or publish it either , use it as is or don't use at all

[@IAmzColbz]

I thought one of his points was having some authoritarian arbiter was a bad thing, then in the same argument said you need someone to tell you your code is trash or software will die out? Like at the very least with open source, if you dont agree with the opinion of the arbiter/repo owner, you can fork it and run with your version. If it works, great now you have better software and proved that your code was actually fine, if it flops then you get feedback that maybe the repo owner was right and you learn from it. Closed source, your project manager tells you your code is trash and your forced to do something else whether you like it or not. Either you want an arbiter or you dont.

[@JoelJosephReji]

How is this not really different from contributing to a proprietary project at work? A bad first impression sticks with all our co-workers and bad PRs are usually reviewed to fit to the standard at which the repo is run. The only difference is that at work, you can just quit and start over again while in open source communities, you are out there in the public. (at the same time, you can create a new account to have a fresh start, ig)

[@ex0stasis72]

Ya, trying to relate open source to a political structure like democracy or monarchy isn't helpful because in a country, residents are mostly stuck to staying in the country, and it takes a considerable amount of effort to emigrate to another country. With software alternatives, you can make the decision to switch software flippantly, compared to switching countries. So in that regard, the drawbacks of an "authoritarian government" in the open source world are greatly mitigated.

[@dunklerKurfurstDesDeepstat]

"OPeNSOurCe makes nothing new, it only copies" - First OS to Run on 64-bit Architecture: Linux was the first operating system to run on 64-bit architectures, with support for the DEC Alpha processor in 1992. - First OS to Support Multiple Processor Architectures: Linux was designed with portability in mind and became the first operating system to support multiple processor architectures, including x86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS, and more. - First OS to Implement Live USB: Linux popularized the concept of a live USB, enabling users to boot and run an entire operating system directly from a USB drive without installation. - First OS to Introduce the Ext File System: Linux introduced the Ext (Extended File System) as the default file system, improving disk space utilization, reliability, and performance. It later evolved into Ext2, Ext3, and Ext4. - First OS to Implement Journaling File System: Linux implemented the first widely-used journaling file system, called Ext3, providing enhanced data consistency and faster file system recovery after a crash or power failure. - First OS to Support Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI): Linux was one of the first operating systems to support UEFI, a modern firmware interface replacing the traditional BIOS in newer computers. - First OS to Use Git Version Control System: Linux was developed using the Git version control system, which was initially created by Linus Torvalds to manage the Linux kernel source code. Git has now become the de facto standard for version control. - First OS to Embrace Containers: Linux introduced Linux Containers (LXC) and later Docker.

[@testacals]

Also, didn't linus invent GIT ???

[@dunklerKurfurstDesDeepstat]

@@testacals true but github is now owned by microsoft so we dont talk about that 😅

[@32gigs96]

GitHub and got aren’t related how you think they are… at all

[@craigdanielmaceacher]

18:00 his argument is really just a version of the Tortured Artist argument - that if the artist isn't suffering he can't make great art, which I don't buy at all. Aspects of your personality are only loosely coupled, improving one doesn't bring the others 'down', you are just adjusting a maladaptive pattern you've developed

[@fronix5060]

Closed source: "Trust me bro"

[@powerfulaura5166]

Any developer who disrespects end-user freedom/liberty - which is what 'open source' is about fundamentally - gets no respect from me.

[@DarthKnoppix]

Pretty sure this is how some projects like FreeBSD work. There are a lot of projects that are open source and have core maintainers etc. too.

[@thirdbeat]

@5:00 . its more like "informed captain" than anything else. yeah, you can suggest changes via pr's or issues, but the informed captains has the final say

[@simonfarre4907]

No I disagree totally. Open Source is not a thankless job at all. Sure, it's for people who actually *love* software development, hacking, programming in general. I've contributed to Firefox, GDB, RR; i'm particularly proud about that one; to name a few. Open Source is *wonderful* if you love programming. If programming is actually one of your core interests, beyond working. The work getting into the product *is* part of the reward when it comes to open source; because you love software development, you love programming, you love learning new stuff, you love contributing to a product that you use regularly etc.

