I understand this is a jaded take, but it's not wrong.
Open source entered a bubble because companies started requiring active open source contributions to staff+ engineering requirements. The model was never sustainable. A select few contribute to open source out of sheer passion, but the majority are/were using it as a career advancement mechanism or network effect.
The result is that major companies were able to advance their technology and profits rapidly off of people's free work. The result is better products, services, and tooling for everyone, but let's not kid ourselves about who benefits most from open source: large companies.
Great reply from someone else around generational shifts. That essentially answered this for me.
To give a troll response:
In the current context, I guess it means someone who doesn't live on the internet complaining about issues they do nothing about as if it does something tangible to change the real world.
Agreed. If someone has a deep enough understanding of engineering fundamentals, moving bits is moving bits. It doesn't matter what use case is sitting on top of it.
Also - Let's not act like Twitter is absurdly complex. Handling that amount of traffic was hard in 2008, yes. It's not hard in 2022. The app itself is what? CRUD with stream processing? Some complexity with scaling that, but it's not self-driving... that's for damn sure. Even if they haven't reached L5 yet, L4 AV is an infinitely harder problem than storing arbitrary text/images and serving ads.
We always seem to forget that the majority of US citizens identify as conservative or moderate. Personally, I'm middle-left and found the endless hordes of far-left mobsters to be as equally unappealing.
It appears the country is finally trending back to moderate after the dumpster fire that was the last 7 years. Will companies continue to be hyper focused on political stances now that they're missing earnings? I think companies will leave the virtue signaling to the internet and get back thinking about how to maximize revenue. If people use the platform, and companies get click-through, I think they will advertise on it.
Open source entered a bubble because companies started requiring active open source contributions to staff+ engineering requirements. The model was never sustainable. A select few contribute to open source out of sheer passion, but the majority are/were using it as a career advancement mechanism or network effect.
The result is that major companies were able to advance their technology and profits rapidly off of people's free work. The result is better products, services, and tooling for everyone, but let's not kid ourselves about who benefits most from open source: large companies.