Open Source (mostly software)

On published schematics for cheap objects

March 31, 2017 — December 12, 2022

collective knowledge
cooperation
economics
information provenance
innovation
institutions
making things
Figure 1

Placeholder, for a currently important part of the intellectual property landscape.

1 Sociology

Gabriel Gonzalez, The golden rule of software quality:

Prefer to push fixes upstream instead of working around problems downstream

Gwern Branwen on an under-supplied collaboration style:

It is much better to find some people who have tried in the past to solve a problem and bring them together to solve it, than to solve it yourself — even if it means being a footnote (or less) in the announcement. What’s important is that it got done, and people will be using it. Not the credit. It is a high accomplishment indeed to factor out a bit of functionality into a library and make every possible user actually use it. Would that more Haskellers had this mindset! Indeed, would that more people in general had this mindset; as it is, people have bad habits of repeatedly failing when they think they have special information, are highly overconfident even in objective areas with quick feedback, and badly overestimate how many good ideas they can come up with — indeed, most good ideas are Not Invented Here. One should be able to draw upon the wisdom of others.

Daniel Bachuber, Managing an open source project:

Nolan Lawson, What it feels like to be an open source maintainer

One reason this situation is so frustrating is that, increasingly, I find that issue triage takes time away from the actual maintenance of a project. In other words, I often only have enough time to read through an issue and say, “Sorry, I don’t have time to look at this right now.” Just the mere act of responding can take up a majority of the time I’ve set aside for open source.

2 For science

But see also open source hardware, open source biotech, open notebook science…

3 widgets and hacks

shields.io provides minimalist dynamically updating badges that track project activity, e.g. GitHub closed issues. Most useful are the activity badges, e.g. .

If I wished to annotate every GitHub repository site with a star rating, I would do it with the following regex:

Search:

$$([^$$]*)\]$https://github\.com/([^/)]*)/([^/)]*)/?$

Replace:

[$1](https://github.com/$2/$3) ![](https://img.shields.io/github/stars/$2/$3)

4 Funding

Does your business want to contribute back? Maybe try BackYourStack: Discover the Open Source projects you are using and need financial support..

5 Legalities

6 Incoming