> And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.
I don’t understand how this relates to the scale of open source software or Apollo software engineers. I guess I know the Unix epoch is 01/01/1970, but how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? Those timestamp definitions came after the first several Apollo missions, didn’t they?
Yes, except that largely those projects are tangential to the "real" research. Larry Wall, creator of Perl and other useful things, is a linguist who was "studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it."[1]. Perl was just a side project.
I'm not certain, but perhaps the parent commenter wasn't being literal. Maybe just a way of saying that the Apollo engineers did their amazing work before what the rest of us consider to be the "beginning of time"?
I took the joke from this comic: https://www.commitstrip.com/2015/10/06/before-timestamp-0/
Or maybe it's a joke. We used to say that some guy has his ID number in roman numerals... or used spears for the matter.
There's so much good open source software that I'm not even annoyed at how wrong your statement really is.
Sadly, yes, you're not wrong. However, have you seen the quality of most proprietary software? No, you haven't, no one has, because it's proprietary.
> Most of it is about people pushing their own agendas and self promoting
Perhaps, but some of it is not, and that is the difference to proprietary software.
And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.