Engineers are happy to pay for tools (hello, Claude Code). Libraries are quite different and it's a little uncomfortable to build a business on a closed-source, proprietary library.
As we mentioned in the post, developer tools really need to be freely obtainable in order to gain mass adoption. In that sense, it was an easy strategic decision. And we felt that the time was right, given that Skip's benefits are being thrust to the foreground in light of recent developments.
You should really consider why free software exists. Open source is open source, sure, but it is a disservice to your users to ever release proprietary software for any reason.
I personally would not start or run a business that didn’t release all software it builds under free software licenses. We don’t open source it because “developers expect it”, we open source it because it’s the right thing to do by your users.
> Free software is an ideology, not just a license.
Yes and people shouldn't enforce ideology on top of each other. I am speaking this as an free software advocate too.
the fact of the matter is open source is still barely fundable and I am pretty sure that they evaluated multiple decisions to come up to this regarding how fundable it is and other factors.
If we have to indoctrinate someone into our ideology, it means that our ideology is unable to gain weight by its own merit. No, let open source do the work and welcome people for who are now open source. Have open arms to everyone who open sources their work & incentive them to do so with a happy heart.
Open source is about freedom. And being honest, If they wrote the code themselves, then its their freedom to have it in open source or not.
I for one, welcome another great open source! Thanks for going open source and Good luck to skip in future!
I know Open source has some issues regarding funding etc. so I hope that people donate to skip & make the project sustainable!
Yeah but if that was the only reason to do open source that was encouraged then there’d almost certainly be a lot less open source software overall (and lower quality). Personally I’d prefer OSS win overall even if it costs some ideological purity.
I don’t open source my iOS apps that provide my living because there are many examples already of others using this to release identical apps without credit or sharing their work back (even with AGPL), which would remove my source of income that enables me to work on it in the first place. I haven’t found a way to make a living off open source yet for the type of products I produce.
I’m not independently wealthy to be able to afford to work for free. If I release my work for free, then I will have to live on the streets or in a cell, or take a job and lose the time I have to produce my work in the first place.
This is indeed a dilemma, but note that copyleft licenses like GPL or MPL do give you considerably more protection than a pushover license like MIT/BSD. I wrote about this last year at https://appfair.org/blog/gpl-and-the-app-stores.
It gives near zero practical protection as the devs that clone in the App Store do not respect licenses and Apple is slow to act (sometimes shutting your own dev account instead of the copycat’s, another high risk).
Enabling copycats also encourages them to target my apps for fake negative review spam and bot activity that gets my dev account (and personal iCloud) flagged and banned without recourse.
I also have no funds to sue someone. And the copycats are often anonymous and overseas in random countries, adding to the challenge of doing anything about it besides begging Apple to help without accidentally hurting me instead.
hey, came from the other comment you messaged me but this feels like such an apple issue which is so fixable that I am not understanding why Apple won't do it.
I understand what you are feeling but I feel like what you are saying is genuine and although sad right now, it provides a course of action for Apple to work upon to meaningfully improve it so that we can get atleast either custom license source available (as I mentioned in my other comment) or GPL/restrictive Copyleft as this mentions.
If someone from Apple's reading this. This feels such a large issue even more than the license issues in general, is Apple working on this or not?
This would honestly show the real loyalty towards developers if Apple can do this so I am waiting and perhaps a movement can be created to establish some formally written demands/ perhaps a change.org petition?
Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.
> Apple won't improve this out of charity for small businesses. Apple has no real loyalty to developers outside of their largest partners. This requires regulation, and/or mass organizing across developers.
Isn't there an EU law where if Enough signatures happen they are forced to discuss it in the EU parliament or similar? I remember this from the stop killing games movement iirc.
Mass organizations can take place too but why not a mix of both utilizing both regulations and mass organizations?
AGPL seems like a joke when it comes up against the indie hacker world. Has there ever been an example of an open-source maintainer successfully suing someone who ripped off their codebase without attribution? Doubtful.
Shame that the world has to be like this in the first place :<
Perhaps I am way too altruist at times & the world is capitalist without any discrimination, stealing anyone's work and reselling it feels so scummy and I have heard it happen actually so you are not actually completely in the wrong and its your code and your lifestyle and so I respect it. (Even if I am an open source advocate, I will admit making money from Open source is super hard in many cases)
Interestingly, what's your thoughts on Source available licenses. Like, honestly, like use a license which doesn't allow reusing components or providing another appstore release of that or similar
If you use github actions with immutable and other instances, I feel like there is a real way of like verifying that the code written is safe & people can verify it & trust it.
If people want to modify your product, they have to pay you and get in touch with you.
I will take this with additional security context and being able to audit over having nothing in the first place! (Hopefully I hope this might not impact your living either in any way and honestly even if you do this! Some of us would deeply appreciate it)
Something is better than nothing. If even much of the world goes to source available licenses, I feel like the transition to open source of softwares becomes much simpler as well if enough conditions (like people start donating/govts start investing in open source) etc. happen!
Source availability still provides one to that direction & is still overall positive with atleast in this context, virtually zero downsides.
Seen some of this happening in Melbourne, Australia, and it's almost suffering from too much success. Recently a free concert had to be canceled because tens of thousands of people showed up and they couldn't handle the numbers safely.
Very happy to see at least something is being tried to reverse the damage from covid.
Shame, Amyl and the Sniffers would've put on a hell of a show ;)
I agree though, Melbourne is absolutely bursting at the seam with events, groups and activities in almost anything you could possibly be interested in. It's particularly noticeable for me coming from Sydney. I saw someone in a local FB group suggest holding a whip-cracking jam meetup in a park and it generated significant interest.
