I'm of the opinion that large companies should be paying for the software they use regardless of whether it's open source or not, because software isn't free to develop. So assuming you're paying for the software you use, you still have the problem that you are subject to your internal procurement processes. If your internal procurement processes make it really painful to add a new seat, then maybe the processes need to be reformed. Open source only "fixes" the problem insofar as there's no enforcement mechanism, so it makes it really easy for companies to stiff the open source contributors.
1. As parallel commenters have pointed out, no. Plenty of open source developers exist who aren't interested in getting paid for their open source projects. You can tell this because some open source projects sell support or have donation links or outright sell their open source software and some do not. This line of thinking seems to come out of some utopian theoretical world where open source developers shouldn't sell their software because that makes them sell-outs but users are expected to pay them anyways.
2. I do love the idea of large companies paying for open source software they use because it tends to set up all kinds of good incentives for the long term health of software projects. That said, paying open source projects tends to be comically difficult. Large companies are optimized for negotiating enterprise software agreements with a counterparty that is primed to engage in that process. They often don't have a smooth way to like, just feed money into a Donate form, or make a really big Github or Patreon Sponsorship, etc. So even people in large companies that really want to give money to open source devs struggle to do so.
I think I fully agree, although to expound on (1) I don't think that is the kind of software that any company should want to depend on for anything remotely important. I'm sure there are counter examples where you get a high quality project that doesn't require or accept donations, but I think these will be exceedingly few and far between. It seems like it's in the company's best interest to make sure the development for a dependency isn't going to go away for lack of funding?
I'm not sure you realize that "open source" means anyone anywhere is free to use, modify, and redistribute the software in any way they see fit? Maybe you're thinking of freeware or shareware which often _do_ come with exceptions for commercial use?
But anyway, as an open source contributor, I have never felt I was being "stiffed" just because a company uses some software that I helped write or improve. I contribute back to projects because I find them useful and want to fix the problems that I run into so I don't have to maintain my own local patches, help others avoid the same problems, and because making the software better is how I give back to the open source community.
> so it makes it really easy for companies to stiff the open source contributors
I don't think there's any stiffing going on, since the open source contributors knowingly contributed with a license that specifically says that payment isn't required. It is not reasonable for them to take the benefits of doing that but then expect payment anyway.
I don't think this is entirely true. A system of government could dramatically limit the power of the executive or make it easier to remove a president or make it harder for the legislature to make moves (essentially just limit the damage until the cult effect wears off).
While it has its own flaws, I do think that in practice a lot of these things are at least blunted by the Westminster system. (I'm in Canada, so mostly talking about that one specifically... I'm aware there are differences.) I think it kind of addressing both points in a way--limiting the damage of the president and congress.
Everyone elects a member of parliament to the House of Commons. That's it. Our ballots have a single choice on them.
The Prime Minister is just whichever guy a majority in the House of Commons can agree should handle the day-to-day stuff. They have little in the way of codified power, but in practice operate fairly similarly to the US President--selecting ministers to lead key agencies, making orders in council ("executive orders") where Parliament has delegated them that power, etc.
However they remain subordinate to and serve at the pleasure of the House of Commons. At any time the house can make a motion of no confidence and remove the Prime Minister with a simple majority. Certain things such as the budget are an automatic confidence vote--failing to pass a budget means you're dismissed. (Sometimes they're replaced, often this triggers an election to, excuse the pun, give voters an opportunity to get their house in order.)
They're not dramatically limited relative to the US President, but their position is a lot more tenuous and requires ongoing support from government for them to remain in power. Instead of shutting down the government if the prime minister can't put a budget together, we just fire the prime minister. Instead of doing a split-brained thing where two parts of the government get deadlocked, we just fire the prime minister.
What happens if the House of Commons goes crazy? Canada has a Senate. It's 105 members that are selected by appointment. They serve until age 75. They're generally unaffiliated with any specific party. There are actually some women there (~55% versus ~30% in the house). The members are selected by whoever is in power at the time of a vacancy, however it's not generally treated as partisan (and steps are being taken to make it explicitly non-partisan). Over time, though, it would tend to follow larger election/political trends. Since it's a "lifetime" appointment, the Senate can act against populism and as a damper to pull the government towards status quo.
The Senate is described as the chamber of "sober second thought" because anything the House of Commons passes has to be passed by the Senate to become law. It's rare for something to pass the house and not the senate (some notable examples being things like an attempt to criminalize abortion), however I'll say with no basis that that doesn't mean they don't have influence--the house is unlikely to try and send anything up to the senate that they have an indication would be rejected.
And if the Senate goes crazy? We left an escape hatch--constitutional amendments are not voted on by the Senate. The House of Commons can pass a constitutional amendment which has to be approved by the provincial assemblies in at least 7 (of 10) provinces collectively representing at least half of the population.
