oss-wall-of-shame
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Alir3z4
Huh?
I don't understand this repo.
All of the companies you've 'named and shamed' actively contribute to OSS. It's especially surprising to see Instagram on the list, given that they were the reason Facebook decoupled and released React https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/#instagram
instagram: https://github.com/instagram dropbox: https://github.com/dropbox uber: https://github.com/uber
Dropbox contributed to Python by hiring the author of Python and letting him spend 50% of his time on Python: https://gvanrossum.github.io/
- https://github.com/uber
- https://github.com/instagram
- https://github.com/dropbox
Thanks for the mentions and sources and opening this issue. It's my bad to not explaining in the repository readme well enough to minimize the confusion.
Most of these companies and probably all of them contribute to Open Source for sure, but they don't contribute back to the projects they use.
I love dropbox for:
Dropbox contributed to Python by hiring the author of Python and letting him spend 50% of his time on Python
DropBox uses @rtfd which is open source and free, they host their libraries documentation there and never bother to contribute by any means. Many other open source & free services and projects are just like that. Pretty sure its founder @ericholscher never mentioned any of those companies contributing to the project in any way, however you can see Rackspace supporting the project by providing hosting.
Instagram does Open Source but what it does for Django ? Thanks for https://github.com/Alir3z4/oss-wall-of-shame/pull/3 mentioning, but still nothing since the day zero of Instagram become online or after getting acquired or being the thing in many people daily life.
ps: this list is not complete enough, tons of companies should be in there but I need time and suggestion. Once a while I come up for new companies to put them there, but I just forgot to do. ps 2nd: I'll update the README with more details regarding this issue.
As a note, Dropbox has actually contributed to Read the Docs now. This was after some pressure on Twitter -- so I'm not sure if it's the right take away to think that shaming works, but I think it's hopefully more of a general push inside corporations to give back to OSS when their employees push for it. I think we need to be doing more to get employees to give back, and educating them on the benefits and how it helps the ecosystem progress.
Also, Instagram is now a Django sponsor. This was also pushed by an employee inside the company who happened to be a Django core committer. So this is the common theme, is having someone on the inside push to make it happen.
@ericholscher I just removed the dropbox from the list. The repo happens to be at the same time that there was a pressure on dropbox on Twitter some months ago. I remember I made some tweets regarding to it.
I'll remove Instagram from the list as well, there's a pull request for it as well #3 .
Even though I'm disagree with shaming, I couldn't really find a way to get this going. I'd love to know more about:
I think we need to be doing more to get employees to give back, and educating them on the benefits and how it helps the ecosystem progress.
The way you mention, is certainly the important way to go but I cannot see it clear how to make it work. How can I convince my employer to let me spend some time on the projects or even making them spend some $$$ on those great projects we're talking about. I'd be the one to do this at any company I'm working for.
In addition to all the above, large company size != profitability. If you take into account Uber's income and expenses, it is losing money, 10s of millions per year.
FTR, I have no association with Uber. It just seems wrong to me to shame a company that is not profitable at all for not contributing (and that's disregarding whether or not they actually contribute to FOSS projects).
@jjpe
Uber's income and expenses, it is losing money, 10s of millions per year.
It's "losing billions" as a market strategy, it's doing a market dumping. [s]
Just because it's open source and free doesn't mean it shouldn't be appreciated. An epsilon amount of their expenses will be more than enough for any of those open source projects they're using, Why OSS shouldn't be listed in expenses, doesn't worth it ? hmmm.
DRF is making a great work on this, really really nice way of funding to keep an important project up and running.
Sorry @Alir3z4 I just don't quite follow what your goal or metrics/ethics are here, maybe it's simply because of the wording like you say, but honestly to me it seems like an unnecessarily aggressive and subjective way to approach the issue.
Keep at it by all means, but if you're looking to publicly humiliate companies and set an example for others to follow shouldn't your employer https://github.com/instavest also be featured in these lists? Am I right in saying they use Django and Postgres too?
PS @uber uses MySQL these days https://eng.uber.com/mysql-migration/ and they comprehensively documented the reasons behind that decision and what they learnt in the process. In my eyes their findings could be extremely valuable to someone, and taking the time to do things like this could be considered as giving back to the community, don't you think?
BTW reading through what you've said in the replies I think your intentions were good, I just felt there must be a more friendly or at least tactful way of going about it. Rewarding those that give back rather than scolding those that 'don't'? Anyway, that's just one guy's opinion. I'll leave you to it. Cheers
@Alir3z4 I agree FOSS should be appreciated. But understand that businesses do not exist to further the FOSS agenda, they exist for the sole purpose of making money for their owners. The ONLY reason FOSS has gotten as big as it has in the business world is because it can help with real world business goals while maintaining terms that are acceptable to them (this is why the GPL is almost universally boycotted by businesses, while MIT/BSD style licenses are very popular). When a company like Facebook promotes React, it's not to further the FOSS agenda. That is a side effect, and one at that that will disappear really quickly if and when Facebook decides that it's more advantageous for them not to continue with React. I pick on FB and React here but the same reasoning holds for pretty much any company-backed FOSS project.
I also think that trying to shame a company won't work in the real world. Why? Because unlike people, companies have neither a conscience nor feelings (e.g. shame). On top of that, I expect not enough people will ultimately care about this to actually force change.