[@VuTuanIT]

Yes, most of the time I contribute to an Open Source project, it is just pure happy when my PR is accepted and it’s to be part of an useful thing that is being used by the others. It means my code is evaluated, my skill is good to help me and others to be better, that’s such a best reward to any programer, i dont need any other benefits

[@diogofelix8626]

Agreed, I contributed once to the VS Code codebase regarding upgrading the Emmet completions for CSS grid layout among other things and I was rewarded Github Copilot for free, it's not a thankless job at all.

[@linuxrant]

The tiling window managers? and window snapping to other windows and borders? that was long vefore windows or mac came with those. The 3D desktop effects? The 3D cube? multiple desktop workspaces? the online self-updatable package managers/app markets? all of this was in the open source linux before windows, android or mac did it on a consumer/user level Come on these are amazing innovations and user conveniences that later came to the windows and mac because they were god damn cool. Mr blow is cherrypicking. Open source is doing a lot of stuff, in a lot of stuff there happens unoriginal stuff, because it is a lot of stuff. And also if something works... don't fix it.

[@dtg5790]

As you alluded to, there's a level of responsibility that one has to take with regard to communication, even if you're the "smartest guy in the room". I think there is a difference between being a "crotchety programmer" and being outright abusive, and if one isn't careful one can simply use the former label to justify the latter behavior. Having been part of teams with a crotchety programmer in an engineering leadership position, I've seen such programmers at times make it more difficult for the rest of the team. And on the occasion when they make poor decisions (real talk -- it happens even with experienced devs), the negative impact to the team was even worse than it should have been, in part due to the environment they've created where the rest of the team was reluctant to voice feedback. I think my point is that we shouldn't allow one's own engineering talent, especially when working on a team, justify poor behavior towards others. I do think it's true though, like the whole debacle with rubocop goes, things can be taken to an extreme in the other direction.

[@zacharychristy8928]

Absolutely what I was thinking too. It doesn't matter if you're a galaxy brained rockstar programmer if your attitude keeps you from being able to work with others in any capacity, you'll never accomplish anything meaningful. I agree we should have patience for people who are driven to abrasiveness by their passion but there's clearly limits here. I knew plenty of mediocre programmers who were complete dicks too. Lets not pretend that every asshole is just a misunderstood genius, lol.

[@LHCB6]

Being the literal smartest guy in the room sucks. It's often times people who are pretending that they are the smartest in the room creates resentment from people who know it's a bad or dumb idea. Unfortunately, if one is the smartest in the room on a technical level, the human interaction level needs improvement

[@markemerson98]

Pull Requests have definitely made us lazy to a point... and theres always one developer who holds up the entire CI/CD flow with their pedantic nit picking comments... grrr

[@robmckennie4203]

lmfao the thing about pull requests is hilarious, if the maintainer doesn't like what i wrote and doesn't merge it into their repo, i can just say fuck you this is good shit i'm going to maintain my own fork with this addition and we'll see what people prefer

[@bhavyakukkar]

but how will the people find your 0 stars repo?

[@karlkastor]

Open source software with bad documentation: You just look at the code to find out what stuff does and you're done in 5 minutes. Closed source software with bad documentation: You need to open a customer support ticket for your question and it will take at least a week to get an answer.

[@amc1949]

For his last point, I think he's trying to hide being an asshole behind being a good at what you do. A lot of people who are bad at what they do are assholes and a lot of people who are great at what they do are nice. How you treat others is more associated with ego than skill, it's more accurate to say that you become more difficult the better that you think you are rather than how good you actually are. You can also be harsh in your critiques and easy to deal with and easy in your critiques and difficult to work with. It's a matter of how you're approaching and interacting with the other person.

[@xunjin8897]

You nailed it! There is a "common sense" that people who are good at their job can shitty those who are not, that's toxic behavior.

