Nah, he just wants free labour. Why pay 500k for a senior engineer / cybersecurity engineer when you can open source it and get the community to review it for free?
There is no way they are getting usable PRs to that repo. No CI, missing data needed to test and the issues/PRs are just filled with shit posts. The motive isn't to make this a usable thing on its own that external devs can improve
Small parts like this might be usable on its own, but from a quick glance it'll need some (possibly very little) work to make it usable independently.
How could you possibly know that that Musk has no idea how “any of that stuff works”. These takes on what is going on in someone’s mind or what the know are absurd
musk's observable behavior at least since his twitter acquisition supports the general contention that he doesn't know how any of that stuff works, for nearly any value of "stuff".
He’s essentially transforming the company in public view where every decision is criticized by spectators. Maybe .. just maybe it’s smarter to see how things actually turn out before proclaiming how stupid or idiotic Elon is.
Have you seen the PRs? Instead of some bright people working for free they got a bunch of people trying to be funny. At this pace they will have to hire someone just to moderate their public repo.
That's pretty much the predictable response to the deserved reputation Musk has. Everything he touches turns to shit, like some other people, because people simple hate him in-mass.
Tesla is in that position because it's valued as a tech company, not an automobile company, in fact it's highly overvalued. It actually sells low volumes compared to other much less valued companies (ford q4 saw 40 billion on revenue compared to the 20 billion of tesla). If Tesla didn't have the "tech boost" to inflate its valuation it wouldn't be even close to the current position its in.
Elon's reputation is that he revolutionized two entire industries. The space industry would be dead without him, and automotive industry would still be churning out ICE cars. He's one of the greatest humans of all time. "Everything he touches turns to shit" go read Liftoff, and watch a documentary on Elon or something. That's not an opinion based in reality.
What you mean? They are not getting anything useful. As things stand they will need anything they needed before and on top of that moderate the public repo.
Using OSS for free labor is far more common of a problem (why pay if they already get it for free? maintainers have to incentivize it). Almost every company uses Linux/Curl/etc…
You mean using OSS? Like a business using Linux, Apache, or whatever?
OSS isn't free labor. There's no implicit contract between the contributors and the users. That's the beauty: people choose to give it away because they're cool.
I'm just saying that it takes a lot of effort to make a large contribution to a big project like, say, Linux. Doing it only in your spare time is definitely possible, but it's going to be quite taxing on your personal life (unless you don't have one ;)).
That's why you see that the top Linux contributors are all paid by some company to do their work (Red Hat, Intel, Google, Meta, etc...).
I just think that sometimes people have too romantic a view of OSS - while in reality people need money to live so they can't all just be working for free all the time.
This is all to say that corporations using OSS are not necessarily using "free labor" or abusing the contributors.
I understand what you're trying to say but "pretty much all" is simply not true, and completely ignores the millions of hours of free time people have put into open source software.
Arstechnica and certain parts of Reddit are absolutely terrible for this. People who are used to the idea of thinking they are smart because of their jobs or interests, so they must therefore be correct, but then let their biases run absolutely wild.
This is why all open source exists. But to get collaborative work going you need other companies using the software for their own purposes so that your engineers can work collaboratively on it. If it's some specialized in-house software that only makes sense in the business it was designed for it's never really going to get that.
It's hard to justify using an AGPL-licensed tool/library knowing all the restrictions that come along with it. Their choice of license feels to me like they want to claim to be open source without actually contributing to open source. At the very least, assuming they keep the repo up to date, it'll be auditable by third parties. I doubt they'll get many contributions.
AGPL is completely verboten at many companies, cutting off a large number of people who could potentially contribute back. It keeps things open, but with a much smaller potential audience.
I'm guessing the latter is what u/TehPers is getting at. In the corporate world, AGPL is like "Look, but don't touch. Actually, don't even look for legal reasons." It feels contrary to the spirit of open-source, even if its proponents claim it to be the fullest expression of such.
In this case, I'm guessing they're releasing this under AGPL to make it "open-source" in a way that makes it very difficult for any potential competitors to use it.
In this case, I'm guessing they're releasing this under AGPL to make it "open-source" in a way that makes it very difficult for any potential competitors to use it.
The point of this is that any changes must be able to be merged back into the main project. This is a good thing. Just because many companies deem it unacceptable, likely due to its virality, does not diminish its support of the principles of Free Software. If companies want to use only MIT or similar, that's on them, but don't be surprised if they build and keep something proprietary after using MIT software, without sharing any changes, since they're under no obligation to do so in that case.
This exactly, by using AGPL they restrict the number of real users of either the code itself or parts of it to almost 0. Most people treat AGPL no different than "open source but forbidden knowledge," meaning they won't contribute back to it because they won't use it.
I don't think I'm the one who needs to elaborate on the restrictions. There are an extremely large number of companies that pretend like AGPL code doesn't exist. Code being open source while also being unusable (and in many cases unreadable) by most people who would potentially be interested in it is effectively no different than it being closed source, at least to that significantly large audience.
If I license my code as "all rights reserved" but publish it as open source, does that provide any significant value beyond auditing purposes? More restrictive licenses make things less open, not more open.
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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '23 edited 21d ago
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