I don't expect anything from them, they don't ask anything from me and just knowing that it is useful for such a big project is all endorsement I need.
In a funny twist of fate, Microsoft now uses SheetJS open source to power some Excel exports in Office 365! https://tasks.office.com/License.html is the license disclosure, and you can actually see it in action in the exported files.
We were blown away when we found out. It's the ultimate endorsement! Oftentimes we just wonder what would have happened if Microsoft just let the original project adopt a standard open source license.
It’s weird to me that developers write code that other companies use to make profits, while they just get paid with a “feeling” of satisfaction.
There are a ton of project owners who would love nothing more than to be used by a big, popular platform. That's a pretty big win with hardly any risk. It means their thing beat out something that could have been made in-house by the world's best devs. Can you imagine discovering that your little thousand-star github library is present in, I don't know, Gmail? Presumably, at the very least, it means an auto-hire if you apply to any of the biggies for a very high total comp.
(And if you refuse on principle to cash in on that endorsement? I say good for you and I would like to hire you to be on my "wizard council". These are people I subscribe to to be diligent, principled, skeptical, and open about any software update I consume. This would include, BTW, a holistic definition of "software" to include firmware, FPGAs and so on. Please talk to me like an adult about InfoSec! Thank youuuu!)
Yes of course they are under no obligation outside the license, but I'd like to see them send the author a toy anyway.
A company like Nintendo sends out tons of swag to people who have collaborated with the company in some way, just add the author to the list.
https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?s=20
I used to be a big believer in open source software, but as for profit enterprises continue to pillage the community without giving anything back more and more I feel that it’s not worth the time or effort involved, unless the work is protected by a proper GPLv3 license.
That is the ethos, it's what open source and CC is about. I may not be in a position to profit from some of my work, or I might be willing to donate it for free. If someone else can do something valuable enough to other people with it that they get paid to do it, good for them. The world is a better place. At the end of the day companies and corporations are just made up of people making a living.
My open source is my way of volunteering to make the world a better place. Whether some for profit company uses it is irrelevant to me. Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take and even though I have about 100-160 original repos on github my free output pales in comparison to the amount of stuff I take for free. Nintendo might give less today but lead by example and that might change. Though if it never changes it still doesn't bother me in the least.
Oh no.
> Plenty of companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, ...) give back way more than they take
OH NO.
In what planet is donating to a charity the same as "donating" code to a for-profit enterprise, but even more insane (in my opinion ofc) in what planet do google and facebook "give more than they take"??
Do you really think the ability to use their search engine is worth more than that to you?
With less than 0.1% of their annual ad revenue I could retire tomorrow, debt-free, and set up a trust fund for my daughter so she'd never have to work a day in her life.
People say that ads work so of course you are affected by them, but I am pretty sure lots of people aren't affected that much by ads. Luckily for ad companies there are a lot of ad-whales out there, people who are very easy to influence and get money from. These are the same kind of people spending lots of money in free to play games, at casinos or who falls for MLM schemes.
Google's entire ad revenue, of course, comes from "a few ads".
Consumer surplus?
I spent this Saturday morning working in my front yard. It looks nice for my benefit, but it also benefits my neighbors. It would be really strange for me to approach my neighbors and ask for financial remuneration because they've been enriched by my yardwork. Yardwork is enjoyable and I like making the world better in this fashion.
I wouldn't join a yardwork company and work for free.
Software is similar. We can use OSS to share the benefit when we do something we want or need to do anyway.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/building-computer-labs-in-w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software#...
"Netscape's act prompted Raymond and others to look into how to bring the FSF's Free software ideas and perceived benefits to the commercial software industry. They concluded that FSF's social activism was not appealing to companies like Netscape, and looked for a way to rebrand the Free software movement to emphasize the business potential of sharing and collaborating on software source code. The new name they chose was "Open-source", and quickly Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O'Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others signed on to the rebranding. The Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998 to encourage the use of the new term and evangelize open-source principles."
It states this as a source: https://opensource.org/history
Yeah that's weird. I think it's partly people realizing the difference between MIT/BSD and GPL (or even AGPL) licenses. Or the diff between some ideal "how open source works" and what the licenses actually say.
This is a good thing. People may realise that the choice of license actually matters.
Recently I was chatting with a young woman who competes in motorcycle racing at an international level. She's almost old enough to get a driver's license to drive on public roads. Do you think she gets to skip the driving test because she can ride better than all but a few people in the country? No, she'll do figure eights in a parking lot like everyone else.
Big company bureaucracy functions similarly to government bureaucracy. The rules are built for the common case and exceptions for individuals, however reasonable, are hard to make.
When I interviewed, one or two of the questions were stereotypical "reverse the string in Pig Latin while solving tic-tac-toe" or whatever. Most of the questions were directly relevant to real-time safety-critical embedded systems stuff though.
At some point while I was there, Google did some viral marketing leetcode foobar challenge recruiting thing. If you searched for certain keywords, your web browser would do a fancy 3D zoom effect and then give you coding challenges. I did some of them for a couple hours one time. Some of them were tricky word problems, but algorithmically none of them were particularly difficult. The only one I remember had maybe 5 paragraphs of text, and my solution was literally one line of python.
But: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
I think they'll never have to fizzbuzz again, but probably still lots of whiteboarding in their future.
Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you'd like it to run.
That's a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.