[@amc1949]

@@xunjin8897 Yea and toxic environments make everything worse. If someone is having a problem they become more likely to use a bad solution rather than seek help and more likely to pass the blame around and avoid responsibility so they're not belittled or insulted.

[@altrag]

I'm disagreeing with both so far (

[@altrag]

OK all the way through it now: - Prime somewhat addressed my dislike of his original assertion, though his discussion seemed pretty dismissive of the idea that you could just fork things and focused more on the "but I want to be part of the big thing!" issue - similar with jblow's LLVM rant. Most of the rest I agree with in general principle, but I think there was far too heavy a focus on what amounts to "but people on the internet are sometimes mean!" Certainly that's true, but its also unavoidable in any community, not just the open source community. At the end of the day, open source only entitles you to utilize the source. It doesn't entitle you to respect or even acceptance by your favorite project's owners. Both these guys are fairly prolific content creators and should understand the dynamics of parasocial relationships. Its the same kind of relationship contributors (and contributor hopefuls) have with the project owners. Sometimes they'll acknowledge you. Sometimes they'll ban you if you really annoy them. Occasionally they'll just be in a mood and go off on your before they ban you. But most of the time - by far - they're just going to ignore you simply because there's 100 or 1000 or 10000 other people doing the same thing you are and they've only got some much time in their day. They don't care how much time you put into your PR because they simply don't know, and will never know. All they see is an entry in a list that they may or may not get to some day.

[@altrag]

As for jblow's idea that open source projects should only allow PRs from approved contributors, I have two responses to that one as well: - Many projects already operate like that. I wouldn't say most, but many. That's absolutely a not just a potential way to do things but an active way of doing things. Arguably any company that publishes their source code (Unreal Engine for example) is following that model as well. - It does however have a startup cost. Someone has to decide who is worthy to join the project, and that means they have to have criteria for making that decision. That usually gets measured based on prior submissions - a metric you would not have if you didn't allow prior submissions. That leaves you stuck either relying on submissions to other projects (piggybacking on people you've explicitly deigned as doing things the "wrong" way) or worse, having to come up with something akin to a corporate interview process and all the well-known pitfalls that entails, but without an HR department to handle the worst of it for you.

[@altrag]

@@alexvitkov > No you can't Yes you can. You might not be _willing_ to put in the work, but you absolutely have the option available to you. See my original post about writing things _you_ want vs writing things to get the glory. Who cares if nobody else ever uses your fork? That's their problem, not yours. You still have the thing you wanted. But if your primary goal is just getting glory then yeah, forking isn't going to do much for you. But neither will closed-source. Glory doesn't come just because you want it. You have to work for it, no matter what system or model you're working under. Not only that, but your work has to be better than anyone else' work. We can't all be glorified or the term would lose its meaning. If you want people to take up your fork you have to add something people want and can't get elsewhere (or at least make yours better than what they can get elsewhere). That might be a better support system (original idea behind RedHat and similar), or adding some proprietary features on it that you don't allow to be ported back to the original project (Apple using BSD) or whatever else you can think of. Hell, it might just be a better ad campaign to get your name ahead of the alternatives. You have to provide some kind of benefit. You can't just make a copy and slap your name on it and expect anyone to care. That's not just not how FOSS works, that's not how _anything_ works.

[@altrag]

@@alexvitkov > I still can't properly and responsibly maintain a fork of Linux by myself Then don't. Open source only guarantees you the freedom to try - its up to you whether or not you succeed. If you don't want to take the risk of failure, your only option is to not bother. That's not just in FOSS but in life more broadly. Most people can't properly and responsibly run a business either, and most small businesses fail. All you're guaranteed is the freedom to try. > "Oracle are dicks and changed the license so we HAD to fork ZFS and create OpenZFS" That _IS_ providing value. "Value" doesn't have to be code. It could be support. It could be better licensing terms. Whatever people think is worthwhile. And whoever made that fork may well have failed. They might have been the only ones who gave enough shits about Oracle's change to worry about it. Obviously that's not how it played out, but its absolutely a viable alternate universe. > but I can't think of a single example where a successful fork was started because one guy decided to do things his own way and made a better version of the product Every single Linux distribution? The plethora of window managers for Linux? The many Media Player Classic forks that all went their own directions when the original developer decided to call it quits. There's lots of examples. But fundamentally the important part is that you can do something _YOU_ want. Who the hell cares if anyone else wants it? If your fork has exactly one satisfied user - yourself - then its a success. Anything beyond that is just you wanting your ego stroked.

