> Turns out they're as human as software engineers.
Lawyers start out as humans but something about going into law school and then private practice, and feeding them after midnight turns them into... something else entirely.
Plumbers are realistic and don’t live on ideals. They set their rates and set their hours. Lawyers; well if if only people behaved we could have nice things in life, but here we are with people trying to screw each other and misbehave…
Digital assets or work are a bit different in that making a second copy is trivial. It’d be different if every computer in the world were bespoke and needed its own bespoke software. So that makes OSS a viable option for those who can but we also can’t expect everyone to default OSS. We can default to asking that the service and prices be reasonable though.
Now I'm imagining a plumber who fixes a drain, then stands up a "fix drain as a service" website where people can put their credit cards in and their drain gets fixed remotely at effectively zero marginal cost to the plumber.
(And then, of course, the plumber gets VC money to expand the business and the drain fix becomes a drain fix subscription, and if you cancel or your credit card expires all your drains instantly block back up again.)
Coz just about everyone wants to be that one guy in Nebraska thanklessly maintaining this bit of digital infrastructure, apparently?
Yeah me neither.
I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.
We don’t need to speculate do we, there are tons of real non company run OSS projects
Now I personally wish lawyers and plumbers also got into the free work thing but here we are
Lawyers have a term for it, pro bono, and they do it for good causes. Turns out they're as human as software engineers.
> Turns out they're as human as software engineers.
Lawyers start out as humans but something about going into law school and then private practice, and feeding them after midnight turns them into... something else entirely.
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Plumbers are realistic and don’t live on ideals. They set their rates and set their hours. Lawyers; well if if only people behaved we could have nice things in life, but here we are with people trying to screw each other and misbehave…
Digital assets or work are a bit different in that making a second copy is trivial. It’d be different if every computer in the world were bespoke and needed its own bespoke software. So that makes OSS a viable option for those who can but we also can’t expect everyone to default OSS. We can default to asking that the service and prices be reasonable though.
Now I'm imagining a plumber who fixes a drain, then stands up a "fix drain as a service" website where people can put their credit cards in and their drain gets fixed remotely at effectively zero marginal cost to the plumber.
(And then, of course, the plumber gets VC money to expand the business and the drain fix becomes a drain fix subscription, and if you cancel or your credit card expires all your drains instantly block back up again.)
AI-slop PRs automerged in response to AI slop bug reports.
Coz just about everyone wants to be that one guy in Nebraska thanklessly maintaining this bit of digital infrastructure, apparently?
Yeah me neither.
I think the only thing that would convince people to move away from curl at this point would be if curl had a heartbleed level vulnerability and failed to fix it quickly.
Curl is so important that if it had a heartbleed and didn’t patch, someone would and people’d just apply it until it was fixed in tree.
Individuals don't but lots of companies do, so that they can threaten to rugpull it later if you don't pay them millions.