I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how open source works. I can’t imagine maintaining anything more than a tiny library that I can ignore six days of the week.
Also: open source relies on good jobs. You can only do it if you have a well paid low stress job with good hours. Those have been in short supply recently.
I think the free time covid gave, followed by the free time the layoffs gave, and AI have been patching / hiding the fact that the core model of open source is completely unsustainable in its current state.
The part that confuses me is: How can multiple people work on overlapping bits of code at the same time, and the Git manager (or whatever you call it) just handles it all without breaking everything?
Roughly equal parts “git is clever” and “once in a while, someone has to take some time to figure it out”.
Say the code is split into two files. You and I both make changes, but you’re working on file A and I’m in file B. No problem!
Now we both make changes in file A. Sometimes Git can just “figure it out”, like if all your changes are in the beginning of the file, and all my changes are at the end.
But sometimes we both change the same section. Git can’t figure that part out, so one of us has to sit down and reconcile the changes. Sometimes this is pretty simple, other times…not so much.
Put it all together, and it works out pretty well most of the time.
I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how open source works. I can’t imagine maintaining anything more than a tiny library that I can ignore six days of the week.
Also: open source relies on good jobs. You can only do it if you have a well paid low stress job with good hours. Those have been in short supply recently.
I think the free time covid gave, followed by the free time the layoffs gave, and AI have been patching / hiding the fact that the core model of open source is completely unsustainable in its current state.
The part that confuses me is: How can multiple people work on overlapping bits of code at the same time, and the Git manager (or whatever you call it) just handles it all without breaking everything?
Roughly equal parts “git is clever” and “once in a while, someone has to take some time to figure it out”.
Say the code is split into two files. You and I both make changes, but you’re working on file A and I’m in file B. No problem!
Now we both make changes in file A. Sometimes Git can just “figure it out”, like if all your changes are in the beginning of the file, and all my changes are at the end.
But sometimes we both change the same section. Git can’t figure that part out, so one of us has to sit down and reconcile the changes. Sometimes this is pretty simple, other times…not so much.
Put it all together, and it works out pretty well most of the time.
I have a job like that, but I also have kids, so…