[@flyingsquirrel3271]

Okay, last comment about this video... about the actix desaster: The whole problem was *not* about the "way that guy was communicating" (direct/indirect, tone, whatever), it was about the content of his communication (what he actually meant). His (already pretty widely used) framework was literally unsound/ had undefined behaviour issues and he didn't want to accept a PR fixing it or prioritize fixing it himself. Because many people were using it, these people were trying to change his mind or warn others about this, so many people got loud on the internet - Again: Not, because their feelings were hurt because they are so soft and he has such a direct communication style, but because of very rational, pragmatic reasons. God I hate these clichés. Also: It was not about him using unsafe, it was about him using unsafe incorrectly, inducing undefined behavior.

[@ai-aniverse]

When I worked on a now dead project LinuxMCE, we kinda had the 'trusted' system. less formal but not everyone could just pull up and submit a PR.

[@rekcneb]

One key point to remember is that if someone can provide harsh or undiplomatic criticism due to their high standards for work, they should also be open to receiving criticism about their social behavior (where others might hold higher standards than they do) Consider the social aspect part of the work.

[@Sethbeastalan]

THANK YOU

[@WolvericCatkin]

_Maybe_ you could've done it faster... but the question is really: Would you have done it if they didn't...?

[@HyperMario64]

Ultimately I think open source is meant for people to hack things around, freely collaborate/share and have control over the software they use. Free software is an entirely different beast but I think it did a lot of good in what became the Linux ecosystem. In general open source can mean a lot of things but I can't think of a single example where some piece of software going open source was a bad thing for the end-user. On the other hand, everything sucks about proprietary software. Well, there have been some amount of proprietary code can be considered absolutely brilliant but it's more of an exception.

[@Force5_Eye_Dev]

Not anyone that is a coder / involved in anything. I just always assumed open source was simply that the code was viewable by anyone, but doesn't mean anyone can submit. the benefit being , that yeah, a group of people are creating it, but anyone can go through and look at the code to see if there are bad bugs / errors/ security issues/ etc.

[@zesky6654]

Everyone can submit, but there just is no guarantee that your contribution will be accepted. This is why you usually create an issue first to ask about a problem before submitting a solution.

[@NotDmitry]

Terse is perfectly fine, but being a genius doesn't excuse you being an asshole. "Great but complicated men" are allowed to be assholes because they simply can get away with it. Them treating their colleagues like trash is also a net negative to their field, often overshadowing their achievements (like all the women Feynman drove out the field). There's a real cost to toxic people with decision power. And in the end, no genius is indispensable. Einstein didn't develop relativity in a vacuum. If he wouldn't, someone else would connect the dots few years later.

[@ttuurrttlle]

I feel like the first half about the issues with Open Source and Pull Requests are not really issues with the principles of them, just issues with how they can end up being used in practice. Like, the issue of PRs that don't get merged being wasted work is an issue that can simply be solved with communication. Before you put hours of work into a PR, check with the maintainers if that is something they would actually want to add... like you could enforce that all PRs must first be a draft so you can greenlight the idea or provide other feedback before work is done. On the open source videogame project I am a maintainer for that is what we do on any large change. There are many small PRs that get made without that process still, but it prevents contributors from wasting effort goinf down a path that we would reject. As far as the community of Open Source being abrasive and critical of code or changes... That sounds like he just has a problem with the internet culture in general. That is hard to solve in the wider internet, but if you wanted to alleviate that within your own contributor community for a project, then you could take some steps to reduce anonymity so people don't default to the rudeness that anonymity can encourage.

