Re:Free and open source software projects are in transition
by JJMcJ on Monday July 31, 2023 @05:42PM
(#36949258)
Many mega corps have a culture of bullying the vendors. That can easily spill over to a single interaction.
Re:Free and open source software projects are in transition
by ThrowawayR2 on Monday July 31, 2023 @05:46PM
(#36949295)
Yeah but the point is that megacorps have dedicated teams of specialists to do that kind of bullying and they do it with organizational consensus and coordination between relevant departments. No random individual engineer is ever going to be authorized to do that.
Re:Free and open source software projects are in transition
by JJMcJ on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @05:32PM
(#36977878)
What I meant was that when an engineering group needs a fix from a FOSS developer, the natural thing to do is to bully and beg.
One reason beside bad culture is another aspect of bad culture. If they want a fix to a piece of FOSS, probably a library, they might have to beg their management for weeks or months, instead of just specifying that their project requires lib-from-overworked-dev-in-Nebraska-who-is-thinking-of-taking-up-alpaca-ranching-instead version 2.44 or later, which is what they can get if they beg, cry, and/or bully said alpaca contemplating developer.
One clueless employee, almost certainly without the knowledge of his cow-orkers or managers let alone any kind of authorization to represent their employer when communicating externally, writes a dumb email to a FOSS project and suddenly the tech commentariat is all abuzz about "$BIGCORP (the whole thing) is 'practically crying and begging' to $FOSS_PROJECT for a feature"? Surely there must be a name for this fallacy and, if not, there should be. The organizational hivemind fallacy perhaps?