Re:The Internet Relies on People Working for Free
by commandlinefan on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @04:38PM
(#20999824)
> aren't worth enough individually to charge for.
The downside I see is that leads to a lot of “just good enough” solutions out there. There are things like the Spring “framework” that kind of sort of almost do something useful but add conceptual overhead and leaning time and subtract troubleshoot-ability in exchange for not much, but enough that the people in charge push you to use it since it’s free anyway. On the one hand, if not for open source, Unix, vi, grep, awk, sed, lex, yacc and bash would all be long dead and buried now - there was a time before I came across Linux that I was starting to try to implement all of these myself in DOS because they were so useful and there was no available equivalent. On the other hand, if not for open source, I wonder if we ever would have gotten PHP or Java or a lot of the monstrosities that hang off of them like Zend and Hibernate.
The downside I see is that leads to a lot of “just good enough” solutions out there. There are things like the Spring “framework” that kind of sort of almost do something useful but add conceptual overhead and leaning time and subtract troubleshoot-ability in exchange for not much, but enough that the people in charge push you to use it since it’s free anyway. On the one hand, if not for open source, Unix, vi, grep, awk, sed, lex, yacc and bash would all be long dead and buried now - there was a time before I came across Linux that I was starting to try to implement all of these myself in DOS because they were so useful and there was no available equivalent. On the other hand, if not for open source, I wonder if we ever would have gotten PHP or Java or a lot of the monstrosities that hang off of them like Zend and Hibernate.