Jeff wanted it to be open-source, but Joel was against it, and since Joel stayed on as CEO it went according to his wish. (But that's an odd time to edit it, since a new CEO is on the horizon.)
@forest But if we're not going to get write access, then what's the point in open sourcing stuff? We can already write feature requests... Doesn't really matter much then if we provide the code or not.
@forest So you get basically the same sort of state as MSE: people write features/feature requests then have to wait forever or hear it's not going to happen.
At least feature requests on MSE can be closed as dupes, pull requests can't (as far as I'm aware).
I sincerely wouldn't want to the be the dev that has to deal with an infinity of pull requests 'fixing' downvotes :P
Well, any code I actually distribute. There's some stuff I use personally which isn't open but I'd open it if someone asked me (it's the kind of thing that's just too specific to my system to be really useful to others without heavy modifications).
But yes, every software product I've written or been involved in has been open source. I've never willingly held back any code that I distribute. I'm not a hypocrite. :p
That's too bad. It means that, when your company is long gone, the benefits you've provided for mankind and the knowledge you've gained will have died with it.
@Rob People never use abandoned software as-is, but I benefit regularly from ancient software. Sometimes I even have to track down the original authors and devs and trace their new email addresses or phone numbers and ask them.
sides, getting our tangled mess of ERP into a state where it could be functionally released as open source would be a lot of dev hours for no direct € gain for the company
I'm of the opinion that, when a company shuts down or discontinues a product, it should at the very least release the source code. I mean, there's code out there used for embedded systems that is no longer supported but which is still super useful.
@Tinkeringbell Nah. Usually the people I talk to are just surprised.
Well all it means is that, if I ever do get the source code, it'll be because someone I know is trading it with other trees in the underground (though I highly doubt anyone would trade something as weird as SE source code).
The companies which don't do that are the ones who generally release poor quality products and need to put more money into advertising and PR than software.
Compare that to a fortune 500 like RedHat, where 99.999% is FOSS.
@Magisch Sure, and I'm not saying that closed source can never be profitable, but it's harmful in the long run, and it results in competing with advertisers, not with other software companies. If a company can't compete based on ingenuity, it shouldn't be in the market. If a company has to hide behind the law, it's not a very clever company.
And that's what we see when China and France routinely steal IP.
@Rob Oh, why not? There's no need to create an entire community just for something to be open source. Look at how OpenSolaris prospered before Oracle bought it. All they did was release it in one big dump.
@forest There's... a whole lot of problems, especially if there's a part of source code that you're making money with (or planning on making money with).
Sure it can improve. But it can also cost you your company. Not saying security by obscurity is the way to go, but blindly pushing a repo is a bad idea
@forest No, many companies are against it because they believe security by obscurity is a thing. And they refuse to upload sensitive data to projects who have published their source
For instance if you're supporting a jumbled mess of daisy chained vba macros written by someone in production who was learning VBA as he did this, and those somehow became mission critical and are unfeasible to replace at the moment
@forest I'd say no, because there's no point restricting yourself needlessly, unless you're doing it for fun. I'd say most devs could do it, if they did a bit of research
Those cheap programmers don't get the education they need.
I mean India still uses TurboC++ to teach C++!
Back from when C++ was a mere extension of C!
They literally need to run it on DOS machines.
Look also at the pay inequality.
It causes outsourcing to result in someone needing to write a lot of crappy code to make a living, when in other countries, people need to write much less, but better.
@SonictheInclusiveHedgehog Back then, computers were "nerd things", before that was cool. Girls didn't like to associate themselves with something that lame.
@forest No, I meant the exact opposite. It was so niche that it was more equal at that time, but as computers became more commonplace, it became weighted towards males.
@Magisch It's measured by looking at objective standards for code quality.
Errors per line of code, efficiency, knowledge of constructs, etc.
@Magisch Yeah that's true. That's why outsourcing is a thing.
Sadly a "quick setup" often ends up becoming "production product".
Look at what happened to Intel when they outsourced their CSME team to Israel before MEv11. They switched from ThreadX managed in-house by professionals to Minix using modules in Java, and boom vulnerabilities and bugs galore.
I'm sure they rationalized it as needing nothing more than a quick hack, too.
But look how fast AMD stock went up after some of the more PR-worthy debacles. :P
Now, one thing I will say about modern programming practices is that we've become a lot better at working as a team and writing manageable code.
Anyway, I gotta go get some rest. Been up too long. o/
Ah ... The Barbecue Chef. Step 1: Buy a Barbeque. Step 2: Cook something on it. Step 3: Serve it to your guests. Step 4: You are a Chef.
