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We trust strangers' open source more than our colleagues'

21 points| MD87 | 5 months ago |00f.net

5 comments

order

zem|5 months ago

can't relate to this at all - maybe it's different in programming languages teams? if anything we would be thrilled to find one of our colleagues had already written the library we needed and was available to ask questions of if we needed anything explained!

klooney|5 months ago

> employees often maintain their projects because they love them, not because the company asked them to. That’s often a strong guarantee of long-term care.

Until they leave, or switch teams.

bad_username|5 months ago

The "entry barrier" and the level of commitment required to bring an OSS project to "findable in Google, has at least some github stars/whatever equivalent, is green in CI, and actually works when you try it" is higher that the authors of a typical internal library in a typical enterprise can afford. Which is why the recognition and trust is usually higher. All IMHO.

watwut|5 months ago

Sure, but if you search on Bing or Duckduck go, you will find them. This one is purely because google search quality went down so much in recent years, that it cant find anything niche - even if you add literal quote from what you are looking for into the search.

mberlove|5 months ago

I'm not sure I understand the claims being made. I'm curious if this is experiential / anecdotal or if widespread.

I think OSS is OSS always...being able to audit it makes it (reasonably) reliable, at least in the sense of security. I can look at the code, run checks, etc. That alone doesn't guarantee things can't crash and burn, but it's a great start compared to a closed-source solution, even if that solution stands on its promises, as reputation in software is an iffy prospect today.