Can "sprints" be reconciled with volunteering? The joy of open source is that you can work on what you want, when you want. The moment that somebody tells you what to do and when to do it, it begins to look at bit like a job.
- How can we solve X problem? Where X is a global problem that potentially has thousands of stakeholders and use cases, requiring millions of dollars in time and effort.
- Can you fill out this survey?
- What flavour of ice cream do you like?
- Start your own hackathon/organize your own event!
- When is someone considered a senior Ruby developer?
- What have you done with your skills?
- Write us instructions on how to use X tool. Where X is an industry standard tool that has thousands of hits on google about how to use it.
When did the open source community get this watered down?
Part of Mozilla’s aim with the Sprint is to help people/projects outside of engineering apply “open” principles -- to educational resources, to civic projects, etc. That’s why you see some light-weight, non-technical issues. But there are plenty of more typical coding projects to work on! You can try searching by project or language to find those.
You've already been compensated with massive amounts of free, open source technology that you use every day, probably every time you interact with your computer. Now you have an opportunity to do a little work for it.
EDIT: harlanji's response, below, is the much better one IMHO. I let the parent frame it as a question of compensation. As harlanji points out, that was the wrong question.
Nobody said anything about "owing." Simply that we've been "compensated" via tremendous value hence as programmers there's no need to feel exploited for providing "free" labor.
Most of them didn't start as such, and only got funding after years, sometime decades, of free work.
And even then, half of the work is still done for free.
And that's only for the most famous one. E.G: the huge majority of free libs in JS or Python are purely pro bono.
And even after the money arrived, some very popular software have very little money compared to the produced work: eg: the PSF.
All in all, my entire computer contains millions of euros of software I didn't pay.
It's sad enough you don't want to participate, but it's a choice we must respect. But don't be discouraging other people actually giving something, it's insulting.
If you don't like it, then ignore it. Your cynism brings literally nothing to the table.
As a student, and someone who wants to become a strong engineer over the next ten years... this kind of opportunity is fantastic. You can see it as "uncompensated labor", I see it as a way to learn, get my code "out there", and get better at my trade.
Im contribootin, but when you think that forces me to abandon all my opinions and cheerfull throw flower petals on every propaganda waggon rollin through town- nope.
Open Source never really cared so much about its contribooters as they cared about open source.
If stallmann would start worrying about its contribooters beeing able to live decent lifes with familys, without having a boss breathing down there neck- maybee then.
But it guess that is just not that sort of freedom thats high on the priortiy list.
Open Source as a lifestyle is currently limited to students and beginners.
Most people in free software don't regard compensation as their primary motivator to work. Personally, I'd hate to spend so many hours of a finite lifetime on things I don't care about beyond a paycheck. As soon as you have enough money for your purposes, it's incredibly freeing to do things that satisfy your actual motivations.
When I first used firefox I was just some kid in high school. Me and many of my peers used firefox for years free of charge. We shared it with out parents and grandparents.
I would consider this as contribution to this wider community beyond just Mozilla's bottom line.
Unless I managed to completely miss something, I see no mention of the copyright issues that likely ensare a good percentage of those who would otherwise be their prime audience.
This sounds interesting to me, but having already waded through the issues once on my own, without some serious help resolving the legal aspect of this, the cost of entry is too high for impulse-based participation.
I'm so confused by what you're saying, do you not understand how software licensing works in regards to copyright? I thought by now its been pretty well understood by the community. The exception being obscurely licensed software.
The problem with copyright is that many of us are subject to broad agreements assigning the ownership of all our programming output to our employers. If we were to contribute to these projects without a clear legal framework in place authorizing us to do so, we open up all parties involved to significant legal risk.
If Mozilla had some kind of pre-packaged kit that we could take to our employers for approval, and that once filled out, had a clear scope of authorization, it would go a long way to giving me the courage to try walking the path to contributing again.
I'm not sure there, I see what you mean now. Thanks for the clarification. I'm not familiar with that case, maybe someone else here on HN would know. Usually most people just don't have to worry about that when contributing to open source. Also depending on the software license, it might trump the supposed claimed copyright of your employer, e.g. GPL code once GPL'd there's no going around it. Or other licenses which revoke your use of their code the second you try to sue. Software licenses are kind of smart in their own regard.
Sidenote: I personally would refuse to work for anybody who tries to own code I write outside of work with my own hardware / tools. Thankfully where I work we're very open source friendly, not only do we use open source tooling / OS' but in some cases we contribute back directly where appropriate.
Every place that I’ve worked at with a clause like that in the contract doesn’t get to employ me until it’s removed. Usually they can’t understand my objections, and has just been put in there by their lawyers, but it’s always come out eventually.
Anyone in SF or East Bay organizing together for this? I see a pin on the map in SF but can't tell how legit that gathering is. Is there anything happening at the Mozilla office?
