There are plenty of good things that come out of it, however, I'll be focusing on the dark side of it on this thread. 🌑
Revealing the dark side of open source projects
🧵👇
There are plenty of good things that come out of it, however, I'll be focusing on the dark side of it on this thread. 🌑
It's not unusual to see companies leading the top starred/ forked and used libraries out there.
Angular (Google)
Font-Awesome (Twitter)
React (Facebook)
Bootstrap (Twitter)
Tensorflow (Google)
Flutter (Google)
VsCode...
Here's the thing: 👇
Then, with a bit of luck we can gain some track and carry some people with us on the way.
Gain some stars, becoming a trending dev a couple of days and have a usable and decent project
It is a constant flow of new bugs, issues, questions, enhancements… A never ending task demanding constant monitoring.
That's what I like to call: "The maintenance dilemma".
At some point in time, you’ll have to take a decision:
1 -You stop maintaining it.
2- Or you keep doing it.
You’ll have to choose between a barbecue with friends during the weekend or fixing bugs and closing issues by yourself at home.
Between chilling out with a movie or adding new "urgent" feature.
You know you won’t have time for it unless you decide sleeping is for losers, and at that point, your life is at risk.
Are you sure about that?
I bet you've found tens of unmaintained or dead projects with no support and issues getting accumulated
The "community" tend to just use your "free" project and few are the ones willing help maintaining and improving a project in the long term.
Now, on top of all you do, you'll have to review their pull request, understand it and potentially get into a conversation to fix that issue/feature you've never thought of.
https://t.co/zWfvFiA3Jo
Sure! But specially if developers working on them don't burn out.
Great open source projects tend to be the ones maintained by developers who get paid to work on those.
Those who can dedicate their full-time and effort on improving them.
"But Alvaro, how? Didn't you burned out?" 👇
6 months after that I quit my job to dedicate full-time to it.
I happily answer emails, stackoverflow questions, Github issues, Webflow forums and DMs on Twitter.
I don't see it as a sacrifice anymore but as great opportunity to work on what I like.
It's good for me AND it's good for developers who want to use it.
I've been lucky finding this equilibrium, but not everybody can.
When this doesn't happen, the dark side might end up turning down some projects on the way.
Here's great talk from @fat from Bootstrap and Bower explaining why he feels guilty creating open source projects and the cost of it:
https://t.co/v5a7ZXUtHb
And remember:
“If Once You Start Down The Dark Path, Forever Will It Dominate Your Destiny.”
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"I lied about my basic beliefs in order to keep a prestigious job. Now that it will be zero-cost to me, I have a few things to say."
We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.
Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)
It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.
Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".
As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said this. But I will now. Requiring such statements in applications for appointments and promotions is an affront to academic freedom, and diminishes the true value of diversity, equity of inclusion by trivializing it. https://t.co/NfcI5VLODi
— Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) November 10, 2018
We know that elite institutions like the one Flier was in (partial) charge of rely on irrelevant status markers like private school education, whiteness, legacy, and ability to charm an old white guy at an interview.
Harvard's discriminatory policies are becoming increasingly well known, across the political spectrum (see, e.g., the recent lawsuit on discrimination against East Asian applications.)
It's refreshing to hear a senior administrator admits to personally opposing policies that attempt to remedy these basic flaws. These are flaws that harm his institution's ability to do cutting-edge research and to serve the public.
Harvard is being eclipsed by institutions that have different ideas about how to run a 21st Century institution. Stanford, for one; the UC system; the "public Ivys".
Keep dwelling on this:
Further Examination of the Motif near PRRA Reveals Close Structural Similarity to the SEB Superantigen as well as Sequence Similarities to Neurotoxins and a Viral SAg.
The insertion PRRA together with 7 sequentially preceding residues & succeeding R685 (conserved in β-CoVs) form a motif, Y674QTQTNSPRRAR685, homologous to those of neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) and Bungarus genera, as well as neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
(20) (Fig. 2D). We further noticed that the same segment bears close similarity to the HIV-1 glycoprotein gp120 SAg motif F164 to V174.
https://t.co/EwwJOSa8RK
In (B), the segment S680PPRAR685 including the PRRA insert and highly conserved cleavage site *R685* is shown in van der Waals representation (black labels) and nearby CDR residues of the TCRVβ domain are labeled in blue/white
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Sequence Identity %
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Y674 - QTQTNSPRRA - R685
Similar to neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) & Bungarus genera & neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
T678 - NSPRRA- R685
Superantigenic core, consistently aligned against bacterial or viral SAgs
Further Examination of the Motif near PRRA Reveals Close Structural Similarity to the SEB Superantigen as well as Sequence Similarities to Neurotoxins and a Viral SAg.
The insertion PRRA together with 7 sequentially preceding residues & succeeding R685 (conserved in β-CoVs) form a motif, Y674QTQTNSPRRAR685, homologous to those of neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) and Bungarus genera, as well as neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
(20) (Fig. 2D). We further noticed that the same segment bears close similarity to the HIV-1 glycoprotein gp120 SAg motif F164 to V174.
https://t.co/EwwJOSa8RK
In (B), the segment S680PPRAR685 including the PRRA insert and highly conserved cleavage site *R685* is shown in van der Waals representation (black labels) and nearby CDR residues of the TCRVβ domain are labeled in blue/white
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Sequence Identity %
https://t.co/BsY8BAIzDa
Y674 - QTQTNSPRRA - R685
Similar to neurotoxins from Ophiophagus (cobra) & Bungarus genera & neurotoxin-like regions from three RABV strains
T678 - NSPRRA- R685
Superantigenic core, consistently aligned against bacterial or viral SAgs