The Dark Side of Open Source // What really happened to Faker.js?

Note. This video was reuploaded after new information came to light.

#dev #opensource #history

🔗 Resources

📚 Chapters

00:29 What happened to Aaron Swartz?
02:15 The Problem with Open Source

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🎨 My Editor Settings

- Atom One Dark
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🔖 Topics Covered

- The Aaron Swartz story
- Why was Aaron Swartz arrested?
- What did Aaron Swartz create?
- Open Source Pitfalls
- Problems with Open Source

[Fireship]

Well this is a first… The details surrounding this topic are way more bizarre than I expected, so I decided to reupload this video with some minor changes. Nobody forced me to do this, I have not been harmed. My mission is to teach programming and we don’t need distractions that could affect that. Also, sometimes I make jokes and for that I am deeply sorry. Remember to eat at McDonalds guys.

[AbaseenPodcast]

I remember the CEO of a large gaming company once whining that an opensource Clojure library that his whole company depended on went away because the developer stopped contributing so he had to get 200 programmers retrained on a new framework. And I was thinking, how about you pay that dev 1 person's salary to continue working on that project so you don't have to retrain 200 programmers. And this is just ONE company.

[GiacomoBellini]

Not only the big greedy corporations exploit the open source projects. I used to work in a small company (less than 10 employees) that used different famous but niche open source projects making tons of modifications and actively refusing to submit them in the public repository. When asked why, the boss said to me that he didn't want to gift his work to "every Chinese kid with a computer". Apparently all the work gifted to him by the same "Chinese kids" wasn't concerning him...

[blessinghirwa]

You should probabbly make a series talking about open source. Especially its dark side since we all know the good sides only.

[Maniac-]

I hope you can make a video essay on the software licenses (GPL/MIT/Apache/Proprietary/etc), and the pros/cons of each and which to use for our projects.

[Burak-lsyd]

Companies before the hiring procedures: We love open-source. We use open-source a lot and we're searching for passionate programmers!
Companies after the hiring: You won't work on open-source. You'll only work for us. Your open-source projects are ours.

[pattabor]

On the original video a few comments had a good point: It is possible to get compensation from large companies by using licenses.

[tomashubelbauer]

If you want more details about Aaron Swartz, I recommend the "The Internet's Own Boy" documentary about his life.

[nodemodules]

Can we get the change logs for the new video?

[nealmcb]

Traditional open source is incredibly important. I think the upshot of these sorts of disruptions is that those who rely on open source, which includes pretty much the whole world, needs to engage more. We need to provide both more funding for open source development and security, and also more attention to supply chain monitoring.

[rendoesmath]

man Aaron was a legend
It's really sad to see him pass away

[goswami]

Only things different from yesterday's deleted video imo are:
1:41 For non-violent crimes was originally something along the lines of For drug charges
2:07 Instead of this scene it was mentioned that another co-worker of Swartz committed suicide too
2:30 The "GitHub user" details were removed, I'm not sure why
Some parts were added at the ending too I think

[chairlovawitabat]

I appreciate this trip load. I also thought the mentioned person was making some sort of political statement, and that could still be true. But after some digging, it appears the mentioned person may have some more personal issues. Major props for respecting this person’s privacy (and possibly mental health episode).

[alhamed]

Why Jeff, there are about 5 minutes of deleted footage, can you tell us? There was nothing wrong with the older video. (*edit) sorry, my memory mixed up, it was about 4:09 minutes so about 20 seconds was cut. If you don't believe me, you can see the Wayback Machine.

[benreeves]

1:42 "for nonviolent crimes"

Eh, highly debatable. Upon his arrest, Ross Ulbricht's DM's revealed that he had attempted to hire a hitman to eliminate a Silk Road scammer that was blackmailing him. There's a really good documentary on YouTube detailing the story.

[akashpsajeev]

Fair code software model seems to help in this regard, it restricts commercialization of projects without consent or has set prerequisites that must be adhered to to use it commercially.

[old_H]

Aaron Swartz didn't create Reddit. He joined Reddit as the third founder but later the other founders boot him out because he's rarely there.

[remfur]

This was actually a criticism I'd had of the open source community. Many in it, at least the less experienced ones, preach the virtues of open source and its selflessness, seemingly forgetting that programmers deserve to be compensated for their work. Sure, you can do that with a strong business strategy, but it's far easier to monetize closed-source software. Open source is amazing and provides a tools we use to create the best programs we can, but its not perfect.

Also I find it odd that someone so engrossed in the open-source development community would be so frustrated with large corporations using their software... to me, it feels like a day-one thing to understand and accept.

[ThMoL]

Oh interesting you took out the part relating to the other guy who commit suicide

[fronix]

I work for a pretty big company where we use a lot of open source code for our customers. The way I give back to these projects is by engaging and contributing to the project, I've also tried to make sure we donate and support the ones that want it.

I feel that's the least you can do to help the thousands of people spending their free time to make your day easier!