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Plenty of opensource projects are built by communities. If you want to do opensource work with peers, you can always work on llvm, rust, Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel, wayland, SQLite, postgres, docker, OpenSSL, or all sorts of other high impact, important projects that run the world.

Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams.

And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.



Well, maybe not SQLite. The three man developer team is very hardcore about keeping all contributions public domain/CCZero, not just open source, and so they very rarely accept contributions because they pose a risk, however small, of jeopardizing that status.


Fair enough. Maybe Postgres would have been a better example.


SQLite doesn't generally take public contributions, you'd need to get hired by them to write code there </nit>.


And it’s not actually open source, at least definitely not Open Source.


It’s public domain, so open source as defined by OSI.


There definitely are nuances to licensing vs public perception.. what makes you say it is not adhering to its license?

https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html


Not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent, but when I’ve seen this argument in the past it’s usually meant as “they’re not using GPL so nothing stops someone from copying the code, creating something new, and then not being forced to distribute their source.”

Essentially they usually mean it’s not Open Source if at some point the source code of downstream projects could be closed source.


Doesn't this theory apply to almost anyone with the capability to dual license. Which I thought was any project that had agreement from the original authors.


The word for that is usually "copyleft".


Yep. Or “free software” / FOSS. The term Open source was largely popularised by Eric Raymond and the OSI. It was coined with the release of the source code of Netscape navigator and was famously - and controversially - always business friendly.


Cool, good to hear. Seems like people do make friends in the space, and there is obviously a lot of cooperation involved in getting a change into a shared codebase.

Still wondering about what the actual community aspect of it looks like, beyond individual issues. Probably the best way to find out is to contribute ;)




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