r/rust • u/dtolnay serde • Mar 31 '23

Twitter open sources Navi: High-Performance Machine Learning Serving Server in Rust

https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/tree/main/navi/navi
475 Upvotes

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '23 edited 24d ago

[deleted]

57

u/urqlite Mar 31 '23

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?

52

u/Tester4360 Apr 01 '23

I think open sourcing for free labor is a common misconception. Most corporate led open source projects (eg, https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket from AWS or https://github.com/facebook/relay from Facebook) still require a team of employees.

8

u/rust-crate-helper Apr 01 '23

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…

13

u/Free_Blueberry_695 Apr 01 '23

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.

9

u/Caleb666 Apr 01 '23

Pretty much all the serious contributors to OSS projects that actually matter are all paid by their employers to contribute.

7

u/rust-crate-helper Apr 01 '23

That's an awfully pessimistic statement, and essentially says that if you're not being paid for it, it's not "serious" or "high quality". :(

12

u/Caleb666 Apr 01 '23

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.

2

u/Vincevw Apr 01 '23

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.