while I created it to serve Tarsnap’s needs, it would be a stretch to place such a general-purpose open-source tool under the narrow umbrella of “working on backups.” In short, academic institutions systemically promote exactly the sort of short-term optimization of which, ironically, the private sector is often accused. Is entrepreneurship a trap? No; right now, it's one of the only ways to avoid being trapped.
I’ve committed to donating at least 20% of Buttondown’s profits to the software that enables it. This is a relatively low number in absolute terms—I'm certainly not changing anyone’s life—but I think it’s still important.
The Hippocratic License: An Ethical Open Source License
The Hippocratic License (HL3) is an ethical source license that specifically prohibits the use of open source software to violate universal standards of human rights.
That two experienced developers could hold such conflicting views on commit access belies a quiet but growing tension between past and present norms in open source. The salient issue for maintainers today is less about growing contributor numbers and more about navigating the flow of developers who are clamoring for their time. In a world where single maintainers like Dominic Tarr maintain hundreds of tiny modules, we need to reframe the question from “Why would he do that?” to “How do we design for trustless interactions?”
Viewed through this lens, Sponsors can be understood as a first, important stepping stone towards company sponsorships, which seem inevitable for GitHub given the presence of Organization accounts. Their eyes light up when they talk about specific developers. If I ask why, I tend to hear a few common responses: 1) they’re learning a specific skill, and watching that person is helpful, or 2) they’re experienced developers who just love being able to see how “the best” do it. it struck me the other day that open source is a sort of “high-latency streaming”. the relationship between a prominent GitHub developer and their audience, and a prominent Twitch streamer and their audience, is similar: they gain followers because people enjoy watching them do something in public. an additional set of motivations, which is, “I want to watch and learn from you”. A graphic artist or a blogger who’s funded on Patreon doesn’t quite have that same relationship to their audience. In those cases, I think their output – the artifacts they create – takes center stage. there are probably others who just love watching the person who makes it. With companies, open source developers are selling a product. With individuals, they’re selling themselves.
With his students, he was able to write a program capable of typesetting the entire 700-page revised volume of his book by 1978. The program, called TeX, revolutionized how scientific papers are formatted and printed. It’s also one of the oldest OSS projects still in use. The disconnect between technical or scientific and nontechnical authors is also fundamental to understanding TeX’s mainstream obscurity: In nontechnical publishing, typesetting is usually not essential for conveying the author’s intent. Typesetting is considered ornamental; authors of popular material are content to send a Word document to their publisher and let professionals do the rest. Technical authors, on the other hand, need to convey their meaning precisely through glyphs, sizes, and placement. TeX lets them do that, as well as exchange their documents in a widely understood format.
What started as an avant-garde, standard-compliant browser is now a sprawling platform that spares no area of modern computing. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. This in turn results in more users flocking to the browser as their favorite Web sites and apps no longer work elsewhere, making developers less likely to spend time testing on other browsers. A vicious cycle that, if not broken, will result in most other browsers disappearing in the oblivion of irrelevance. And that’s exactly how you suffocate the open Web. It also happens that Google’s business is search engine advertising and AdSense. Everything else is a measly 10% of their annual revenue. That in and of itself is not an issue, but when the line between the browser, the search engine, and online services is blurred, we have a problem. And a big one at that.
Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed To Make Money
That’s what we think the world should be like, but we all know it isn’t. You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. I think this underlies many of this moment’s critiques of capitalism: there’s too many things that are important, even needed, or that fulfill us more than any profitable item, and yet are economically unsustainable.
As a technical challenge, Bootstrap just isn’t very interesting. It’s trying to provide a collection of components — components like modals, tooltips, and grids that have been around the Web forever…