So to boil that rambling mess down--
The Legislature is essentially trusted with running everything. They delegate power to the Executive which is given wide powers, but the process of taking away that power is made very easy. The check on the Legislature is a group designed to be a lagging indicator and not beholden to anyone that acts as a damper. If anything isn't working, we default to throwing it all out and trying again. We left some escape hatches that involve going back to the people.
We haven't had to deal with the same sort of direct attacks that the US has, but... well, fingers crossed.
That certainly seems like an interesting system, and at the moment I'm open to ideas, although it's essentially impossible that my country will adopt a new system.
The US doesn't keep biometric data on every citizen or lawful resident, and the government can trivially lie or make a mistake about whether they did the database/ID check. This isn't a hypothetical, many legal residents and some citizens have been swept up, and without due process they have no ability to say, "I'm a legal resident" or "I'm a US citizen". They can just be shipped off to an El Salvadoran prison camp where the president can claim, "oops, I can't get them back because they're not in our jurisdiction any more".
> And no country gives whatever it is you're calling due process to illegal immigrants.
Virtually every European country gives due process, even in illegal immigration cases. And probably more importantly, the US Constitution requires due process even for cases of illegal immigration.
> Obama deported hundreds of thousands without any legal hearings
But they had due process. He didn't round people up in the streets without the ability to contest government claims of illegal immigration.
Yeah, they're actually simple enough that they're kind of a perfect way to learn a new language... You get to try something that is pretty familiar (transforming some source files into some destination files), small enough that you can actually build the thing in a weekend, and big enough that it isn't just a toy program--it will give you a tour through the standard library, the build tooling, the package management / ecosystem, etc.
You can also use it to play around with different programming paradigms--I recently rewrote mine from Rust to Go and played around with a maximally parallel architecture (what I thought would be a fun throw-away experiment quickly became my production SSG): https://blog.weberc2.com/posts/efficient-ssg-with-csp.html
> Isn't the hype more about the relative difference (I don't think most people are claiming NL is a utopia)?
We're talking specifically about self-designated "anti-car" people. I doubt there are any surveys, so we're all just conjecturing, but the rhetoric I see definitely holds NL and Europe generally up as a car-less utopia. For example, the first post on r/anticar is titled "cities built for people rather than cars are so beautiful" and it shows an idyllic picture of a German street. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anticar/comments/mp6t4p/cities_buil...
> The amount of miles driven per capita in the US is twice as much as that of the NL. The percent of trips on bike is 25% in the NL vs 2% in the US. About half of all trips made in the NL are on bike, transit or walking. The other half of trips are made with cars.
I don't see how this is relevant? I don't think anyone in this thread disputes that cycling is more prevalent in NL versus US, and none of this refutes the toplevel claim that NL is a car country nor supports the anti-car rhetoric which suggests that NL is a car-free utopia. Like many "non-anti-car" Americans, I would like to see American transit become more multi-modal, but that's not what we're debating at present.
> However, I am sure that the NL could still make many changes to reduce car ownership if it really wanted to.
Sure (the obvious/extreme example is banning cars by legislation), but this seems circular, because we're implicitly interested in why doesn't the NL public want fewer cars (on the contrary, car ownership was increasing as of 2016)? Like in the US we can plausibly argue that Americans haven't experienced the Dutch cycling/pubtransit system and thus doesn't know what they're missing out on, but that's a much harder argument to make about the Dutch. :)
I'm also curious what problems this presents and what platform the OP thinks we ought to use and why.
EDIT: Interestingly, I just Googled `"github is not a blog"` and the only hit was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22910089 also from the OP 3 months ago where he also didn't support his position.
Generics aren't the gap (multiple return values are already generic), but rather sum types. Sum types are what allow you to express that this is either None/Sum(T) (Option) or Ok(T)/Err(E) (Result) or Nil/Cons (List) or etc.
Sum types are what give you compile-time safety over those options. Run-time safety and developer-intent-signaling is entirely feasible with just generics.
Right, but as previously mentioned, Go's multiple return values are already "generic" and already signal developer intent. If you have a library method that returns (int, err) every single Go developer will check the err first before using the int. User-defined generics don't improve this use case.
Result types can, at runtime, by making the err case panic if the value is accessed, instead of just returning a zero value. They let you move past intent and into enforcement. Multiple returns are nothing but intent, and cannot be made stronger.
You can do that without generics, of course. But the developer overhead is large enough that it effectively does not happen, as you have to redo that by hand for every type. That's what generics bring - ergonomics good enough to stop using less safe workarounds (e.g. `interface{}`, multiple returns).
