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Re:Goodbye, Clean Code by einpoklum on Sunday January 12, 2020 @05:41PM (#22030126)
> Most co-workers I've spoken to don't contribute to any such open source projects.

You asked "what fraction can claim they have"; and you're saying "most" of your co-workers haven't. Fair enough, it's the same for me actually. But "Most" is just over 50%. A sizable fraction have.

> Second, there's a lot of unused garbage out there.

Yes, that's true (and also a lot of unused gems). But even if we only take code that's seen use by others, my previous argument stands. Of course, "used" can mean 10 people or a Million people.

> Take me... GitHub raking... I'm in the top percentile

Wow, I didn't even know about these rankings! Thanks!

Anyway, I looked at my rankings, but more than that - I looked at the overall number of contributors. There are supposedly [1] about 24 Million software developers in the world today. Now, There are 300K C++, 300K C, 760K Java, 600K Python and 1M Javascript contributors on GitHub, Then it's pretty safe to assume that between 5% and 10% of developers contribute merely on GitHub. Actually, yeah, over 2 M active users in 2017 [2]. And again, there are other venues for FOSS contribution, like I mentioned. So dropping the unused stuff, we're still close to 10% of developers.

> I quickly concluded that universal free software is mostly incompatible with capitalism.

If you put it that way, I agree that that's the case. But - I didn't mean to say programmers should be inspired just by the fact that software can be free; I also mean that they should strive to write their software as though it were about to be released as FOSS.

[1] - https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software...

[2] - https://www.infoworld.com/article/3253948/who-really-contrib...

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