[@isodoubIet]

In other words, management is hard. Outsourcing most of the development to random people doesn't fundamentally change that.

[@danielvaughn4551]

When I write anything online, I imagine the following scenario… It’s a hundred or two hundred years in the future, and a descendant of mine is in school. They’re given a homework assignment to scour the internet archives for the recorded thoughts of their ancestors, and they stumble upon me. Of course, this is just a conjecture, but it’s helpful to realize that this scenario is actually plausible. If that happens, how do I want to come across? What kind of image do I want to present for my great great great grandchildren? So for me at least, I feel the need to put a great deal of effort into being my best self when I’m online.

[@OmegaF77]

Um, I think that's thinking a little too far into the future. I'd rather my descendants discover my work and go "lol".

[@danielvaughn4551]

@@OmegaF77 it's just a thought that crosses my mind every now and then. I just feel like what I say online could theoretically be preserved *forever*, so it feels like speaking into eternity. Freaks me out a bit.

[@isodoubIet]

@@danielvaughn4551 Personally, I think it would be way funnier if a descendant of mine came across one of my comments and thought I was a total dickhole.

[@potato9832]

You can be blisteringly smart and nice. I don't buy the a-hole genius argument. If a genius is an a-hole, then they can work alone. The rest of us can chill out on a team and build a good working environment.

[@happyfase]

I think Blow's take is OS instead of OS. Oligarchical Source instead of Open source. Which isn't entirely different from what we have. Sure, anyone can submit a PR to squash a bug, but the direction of a project is generally driven by small group of contributers, but frankly, that's how it ought to be. That's where forking comes in. The oligarchs burn the project, grab the last good commit and run with it.

[@christiehill7135]

Can relate to the part about working with someone from a different cultural background than myself. There was a massive language barrier and it nearly broke me trying to communicate with this person. To them I was an asshole, to me they were an idiot. Not saying it was right, it was just a difficult situation to deal with and wasn't handled correctly.

[@farqueueman]

Open source software SUCKS said the guy named BLOW.

[@mforce2]

And then open source software said ... yeah well why don't you BLOW me 😁

[@anon-fz2bo]

Said the guy who uses Jai

[@meltygear5955]

@@anon-fz2bo Jai deez nuts see it doesn't even go with deez nuts that's how bad it is

[@pinatacolada7986]

The open source code idea is from a time when developers genuinely wanted to "make the world a better place". We had bitcoin, the pirate bay, decentralization, encrypted anonymous communications etc. But now developers are just greedily monetizing everything. It's a real shame.

[@nowave7]

He obviously doesn't like proprietary software either (khm... Visual Studio...). So, what does he like? Or is he just a hater and a troll in general?

[@erickmoya1401]

The latter

[@handsanitizer2457]

He wants everyone to build their own software 😂.

[@anon-fz2bo]

typical "I'm better than u coz I can do what u can't" mindset

[@devopssimon]

With regard to having pull request denied after all the hard work, That is what comments and issues are for. You get buy in and consensus from the community first, then you make sure the repo owner is on board, then you start work. If it's a new feature, you also need to be prepared to maintain that code over the long term, this is a big reason why so many pull requests are rejected.

[@teslainvestah5003]

He ripped on microsoft engineers for how long they took to develop a terminal emulator because, as he explained to his audience, every video game has a chat that is basically the same thing as a terminal emulator. You don't need to give him the benefit of the doubt anymore. He's not wise, he just feigns confidence about anything and everything. There are flat-earthers more humble than him. edit: dang, his last take was really, really good.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

You could really see that in full effect when he did panels with other developers, was asked fairly complex questions about a specific subject to start answering them and the amount of pauses of thought increasing by the second. Which is sad. People have to realize it's perfectly normal to admit you don't know everything instead of just pretending they do.