@johnrees I'm standing my ground against corporate that uses other people work and never bother to give back to the hard work of others. I give some credit to these companies that do actually mention they're using those projects, there're tons of other companies that never ever mention such things to user or public or even their founders(investors), because they wanna show that they do everything by themself.
Have you ran a open source project and leave it due to not having enough time or actual money ? We have many great projects that are going down just because the authors are spending their time on making money by working full time job and never have the time to work on their projects that thousands of companies are relying on.
We(individuals) choose to open source and give back to the community, companies choose to use and never give back.
Maybe the whole thing lacks a proper licensing or a way to govern the solutions, projects might be suffering lack of good vendors or publishers. (Think PlayStore for Android vs PyPI for Python). What ever it is here, is the time and work of many people being injected in Open Source projects and another side corporate that never bother to do anything for them. Simply ignoring the fact that their business and investors and $$$ in their bank account have been built upon these projects.
If my current employer has any public record regarding the project they're using, I'd be happy to list it here as well. All the project listed here have official records of such usage. I'd be happy to accept your Pull Request for it as well.
I'm not trying to be aggressive here, looking at the situation is ridiculously depressing and one sided. On the happy side corporate is sitting.
@jjpe
I also think that trying to shame a company won't work in the real world. Why? Because unlike people, companies have neither a conscience nor feelings (e.g. shame). On top of that, I expect not enough people will ultimately care about this to actually force change.
Believe me, if I find a better way to do this, I'd go with it. I'm always open to suggestion. I can see your point clearly and I'm completely agree about businesses regarding to FOSS agenda. But do you think we should only let this go on and on and never mention it until we find a nice way ?
Would be fine to say "it's how it works" ? with that kind of mind we could still not have open source around.
I'm really open to your suggestions, if you think changing the repo name would help, the tone, they way of approaching, etc... , I'd be happy to do it and get involved.
I agree that it is useful to expect corporations to contribute to the open source community that they benefit from, but is it important that they contribute to literally every project they use? For one thing, they could be using a certain project because they don't employ anyone with expertise in that domain. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. Also, many of these projects are already very large and have healthy communities, and it is not clear that they require extra involvement from other organizations. Who cares if Uber is supporting redis or Hadoop? redis and Hadoop are doing just fine.
I agree we should discourage freeloading, esp. corporate freeloading, and that spreading information is a good way to do this - but we should be sure that the information we're spreading is actually indicative of freeloading in some meaningful way.
@CaptainLexington makes a good point. In addition the only way to really discourage undesirable corporate behavior is to hit them where it hurts, in their wallet. Anything else is wasted effort.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/uber-s-loss-exceeds-800-million-in-third-quarter-on-1-7-billion-in-net-revenue
800 million loss is profitable?
@Alir3z4 Many devs contribute back to the projects using their personal Github account. Do you track all such accounts? I, for myself, take part in discussions, reporting issues in open-source projects used by my employer using my own account, and I have many peers who do that.
Is that not considering contributing back?
@CaptainLexington RedisLab has hired @antirez full time and they letting him work on the project, Redis is great and probably wouldn't be like what it is now if the author was working full time on another projects while barerly having time to work on Redis itself. Look at the amount of pull request and open issues, a solely free time work from its author wouldn't even let the project to come close to this, a burn out would happen a long time ago and we might have been using something like redis-ng by another company or some other community by now.
We have companies behind Hadoop as well, SaaS ones and some other, although of course many free time weekend or after 5 PM contributions.
I'm all for:
I agree we should discourage freeloading, esp. corporate freeloading, and that spreading information is a good way to do this - but we should be sure that the information we're spreading is actually indicative of freeloading in some meaningful way.
Extra involvement such as patches, features, bug reports, documentation, etc from corporate in many times is not needed, our open source projects are usually good at those things. As you said who cares of Uber or X big company send patches ? It's mostly their own fixes concreted into their own environment. The lack of funding and sponsorship models makes the corporate freeloading predictable.
A company need to hire a developer and keep them on payroll for a feature or a project, they'll pay the money because they have to. If the work is done outside already by an OSS, there will be no obligation to fund or support the project, therefore company will not hire extra resources to do the job.
@dhwaneetbhatt I assume (looking at your username) I answered you on the reddit:
When Employee does that in their free time, it means the company haven't done any contribution. The contributor is the person in his/her own free time, something that the employer doesn't have any part in it. That's how most of the free and open source projects are being developed and maintained, free time of individual contributors. [S]
@jjpe
In addition the only way to really discourage undesirable corporate behavior is to hit them where it hurts, in their wallet. Anything else is wasted effort.
I don't think anyone will hurt, corporate needs X project, they would be paying some developers do it internally otherwise, BIG WIN for corporate is, even if they gonna fund or sponsor OSS, they won't be paying as much as they will pay internal developers.
Thing is, there need to be force behind this not only words, a true working solution that makes corporate to do that, they won't throw a cent just because.
Anyway, something like this repo won't make them to do that, they're not scared of it, they will never be ashamed or feel guilt. They don't even see the purpose of this and will never ever bother to do anything about it, probably they gonna see Free & Open Source as a obligation of the community.