Re: "Write a new package" culture instead of patches?

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 12:02:52AM +0200, Arthur Miller wrote:
>> Alan Third <alan@idiocy.org> writes:
>> 
>> > On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 11:52:18AM -0700, Stefan Kangas wrote:
>> >> 
>> >> Has anyone else thought about this?  Is it correct to say that such a
>> >> "package first" culture has developed?  If yes, why has it developed,
>> >> and is there anything we could do about it?
>> >
>> > I wonder if it's related to the way that a couple of years ago many of
>> > the discussions on the Emacs reddit seemed to revolve around why the
>> > Emacs maintainers hadn't yet fixed someone's pet bug, but nobody ever
>> > thought to report it to us.
>> Could it rather be that a "github" culture has evolved, together with
>> social media it makes + melpa it makes it relatively easy to fork
>> someone's work, change/fix what bother you and make your own package
>> under other name.
>
> This rhymes with one observation I made: Git makes branching easy.
> Still, Github strongly encourages forking. Why is this so? My hunch
> is that for Github, the number of repositories they host is /currency/
> (actually to the tune of $7.5B, as it turned out by 2018). So there's
> a strong motivation to multiply the number of repos.
>
> That is, I think, the same mechanism as Twitter or Facebook
> tolerating bots as legit accounts (up to a certain point),
> because they inflate their market value. And not much different
> as Microsoft tolerating pirated versions of Windows (remember
> the end-90s where everyone knew that you could generate a valid
> Windows license key by making sure that the middle part of
> the number was divisible by 7?).
>
> These are, of course, mechanisms which are totally alien to the
> Free Software world [1]. But I guess it's standard corporate
> fare. Something-something-strategy, I guess.
>
> Cheers
> [1] Although we're catching up :-/
> -- t
That plays role definitely. Familiarity as well. Github is really easy
to work with and get started with git and as they let people do whatever
they want, like fork crap load of repos, it also makes people use github
and get familiar with its APIs etc. Once I setuped github api keys, I
don't feel for going over and setting up API keys for gitlab, I dont'
know is there a free service like github? I have very modest needs and
am too lazy for me to be worth going hoops around searching for better
alternative.

I think familiarity is also reason why major companies tolarated privacy
back as you say. I remember in early 2000, if you wrote word microsoft
or adobe in back than AltaVista or Google you would be bombed with pages
that offered keygens and pirated copies. They let people use it, it ment
people will learn it, and once they learn it, they stick with it. So
once they come to workplace the company will get them the software
because they are knowledgable with it.