[@zesky6654]

The last take is correct, mostly, but it's not really novel.

[@wacky.racoon]

I too have a few "floater" PR's that I took care to make real nice and pretty with a bow on top that could be merged very easily but nobody ever looked at or reviewed

[@bhavyakukkar]

send it over buddy, if i already use whatever that is you contributed to, great. otherwise ill still try to find a way to use what you made

[@wacky.racoon]

I have to say my best PR experience was adding device support in the linux kernel.

[@keldencowan]

If Godot forces a change that breaks my ability to ship, I can always fork a private repo as a last resort. If Unity forces an unacceptable change I'm simply screwed. Why on earth would I use Jai knowing Blow is a crotchety BDFL? That would be a massive commercial liability.

[@PopcornMax179]

You shouldn't. It's his code he wrote so he can make the exact games he wants.

[@Capewearer]

Lol, you won't. Your competence isn't enough to do it solely alone.

[@AntsanParcher]

Regarding the political leanings or lack thereof of open source I think there's a severe misunderstanding between especially anarchist ideologies and everyone else. The idea that open source is very authoritarian because people control their projects is… wrong? That's not what a lot of anarchism understands authoritarianism to be. The most important question is not whether any group of people is forced to put up with your bullshit. The most important question is whether you can leave - not only in a merely “legal” way, in that you are technically allowed to leave, but also in the way that you can reasonably expect to make your way elsewhere where you can try to fit in. Open source makes this trivial in any way that matters to the parts of life that open source deals with. In my eyes that makes open source very much anarchist. You probably know The Hacker Ethic, so the idea may not be new to you. Regarding the thing about smart/creative/intelligent people being hard to interact with: I have never met a person who did groundbreaking stuff who needed to be an asshole to do it. I've mostly seen it used as an excuse by arrogant people who who mostly believe that they are so much smarter than everyone around them because they're too far up their own ass to figure out that the people around them are more competent than them at things that they personally are blind to. Most truly smart people are smart enough to figure out that feelings matter, because humans aren't computers, and they usually are able to work out how to not be assholes. Truly smart people are smart enough to figure out that, no matter how much of a genius they are, there's always something left that they don't understand, and so they know that they need to collaborate with other people. There are certainly exceptions, but they're rather sparse, and often quite literally pathological. It's such a weird way to think about it, the way he phrases it - as if we were trading abuse for insight, as if the worse aspects of Einstein were somehow payment for relativity. There's also this weird implication that Einstein treating his family like shit was somehow inextricably linked to his genius, which is quite an extraordinary claim with quite little support behind it. “I'll sit on my couch and eat cheetos and criticize Einstein in some certain way…” is really emblematic for the kind of bullshit that I was talking about above, that idea that everyone who dares complain about Einstein's faults must somehow be a lazy bum. That's just condescending bullshit by a guy who got arrogant because he made a few critically acclaimed games, directed at basically everyone, so it hits people who put the food on your table every goddamn single day so you don't have to try to think while half-starving, or have actually saved lives at the risk of their own life, and directed at noone so as to leave no possible vector of calling him out on i. And yeah, I know he doesn't mean it that way - and that's the problem, he's too far up his own ass and his weird ideas of meritocracy to realize that that's what he's doing. We criticize farmers, firefighters, nurses, and medics for their character flaws, too. This idea that heroism should exempt you from criticism is absurd. The only societies that actually do that are the ones that have people sitting on their couch and eating cheetos. Every other society understands that a hero can tear down as fast as they build up, and no, building up in the first place does not give you carte blanche for then tearing down. If you are a person like that, you're not a hero, you're a liability to the safety and wellbeing of everyone. There's a few really smart people out there (who also had some weird and cringe ideas) who said something similar to “Intelligence is like a razor blade - a powerful tool you can cut throats with if you're not careful about using it.” “The crowd” is a safe abstraction, a shorthand magic word to wave away and minimize all the work that's been done by thousands of people, attributing it in the same breath to the ones who often quite literally abuse them. It's kind of saddening to see you earlier agree with him how we should pay more attention to contributors (which, actually, I think you added that part on your own, which is great) but then here turn around and… carelessly employ the idea of “the crowd”. “That's way more toxic than a programmer saying angry things” is such a spineless thing to say, especially when it comes only a few seconds after making his strawman so much more disgusting. Say what you wanna say, Jonathan! Whose abuse of what kind is excused by how many versions of which library coming out how many days earlier? The idea that crotchety programmers have built like half of modern society is absurd, the same way that claiming that society will be destroyed by people expecting basic human decency from each other. We don't even need to look into obscure history books to know that the opposite is the case - every time that people got convinced that some kind of abstract “advancement” (whatever that advancement is supposed to be) is strictly more important than other people we get the greatest horrors that humanity has ever experienced. Not that Jonathan has any idea about any of that, because all his expertise starts and stops with games and the purely technical underpinnings of making them. But as established above, being successful there made him too arrogant to consider that he may know shit when it comes to how societies function. And I don't understand what your example at the end of that section has to do with what Jonathan was talking about here. It's not like preferring or dispreferring some technology is some kind of character flaw, that's a technical judgment completely removed from character. Agree on Twitter though, it's a cesspool. Well, almost agree - Twitter is not the result of people having shitty opinions, Twitter was specifically designed to make people's shitty opinions worse. Like yeah, people went in with shitty ideas, that's a necessary precondition, but it's not really a secret that the hottest takes were promoted the most, and often specifically to people who'd get upset by them so as to make controversy and unproductive shouting matches so much more likely. Because that drives the most engagement. Also agree that angry communication isn't inherently bad. That's weirdly also a thing that people who defend toxic programmers love to forget if other people get angry about abuse. Also there's the thing where there's still a difference between “terse”, “angry”, and “abusive”. The first one is almost always preferred. The second is sometimes necessary, but should be avoided otherwise. The third is not ever acceptable. It's not always trivial to discern between the latter two, and that's exactly why we have to talk about it so much. We can't solve hard problems by ignoring them.

