The Cathedral and The Bazaar

Gil Yehuda Talk

This Wednesday, we had Gil Yehuda, Sr. Director of Technology Strategy at Verizon Media, come in as our guest speaker to talk about open source. Gil’s view is valuable since he has witnessed the development of the open source software movement. I found the evolution of open source license philosophy mentioned by Gil very interesting. In the beginning, the idea was that proprietary code is bad, and code must be set free, but today open source has certainly become much more commercial. Open source is no longer about volunteerism, but has become a business model. Gil explained in detail why corporations are so interested in open source. According to Gil, open source software can help reduce the tech debt as the open source community will be maintaining the project, which means that there will be no future need for the company to fix it. Another underlying reason which I have never thought of is that open source can neutralize the threat from your competitor. By releasing an open source software that is similar to some proprietary software made by your competitor, people will be happy to shift to your free product even if it’s not as good. This was quite a novel idea to me, but I didn’t find it very surprising. But I was wondering if that’s really a good thing, since it may result in people using softwares of lower quality just because they are free.

Gil also gave us a few suggestions. He mentioned a story of a previous intern publishing the company code to a public repository on GitHub, and told us we should never do something like this. I was kinda surprised by the story cause I thought that would be common sense. Another suggestion was that we should show some care about the visitors to our repo and do not use GitHub like Google Drive. I have to admit that I am the type of person who just dumps the code to GitHub without adding a readme file explaining what the code is about, since I thought no one would ever care about my projects. I think it is time for me to show some respect to my visitors (if there is any) and polish my GitHub a little bit.

Group Project

Charlie has done an amazing job setting up a development environment for our group project over the past week. I’ve been reading the official Rust tutorial but haven’t really written any Rust code yet. I also looked at Lemmy @ Weblate, the platform where Lemmy’s translation work is done. I believe it would be better for me to get more familiar with the project before trying to make any contributions to the translation. Our plan for the following week will be to pick an issue that we will be working on together. I’m really looking forward to it!

Other

It’s getting harder and harder to place an order with any grocery delivery service out there. Every time I try to check out my Amazon Fresh cart, there is never any delivery window available. And the same situation for FreshDirect, Instacart, Shipt…you name it. I ended up using this Amazon Fresh delivery slot finder, a tool that helped me finally succeed in placing an order with Amazon Fresh. The project is under the MIT license and contributions are welcomed, so I guess it is fair to call it open-source. Confession time: I kinda feel bad for using the tool, for the reason that I am gaining advantage over other people with technology, which is unfair. But without it I might never be able to get a delivery slot on my own. Such a dilemma :(

Also the current COVID-19 situation sure has made my chronic procrastination even worse. I’ve been planning to participate in the LeetCode 30-Day Challenge and spend more time on my research work, but so far i haven’t made much progress. I guess I’m now experiencing the “you don’t need more time, you need more discipline” situation. Is it okay to lose some self-discipline under a global pandemic? I don’t know. What I know is that I really should stop procrastinating and finish my next weekly blog post on time.