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?
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?