March, 23, 2024 archives

Writing software is fun. (For me. Your mileage may vary. But I am not alone in feeling this way.)

This means it is a particularly fraught field for exploitation.

A comparison I would make is to making music. Practically every musical biopic (or fictional version) features the part of the story where the artist (Ray, The One-ders, Elvis, The Dreams, Queen, The Pussycats, etc.) who is creating and/or performing music for their love of creating and performing comes under the influence of someone who sees the potential for money to be made. They have more experience in the business related to the craft, and they use that information asymmetry to exploit the artist.

The business of music has been around quite a bit longer than the business of writing software, and it is still messy and there are constant struggles and upheavals over the rights of artists, how to distribute the money when it gets made, and what sort of gatekeeping goes on within the business.

Seven years ago I pointed out that the games industry was having the same discussions about “crunch time” as 20 years before that. It’s always been a segment of the industry fed on the enthusiasm of people who think writing games is fun.

All of this to say, that as we enter another cycle of software licensing shenanigans in the open source world, I am interested, invested, and extremely tired.

Sometimes I just want to bang on the drums keyboard all day, share that with others, and forget that it is part of this complex ecosystem of people who are coming at it from different angles.

Back in the day, open source packages used SourceForge for distribution, issue tracking, and other bits of managing the community around projects but it eventually became a wasteland of neglected and abandoned projects and was referred to as SourceForget.

As I have been poking around at adding Markdown parsing and syntax highlighting to my PHP project, I can’t help but feel like GitHub is taking on some of those qualities.

Parsedown is (was?) a popular PHP package for parsing Markdown, but the main branch hasn’t seen any development in at least five years, and the “2.0” branch appears to have stalled out a couple of years ago. Good luck figuring out if any of the 1,100 forks is where active development has moved.

I think it would be good if more community norms and best practices were developed around the idea of the community of a project being able to take over maintenance when the developer steps away. What’s the solution to the thousands of open issues on GitHub that ask if a project is abandoned?

Here is an issue I found on one project where the developer is trying to hand over more access to community members, and I wonder if a guide to taking your project through that transition would have been valuable to move it along.

Another way this comes up that is very relevant is the assertion put forth in “Redis Renamed to Redict” which really asks the question what moral rights the community has to a project.

(SourceForge also came to be loaded down with advertising and I remember it being kind of a miserable website to use, and as GitHub loads up with “AI” features and feels increasingly clunky to use, it’s just another way I wonder if we are seeing history repeat itself.)