This is the problem with open source, anytime someone tries to submit a finished solution - someone will come out of the woodwork and blame them for not attributing enough. In this case the link exists, but it isn't in the favorable order.
The only thing they added was a dependency on a closed source 3rd party """cloud""" service. This is basically the open source equivalent to blog spam and should be rightfully put down.
And the post you're replying to isn't even trying to do that! Its just suggesting that hacker news would find more benefit out of the original repo over some closed source cloud bait made by an employee of said proprietary cloud service.
This is a little aggressive. Sure, Balena offers a proprietary licensing to make money for their cloud software, but all of the technology is built with open source first. You can self host OpenBalena (the open source parts of Balena) and do your own deployments locally. I'm not sure if going after open source projects that can make money is the best way to promote open source software.
> I'm not sure if going after open source projects that can make money is the best way to promote open source software.
but im not doing that.
I'm going after open source projects that can make money (by building closed source infrastructure) taking other peoples open source projects and moneifying them into a new """open source""" project (where 99% of the meat is in closed source cloud infrastructure) as a way to piggy back off of the work of other people so that they can advertise on hacker news.
Like, if the repo actually added something substantial and new to the project, that would be one thing.
If this was an article that explained how to do the gluing/config work this github repo does, also, another thing. even if hosted/made by the cloud company. That at least appeals to the intellectual pursuit.
RPiPlay is itself composed of many great OSS projects (e.g. GStreamer). Maybe we should somehow be able to publish the shole "tree" of contributions to a particular project (including build-time tools) ?
Yeah, personally my view is that if an OSS project contributes something new to the existing tool then it should be acknowledged on a place like hackernews.
Also, because acknowledging the project you built on top off recursively references other tools, there is no need to publish the whole tree. That exploration is left as an exercise to the viewer of the repo.
If we had a reliable way to identify contributors there might be nice ways to build on top of that. Like semi automatic donation services that uses id keys of the list of contributors.
Never going to work. Someone will cheat the system by creating multiple identities in order to get more than their fair share. Besides, how do you even measure what’s fair automatically.
And likewise, automatically distributing money per dependency will just make people split projects into multiple parts to get more of the money, or to add fake dependencies.
Donations need humans in the loop to decide where the money should go.
That's why I said semi automatic. It should always be up to a human to decide exactly who gets the money and how much. But there could be systems that makes it easier for that human to make such decision and worry about the important parts of it.
The automatic parts can consist of listing candidates, link to their contributions and handling of the transactions, not selection.
We already have put cash into the equation. There are donation buttons on many repos nowadays. Should we fight against that or should we try to make better use of it?
That should mitigate against fake dependencies, but not splitting important projects into multiple equally important projects, unless this engine also incorporated something like SLOC or number of commits (either of which would make splitting a net zero) but those are non-metrics as well...even more readily abused.
Not following what your point is here? I'm not promoting metrics. I'm just saying we should allow lifting up the whole software supply chain for donation driven projects.
Just saying how any tooling to automate the process would be easy to game all the way down, so the due diligence toward donating has really got to be a manual human effort.
So like an attribution manifest that contains direct contributions and links to other OSS manifests? Then you could just have a project walk the manifests and generate an output of everyone who contributed?