[@RadicalGaming1000]

"The idea of a pull request is offensive" I've heard enough

[@u1over]

I thought the point of open source is that: if the king gone mad, someone can make a copy and make it great again

[@UGPepe]

The irony is that Jai will have zero chance if it won't be open source and he knows it. So I guess it's just another stagnant and non-innovative language then?

[@pengurrito7136]

propriety software projects that involved more than one person are just as "authoritarian", but the development activities are not visible to the public.

[@dromedda6810]

Blow always have creative takes on things that i usually never agree with, but also agree with at the same time

[@farqueueman]

that doesn't make you sophisticated. That makes you unintelligible.

[@kartonrad]

??? This is such a toxic comment I don't go to the aging bus driver and say "driving a bus doesn't make you prettier" What the hell your comment is completely out of the blue

[@AndarManik]

Open source I think is a broad project management system which emerged recently compared to other programming management systems. My optimistic desire for open source is that with the new advent of language models would improve the management system. I would want pull requests to be automated but obviously it’s just another management system.

[@MrDgf97]

Jon Blow is a really talented and hard-working programmer, who's regretfully cursed with a doom and gloom attitude towards most things. Trivial problems/topics are categorized as "society's downfall" by him. When someone suggests that better communication results in better collaboration it's not even an opinion, it's a fact that applies to pretty much every field of work. It's easy to differentiate between someone boldly enforcing contribution rules/standards, and bad communication (bullying, ridiculing, humiliating, etc.). Justifying bad behavior behind "it's just my personality" is shameful. To me that makes as much sense as someone justifying relationships based on astrology.

