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Seen this one too, hard agree. As far as open source stuff goes, I don't agree either, but I think I could steelman the arguments against it, to some extent at least.

Neither of these apply to open-source __in principle__ but they do apply to how a lot of it happens in reality. Which ofc you could say makes them not legitimate, but there's a definite connection there.

In no particular order,

1. The need for mainaining code due to external reasons

A statically linked executable (at least in theory) only relies on the kernel functionality, which is relatively stable, so no maintainance needs to be performed for it to work. But when you distribute source code, you take up responsibility to keep it compilable, which can fail without any involvment from you, since the build process involves so many steps (see Casey's thread).

You might say, just package the executable and source code together, so the user can choose whichever he wants to use. But again, when you distribute source code, there's an expectation that it is maintained. So distro maintainers could just choose to compile your source themselves instead of using the existing one, change static dependencies into dynamic ones and so on.

2. The lack of responsibility

Again, not every open source project, just vast majority of them. When you work on something for free, you don't have the insentive to make it as good as when you're financially dependent on it being good. Same happens for big companies actually: when you receive your paycheck divorced from the quality of the product, that quality becomes less relevant to you. Very different from Jon's situation for example.

Attached to that, the open source culture of just submitting one patch and disappearing forever. If it's a bugfix, no guarantee that the bug is actually fixed. If it's a feature, no guarantee that no bugs have been introduced, or that it fits in any way with the existing code.

3. The finance problem

Best exemplifed by Mozilla. When you devote most of your time to an open source project, you still need to put food on the table. The problem is, pretty much every one of these alternative methods is worse for the user than just paying for the product directly. Which you can't really do if you're open source, since anybody can just fork your project, take your customer base and leave you with nothing.

May 20 · 7 months ago

Original Post

The right way to write software — Adapted (mostly pasted without modifications) from Jonathan Blow. Originally found here: [https link] I read this article about software development, which I knew about because I saw Prime reacting to it: [https link] For the most part I think it is fine: a relatively young programmer is doing the healthy work of introspecting on what he should really be doing. But there's one part of the article that I think is a deep mistake, and the author doesn't know it'...