Public funds.
There actually are lots of initiatives (e.g. https://bigdatastack.eu/european-open-source-initiative ) but it’s still young and there are multiple problems between available public money and contributors actually earning a salary.
Money is not the problem.
either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion
crazy idea: let’s publicly fund FOSS projects so devs working on stuff they like with a passion can actually make a good living and enable sustainable non-profits to hire expertise, marketing and all the stuff a company needs
the result would be actually good software and happy devs
25 years in the industry here. As I said there’s nothing against learning something new but I doubt it’s as easy as “leveling up”.
Both fields profit a lot from experience and it’s as much gain for a scientist do become a software dev as an architect becoming a carpenter. It’s simply not productive.
there is so much time lost in research institutes because of shoddy programming
Well, that’s the way it is. Scientific code and production code have different requirements. To me that sounds like “that machine prototype is inefficient - just skip the prototype next time and build the real thing right away.”
It’s always good to learn new stuff but in terms of productivity: Don’t attempt to be a programmer. Rather attempt to write better research code (clean up code, revision control, better commenting, maybe testing…)
Rather try to improve cooperation with programmers, if necessary. Close cooperation, asking stupid questions instead of making assumptions etc. makes the process easy for both of you.
Also don’t be afraid to consult different programmers since beyond a certain level, experience and expertise in programming is vastly fragmented.
Experienced programmers mostly suck on your field and vice versa and that’s a good thing.
Consequence:
Software can only be good, when enough people WANT to work on it and with it along the complete life-cycle. There’s a critical amount of developers/contributors/testers and (feedback providing) users.
Hence a lot of critical consumer stuff is based on popular opensource.
Also, we’re entering an aera where the difference between hardware/firmware/software gets increasingly blurred. So all of this applies to more and more hardware, too.
byebye unix principles
I find too verbose comments less annoying than no comments.
Try to describe the bigger picture. Good comments allow understanding the current portion of the code without reading other code.
Also add comments later if you find yourself having to read other code to understand the code you’re currently looking at.
Comments are also a good place to write out abrevations/acronyms.
Never optimize for sourcecode size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_programming might be an interesting read.
check carefully what you signed. If you didn’t sign anything saying otherwise, there’s nothing to prevent you from doing it.
If there’s something, you could still work around it (e.g. remove company secrets).
If the resulting product is provable better, then it’s objectively not the same thing you did for your boss.
After checking all of this, your local FSF might give you free legal advice to get going (keep all notes/correspondence secure for later if anything comes up. It proves you tried to act responsibly).
Sure it’s cancellation fees? This doesn’t seem legal.
DE-mail was doomed to fail from the start. Here, they did some things right. Let’s see how it turns out.
yep. IF sleep/idle/s2r/wakeup would work decently, it would already be a step in the right direction.
I want a PI zero that can run off small batteries for a long time. Form factor, prize, ecosystem is all perfect. But power consumption (even with WIFI etc. turned off)… is-too-damn-high.jpg
imagine microsoft promoting guides to use the terminal which was deemed outdated, slow and complicated legacy in the past.
Give it two or three more major teleases, then windows will be a DE runnining on some *nix-ish kernel. Microsoft is really learning the hard way.
wouldn’t make that consent even harder? or imply wars?
e.g. Brazil. Imagine they got the last lumber on earth, they’d have to choose between preserving their last trees and incredible wealth by selling it. I can’t imagine a poor country to choose the former.
I don’t believe a CEO or King is necessary for short sighted action. Humans are just very bad at sustainable long-term decisions.
I know a guy who owns a small forrest and when wood prices were skyrocketing due to supply chain disruption, he was tempted to sell more wood than planned. So he couldn’t sell as much in the following years. He has no boss, is not rich and makes his own decisions.
It’s a simple mechanism of supply and demand. I can’t see a reason why people wouldn’t cut down more trees than can grow back when demand is ultra high, other than force/legislation. And then people get angry because they won’t realize that they’d destroy their own business in the long run. A worldwide life-threatening situation won’t change that.
That’s exactly one of the premises in this paper: Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis.
Some say, the easter island model doesn’t scale worldwide but I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t.
it will run in termux and on anything that can run a full python. Also you could run it remotely via ssh. Textual also offers a web interface to access apps via browsers but I never looked into that.
not sure why you’re downvoted. of course member states enforce it.
exactly. Forking for any reason is the essence of FOSS.
Scenarios like OPs were taken care of right from the start. That’s just the legal side, tho. But someone still needs to do the actual work which is why it sometimes fails.