News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Hacker News Guidelines by bowsamic on Friday August 25, 2023 @03:57PM (#37266315)
I think that even if you offer a service for free you are obliged to offer a level of quality and support, much like how you can’t just sell poisonous ice cream. I don’t believe in “share and enjoy” and I don’t think that “warranty free” is morally good
Re:Hacker News Guidelines by shadowgovt on Friday August 25, 2023 @04:20PM (#37266544)
> you can't sell poisonous ice cream

There's licensing around selling food. I wouldn't be against "license to practice software development," but I'd note that (a) that's a very different world than the one we live in and (b) I don't know that most of the open source software we enjoy, hack on, and bemoan would exist in a universe where licensing standards made every software engineer who had authored it beholden to a minimum standard of quality before distributing it.

Would apache have survived in a world where software engineers, or their software, had to be quality-certified? Would MySQL? Would Linux?

Re:Hacker News Guidelines by bowsamic on Friday August 25, 2023 @04:49PM (#37266861)
Again, law is not morality.

> Would apache have survived in a world where software engineers, or their software, had to be quality-certified? Would MySQL? Would Linux?

Yes