
Why the Best Companies and Developers Give Away Almost Everything They Do - frostmatthew
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/05/why-the-best-give-away/
======
lucasnemeth
Unfortunately, needs to remind people about the social distribution of OSS
work in the community:

[http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-
an...](http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-
community)

Of course OSS work is good, and we're happy you found time in 2006 to learn
ajax or whatever, but considering open source as a measure for good developers
is unfair. Even John Resig (quoted in this article) already made a post
explaining his views abt this, (that differs from the OP)
[http://ejohn.org/blog/project-based-
interviews/](http://ejohn.org/blog/project-based-interviews/)

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avmich
Lots of good points.

However, regarding that only reason not to share - that primary differentiator
which allows competition to overtake you. In many cases it's all there is.

When you start company, or a project, and - as it is in many cases - you're
trying to find that one thing which you can present better than anybody - you
only have that one thing. It's the reason you hope to survive and thrive.

Do you think it's a good idea to open source it? If yes, why?

------
potatosareok
I disagree with the premise that the best companies and developers give away
almost everything they do.

There's a lot of code from Google that's not open source - for whatever
reasons. Where are all the C++ big data tools that google uses internally. Why
is big data ecosystem centered around hadoop in Java from guy at Yahoo. Where
is the source code for borg, bigtable, chubby, or most of the tools mentioned
in their research papers? Where are the specs for their tensor flow fpgas.
Does Google open source all the custom linux kernel patches they have to drive
low latency networking and containers? Where's the source for the stuff that
lets google...be google? Given that, which the author does acknowledge toward
end of article, using Google as one of the poster childs for open source seems
like a weak candidate to me (in terms of open sourcing all the things facebook
seems like they open source more of their core infra but maybe that's just me
buying into the marketing).

Most video game code isn't open source. Is any intel/AMD cpu code open source?
Is the source code for stuff I interact with (routers, switches, telecom,
traffic lights - anything) open source? There's Cisco iOS and I know I've
worked with telecom switches that run proprietary unixes. Is QNX open source?
Hell is the code by Nasa open source? I'm not even going to get into the
arguement about is Android better off open source or not compared to iOS.

I think the people who write this closed source code could be amazing
developers. I think the companies who write a lot of this closed sourced code
are amazing companies. I think a lot of what drives tech forward is the result
of closed source development.

I think the authors points about doing open source development as a good way
to grow your career as a developer or for a company to get free dev work and a
pool of highly hiring candidates are true, I just don't know why it had to
start with what I view as a false assertion that discounts the literal world
of nonopen source code that powers your life, done by highly skilled
developers.

Also my post kind of jumps all over the place but I think the authors does
too. I really think this whole article by the author could be boiled down to
1/2 the length just focusing on a few core points about open source that would
have made the arguements stronger (I felt the author covered his bases in a
few places that made the overall point weaker). Below is my summary of authors
article.

Intro

    
    
      1. Think of programmers you know
      2. A lot of them do open source work. 
      3. Why do they (big companies/big name progammers) do this work?(Possibly skip points 1, 2, 3 to start with, I thin they're pretty weak)
      4. A lot of big tech companies open source code. Why?
    

Reasons To Open Source

    
    
      1. Let's skip mastery - I'm not sure how teaching somehow became the same thing as open sourcing)
      2. The work you do package a good open source project is likely to improve the project quality.
      3. Open sourcing your work invites new eyeballs to look over your code and offer free improvements beyond the improvement you just got packaging the   software.
      4. Labor (see 3, not really sure how this got split off from quality).
      5. Both as an employee and a company, open sourcing your work is a way to get your name out there.
      6. I'd skip this point "In other words, open source projects are simply more fun and more satisfying to work on." as that's really debatable.
    

Rebuttals To Why I Don't Open Source

    
    
      1. No time
      > Make time noob btw I learnt Ajax by myself and got a sick job
      2. No one cares about my work
      > Even if no one cares, open sourcing it will make it better (see the whole reasons to open source cmon get w/ it)
      3. Someone will steal my work
      > My bad u right companies don't open source their core business code. But mostly people won't steal. Not sure where the line is between the 2 so I'll   just mention both to cover my bases
    

Culture of Sharing

    
    
      1. Sharing is a good way to be selfish and get your name out there (see pt 5, reasons to open source)
      2. Open source is why silicon valley beating wall street (this point is completely unsubstantiated and to me very weak since wall street hft does a lot of cutting edge tech work, and who's even arguing silicon valley is beating wall street?). Weird dig to end article on.

------
dontscale
It's easier to share code nowadays given that momentum is part of a project's
overall allure and that momentum is not easily recreatable.

~~~
avmich
Do you mean that if you have something to share, you necessarily have
momentum, which is not recreateable?

------
combatentropy
A similar sentiment by Derek Sivers: "Ideas are just multipliers."
[https://sivers.org/multiply](https://sivers.org/multiply)

(Also, and off topic, major kudos to the writer for mentioning William
Zinnser's book On Writing Well, the second best book in the world on writing,
next to Strunk & White.)