Like the Computer Programmer at many places. Step 1: Get hired. Step 2: Write a program. Step 3: Now your a Coder, a Programmer; some kind of Rembrandt.
@Rob There's ... a bit of a thing though. There's a lot of things that can either be done as a hobby or professionally. I do share the opinion that a professional programmer should have some qualifications, know about standards and stuff... like a professional fisherman or beautician. That doesn't mean though that people can't fish or use make-up without those licenses, though they perhaps should not work as professionals.
@Rob sometimes it's. 1. Get hired for something unrelated, 2. "I could automate this", 3. Automate it, 4. "You know about computers, why don't you do this for the other processes as well", 5. You're now a software developer
When I still studied archaeology, some 'professional' archaeologist used to call the people that came over to help with metal detectors 'detector-amateurs' or 'amateur-archaeologists', because those people never had a formal (university level) education.
It's strange, and it was not fair to the qualities of those people either: they taught me a lot about digging, and especially about using metal detectors and treating metal finds. In a way, they were their own kind of specialists. Yet they were always doomed to be looked down upon by the more snobby people among the archeaologists.
There's a lot you can do just for fun, or voluntarily, that doesn't require a professional education.
There something about being a cook for others, or writing programs for other people's computers that differs from someone doing their own makeup and it's not so much whom has to look at it but more whom pays the price for the mistakes.
I think it needs to be necessary to be a reasonable gate
Sure, doctors or engineers probably need a lot of qualifications to be let loose on the world. Some gatekeeping is just obnoxious and unnecessary though, e.g. in video games
@Magisch Oh, that's a different kind of 'gatekeeping'. Though we were talking about programmers requiring some kind of education, not about online bullies ;)
@Magisch Oh, well... that's where you have to ask what 'real' means. Is it someone capable of doing it professionally, or do we count people doing it just for fun? In case of the fun, there's not much need for gatekeeping.
In the old, old, days you had to write the program correctly and save your work to cassette tape before running it in case it went to HCF. Nowadays it's easy enough to cobble something together and send it to millions of people, it may even seem to work fine for years. --- But the truth is that there's a bug somewhere, something doesn't work properly, and it ends up costing 10's of thousands of dollars (like what happened last week).
@Rob Still, there could've been bugs in those programs too. I think we're also discounting the fact that the applications people are currently building are getting more and more complex, so of course there's more room for errors too. And I don't know about you, but I've definitely had to restart VMs or sessions because I reached a HCF like state when developing ;)
I have that distinction directly in front of me. One of my projects is a driver for a hand scanner in C, there is little to no room for error in that code
meanwhile my other stuff is a web app with frameworks, display bugs, synchronicity issues, concurrency, web workers and all that jazz. The room for error and consequently the amount of errors I make and have to fix is higher
That doesn't make me a horrible dev imo. I can write clean C if I have to
@Tinkeringbell first few days were indeed not pleasant. Particularly because the event location has non-flexible opening hours, and the experience is fully booked. So if something is fucked, so are the visitors for that day. :D But so far so good.
@Rob Yeah, and then one colleague has the cold or flu and the entire office is out of runnig the next week because they didn't wash hands. I prefer swiping a badge ;)
They are all instructed not to run, and not to go through virtual objects. And they've signed a waiver. So yeah, as long as they don't run into sensitive equipment ... :D
Hmm, okay, that's nasty. (I have migraines myself, so I get that). Did you try full-body VR before? In our system you're in full control of all your movements, so no weird VR motion-sickness stuff.
:( That's unfortunate. I won't make you our guinea pig, but I'm still curious how you'd respond :D We have plenty of people come by who had bad VR experiences and who loved our stuff in the end.
usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/5/../../../x86_64-linux-gnu/crt1.o: In function `_start': (.text+0x20): undefined reference to `main' collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
Try the Dr. Who - Time Vortex game. 5 versions available for desktop/cellphone (no download) or 4 other downloadable versions depending on which VR headset you have. I just tried the desktop version on my phone, it works fairly well. Written by the BBC.
Will Stack Overflow's engine become open source one day?
Warning:
Some of the answers to this question no longer apply to the current situation. Hosted StackExchange is no more, for example.
@JourneymanGeek Yep :) but see link above, there were a few people that missed the e-mail, that were promised swag as soon as the switch would be complete
Will Stack Overflow's engine become open source one day?
Warning:
Some of the answers to this question no longer apply to the current situation. Hosted StackExchange is no more, for example.
