GitHub Urges Companies To Participate In 'Open Source Fridays' (opensourcefriday.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:
GitHub wants to help more people become open source contributors with a new initiative called Open Source Friday. As the name implies, the program encourages companies to set aside time at the end of the week for their employees to work on open source projects. It's designed to bolster the ranks of open source contributors at a time when many businesses rely on freely available projects for mission-critical applications. Open Source Friday isn't just about getting businesses to offer their employees' time as a form of charity, it's also a way to improve key business infrastructure, according to Mike McQuaid, a senior software engineer at GitHub...
McQuaid hopes that carving out employees' time on Fridays could help provide additional structure and incentive to participate in the ecosystem... Users don't need to be engineers in order to take part, either. While code contribution is important to the success of a project, creating and maintaining documentation is also key.
OpenSourceFriday.com includes tips for interested contributors, as well as a page suggesting to employers that they could see benefits like developers learning to code faster, better, and more transparently.
McQuaid hopes that carving out employees' time on Fridays could help provide additional structure and incentive to participate in the ecosystem... Users don't need to be engineers in order to take part, either. While code contribution is important to the success of a project, creating and maintaining documentation is also key.
OpenSourceFriday.com includes tips for interested contributors, as well as a page suggesting to employers that they could see benefits like developers learning to code faster, better, and more transparently.
Not really new (Score:4, Funny)
In the old days we did Microsoft Free Fridays, so there is at least some tradition.
We hired two of their former... (Score:3, Informative)
employees that were pretty damn good, but they fired them because they are white males. I will never trust GitHub again since they're getting rid of some of their best employees.
Re: We hired two of their former... (Score:2, Funny)
As I understand it, they only fired employees that demanded vacation time that they had earned. As someone that I'm over twenty years that has never taken a vacation day off, they are lazy. You want to get rid of lazy people.
Re: We hired two of their former... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, fuck you. A mental break is needed. If one person leaving for two weeks screws everyone, it's because the employer isn't hiring enough people. You're a pathetic pawn.
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In the Seattle area, it's very common to not allow vacation time since the state doesn't require companies to pay out unused vacation time. Washington state encourages companies to not allow vacation time. I haven't taken more than a long weekend since I started at MSFT in 1994.
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In the Seattle area, it's very common to not allow vacation time since the state doesn't require companies to pay out unused vacation time.
Blame Washington state instead of your employer. My wife is a CPA and worked at seven start-ups in the Seattle area including Valve, and they never allowed vacation time since it hurt the company since if they didn't allow employees they weren't required by the state to pay it out. It was her financial responsibility to recommend against allowing vacation time. The last start-up she worked for fired employees for asking for vacation time, and Washington state allowed them to pay nothing for their accrued
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Open source is a source of slave labor.
SJW angle (Score:1)
This request unfairly makes Friday more privileged than other less-advantaged week days. Therefore we should boycott all OSS projects until they agree to open source every day of the week... let's be MTWTF-inclusive, people!
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Please. (Score:2)
In a lot of bigger old companies OpenSource is a forbidden word. Working with AUTOSAR and ISO26262 at separate companies it's sad how many companies are reinventing the wheel on their own because: "Our competitors might steal our work." Our legal team forbid us from sending in bug reports to something as popular as Numpy because: "The information could reveal _____ proprietary information." Despite the fact that where it was found is such a niche of a niche of a part of the programming industry that I could
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Which is why I BSD everything I do/can write. I still have to eat and if you want a custom specialized version I'll write it for you for $$/hr, it's all yours. Turns out it's good business.
Turns out that a lot of companies do end up rolling back. Look at every corporation and commit that touches FreeBSD's code base. How much has Apple contributed to CUPS, LLVM, ZeroConf, etc? Even Microsoft has joined the bandwagon as of late.
No, it's not the Star Trek Unicorns Communist GPLv3 that some people claim is the
Has the OSS community become less toxic? (Score:2)
I work on my own OSS projects, but I stopped contributing to other groups projects years ago. The percentage of awful people in the community is small, but they are extremely vocal and inescapable. It's not worth the aggravation to take part in that nonsense.
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I released my first open source project a while ago. So far, not much interest other than me. On the plus side, it means my project's "community" is extremely harmonious.
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Just ignore them. That's what I do. Now... where is that killfile.
Free Friday ... (Score:2)
In small companies people _work_ on friday.
In big companies, software developers usually have free, or half a day free.
And honestly, there are two kinds of open source projects: those that are relatively easy from a functionality point of few, but the code is utter mess (like lucine) and those that are far beyond of the capabilities of a random developer.
I for my part grant them the free day.
OS should be developed by enthusiasts, not by 'force'.