[@KevinTheCardigan]

Define bad communication. Define good communication. Define them both within different cultural contexts. Just because you consider a behavior 'bad' because your frame of reference has taught you that a particular behavior is undesirable, does not mean that the person is actually a 'bad' person or conducting themselves poorly. Truthfully, good and bad behavior can vary so much from culture to culture, to not consider it as part and parcel of someone's personality is just plain ignorant. There are few behaviors that all societies have agreed as being bad. Typically all societies agree that unjustified violence is undesirable. Almost everything outside of the scope of random violence can be cultural appropriate or inappropriate depending on context. I've had people 'bully' me as a kid, but in my eyes they were helping me understand why I didn't fit in. Is bullying necessarily bad? I've felt positive results from it. You can call it ridicule or shaming but that depends entirely on how you choose to perceive the communication, not necessarily having anything to do with the communicator having 'bad' intentions. There is such thing as efficient and inefficient communication, and that's way more objective than saying bad communication.

[@alanschmitt9865]

@@KevinTheCardigan Did you offend someone with your communication? Probably bad communication, then.

[@MrDgf97]

@@KevinTheCardigan I'm sorry you were bullied and I'm glad you were able to at least make something out of it. To me, bad behavior in open source software is deliberately belittling someone either for laughs or to "make an example" out of someone. Tone, choice of words, intentions, and yes, even cultural background are all influences on what could be categorized as bad behavior. "There are few behaviors that all societies have agreed as being bad" I wouldn't say a few, quite a lot actually in modern society. Just by doing a metaphorical Venn Diagram of countries' laws around the world you can see what I'm saying.

[@macaroni_italic]

@MrDgf97 You and I might be able to reach an easy agreement on what constitutes bold enforcement of norms vs. bad communication. However, it's obvious from most working situations that plenty of people either genuinely can't make this distinction, or they pretend they're unable to for their own benefit/advantage. I think we can probably agree that one of the worst things about work is coworkers who make your own job unnecessarily harder to carry out. And I think most of us can recall having had experiences where such coworkers compounded the harm by taking feedback and critique personally, so that they could deflect blame and not mend their ways. At least the "bad communicator" is trying to communicate. The underlying point of taking critique personally is, much of the time, to forestall communication entirely, to effectively render it impossible for anyone to call you on your BS. I find that way more toxic in most cases, unless the "bad communicator" is being over-the-top hurtful on a non-stop basis. In which case, you'd probably have a pretty solid workplace harassment beef you could press in response. Try getting a court to force your coworkers to stop making your job harder. That's not really a legally enforceable thing, yet it can be a huge source of workplace stress.

[@KevinTheCardigan]

@@alanschmitt9865 My communications teacher in university offended a student once because he put a bar graph up talking about airlines and there was a picture of a plane. The student said the two tall pillars of the bar graph coupled with the plane reminded them of 9/11. I don't think offending people is a good litmus test for bad/good communication.

[@mr7clay]

Thank god we enjoy a huge messy industry that can operate in a wide spectrum of ad hoc models unapproved by JB, and we can allow contributions by people not in his inner sanctum of smart programmers. You, yes, you, non-developer, can tiptoe into development in some area that provides value to someone else and learn and become better by reading open source code and getting feedback on your PRs and watching the process of other people working in PRs. And if you do eventually create something people really enjoy, keep the door cracked for other people.

[@skaruts]

Authoritarian is also a very bad word for OSS. It's owned by someone, so they get to decide how their own thing gets done. But that's completely different from forcing other people to do you bidding. The owner isn't forcing anyone to do anything at all. His rules apply only to his thing, and people contribute at their own risk. I don't disagree with the overarching points though. I just don't think OSS is neither democratic nor authoritarian. (Democracy is authoritarian too, anyway.) EDIT: I think you're correct when you said you can't relate this to any political structure. That's true. This is just people sorting themselves out, owning their own private property and dictating their own rules inside of it. Funny enough, that's pretty much what capitalism is.

[@zesky6654]

Not really, capitalism assumed an overarching state that enforces property rights. Without that, you just have primitive communism.

[@FlameForgedSoul]

As has been stated what he's describing at the beginning is the Blender Foundation. Also at 8:45 that's all well and good, but what happens when he dies?