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vector_spaces | on: Devtools must be open source
> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.

A corollary is that more people will have eyes on the source code than the original developer(s), so the project can benefit from a broader skill set and set of orientations and priorities than if it were proprietary. Not just on the development front, but hopefully also in security, usability and accessibility

> The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.

I imagine you are correct that most people historically didn't inspect or modify most tools they use, but most developers I know who have relied on open source software -- even if they didn't contribute directly upstream -- have had the experience of locally patching a small bug or adding a small enhancement to suit a use case, or studying a piece of an open source module as a starting place for their own implementation for some piece of functionality, or doing a cursory scan of a project to make sure it isn't e.g. phoning home, or simply taking a morbidly curious look to see how the sausage is made.

Sure, I'm not a representative sample and it would be great to have some actual numbers on this, but I have observed this among engineers at Fortune 500s and YC startups, but also non-tech businesses as well as at local public utilities and health systems.

Anyway, I agree that LLMs can provide a lot of value here and reduce the friction but I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously because most people didn't have time to read code. It provides value even without developers reading code in the first place, and reading code was historically one of the essential parts of the work

lanstin | parent | next
Yeah, due to the friction of maintaining a private fork, I always upstream bug fixes I find where the fix is simpler than a work around. It's just neighborly. I don't it very often, maybe every 2 years? But a lot of other people do so, and it adds up; open source software continues to improve pretty substantially over the years.

And when I'm debugging I read all the code I have access to - certainly glibc pretty often, Python C implementation and C libraries quite often; the Go runtime, if only for the education, etc. It's not often I need to read the kernel implementation, except sometimes for networking protocols where it's also educational. I have found over my career that reading excellent code is as important to the quality of my code as writing code and iterating on it to make it good.

simonw | parent
> I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously

Don't get me wrong, I've been a strong advocate for the benefits of open source for decades. I think it's delivered enormous value, and most of the top valued companies in the world today wouldn't exist without open source!

What's new now is that the end user inspection and modification benefits are feeling a lot more material for a lot more people than before.

vector_spaces | root | parent
No worries, I thought so, and agree with your point -- I'm a fan of your work and datasette historically was something I leaned on often at work and in personal projects. I have read some interpretations of recent developments that misunderstand what programmers and mathematicians do and have done, so was filling in the gaps in what you wrote to speak to some of those

I'm grateful for the work you've done!