The US is not lacking in public spaces, events and activities, or rec centres. The "loneliness epidemic" is a fairly modern phenomenon. Cities weren't structurally much different several decades ago, but now people choose not to leave the house, because they can amuse themselves to death there.
So much of the pressure comes from horrendous working conditions from top to bottom.
And as a secondary effect unions require meetings and hopefully cross organising with other unions having different people in them.
When we get better working conditions, we will have more time to meet other people rather than to sit exhausted with our phones having all the parasocial relationships that drain our social batteries without really connecting with a real person.
A one-time wealth tax doesn't seem to make a ton of sense.
The current loop hole is that loans are not taxed so people take out loans against their assets thus never paying income tax. Tax those loans and refund taxes when the loans are repaid.
The loophole is the stepped-up basis. Loans are fine since they have to be repaid one way or another. Loans that defer taxation until the liability extinguishes itself are the problem.
The way I understand it, the point of stepped-up basis was to avoid double taxation with estate tax. The problem is that estate tax has been mostly de facto eliminated.
Also I'd argue that the loophole is the not having to treat the loan as a concrete valuation/liquidity event, as the goal of most tax regulations is to prevent people delaying paying tax (with things like IRAs being exceptions).
Of all the victims, people should have the least sympathy on taxation (double or otherwise) on the estate. The US (federal - states have different limits) already sets the minimum threshold for estate tax collection at about $14 million. At that level, we dont, and should not care about double, triple, or n-level taxation on the estate (which is what it sounds like you are implying).
I described how I believe the current state came about. You should have been able to tell the directionality of my comment from what else I chose to mention. Yet you still found it appropriate to pile on with some equity-eschewing rallying cry. Given that what you're saying is the direct opposite of the situation we've actually arrived at, do you think that maximally-presented changes will have any hope at succeeding?
But really, you should learn that this kind of inflammatory policing of the ingroup is very toxic, and only alienates people from your overall goal.
Java is maturing into a syntactically nice language, albeit slowly, and it's the backbone of many medium and large companies.
You might have trouble finding small companies using anything but JS/Ruby/Python. These companies align more with velocity and cost of engineering, and not so much with performance. That's probably why the volume of interpreted languages is greater than that of "enterprisey" or "performance" languages.
A lot are, but there is an equal amount that are of modern versions. It’s a big landscape of employers. I’ve already begun moving my team to Java 25 from 21.
I've always felt it was verbose and the need for classes for everything was a bit of a overkill in 90% of circumstances (we're even seeing a pushback against OOP these days).
Here are some actual improvements:
- Record classes
public record Point(int x, int y) { }
- Record patterns
record Person(String name, int age) { }
if (obj instanceof Person(String name, int age)) {
System.out.println(name + " is " + age);
}
- No longer needing to import base Java types
- Automatic casting
if (obj instanceof String s) {
// use s directly
}
Don't get me wrong, I still find some aspects of the language frustrating:
- all pointers are nullable with support from annotation to lessen the pain
- the use of builder class functions (instead of named parameters like in other languages)
- having to define a type for everything (probably the best part of TS is inlining type declarations!)
It has virtual threads, that under most circumstances let you get away from the async model. It has records, that are data-first immutable classes, that can be defined in a single line, with sane equals toString and hash. It has sealed classes as well, the latter two giving you product and sum types, with proper pattern matching.
Also, a very wide-reaching standard library, good enough type system, and possibly the most advanced runtime with very good tooling.
This is not unique to the age of LLMs. PR reviews are often shallow because the reviewer is not giving the contribution the amount of attention and understanding it deserves.
With LLMs, the volume of code has only gotten larger but those same LLMs can help review the code being written. The current code review agents are surprisingly good at catching errors. Better than most reviewers.
We'll soon get to a point where it's no longer necessary to review code, either by the LLM prompter, or by a second reviewer (the volume of generate code will be too great). Instead, we'll need to create new tools and guardrails to ensure that whatever is written is done in a sustainable way.
> We'll soon get to a point where it's no longer necessary to review code, either by the LLM prompter, or by a second reviewer (the volume of generate code will be too great). Instead, we'll need to create new tools and guardrails to ensure that whatever is written is done in a sustainable way.
The real breakthrough would be finding a way to not even do things that don’t need to be done in the first place.
90% of what management thinks it wants gets discarded/completely upended a few days/weeks/months later anyway, so we should have AI agents that just say “nah, actually you won’t need that” to 90% of our requests.
> We'll soon get to a point where it's no longer necessary to review code, either by the LLM prompter, or by a second reviewer (the volume of generate code will be too great). Instead, we'll need to create new tools and guardrails to ensure that whatever is written is done in a sustainable way.
This seems silly to me. In most cases, the least amount of work you can possibly do is logically describe the process you want and the boundaries, and run that logic over the input data. In other words, coding.
The idea that we should, to avoid coding or reading code, come up with a whole new process to keep generated code on track - would almost certainly take more effort than just getting the logical incantations correct the first time.
One thing to take into account is that PR reviews aren't there for just catching errors in the code. They also ensure that the business logic is correct. For example, you can have code that pass all tests, and look good, but they don't align with the business logic.
I'm not a programmer but I always had the impression that different languages were appropriate for different tasks. My question is, "For what type of programming tasks is English the correct level of abstraction?"
Well, it depends on the logic error doesn't it? And it depends on how the system is intended to behave. A method that does 2+2=5 is a logic error, but it could be a load-bearing method in the system that blows up when changed to be correct.
Something like blowing up the stack or going out of bounds is more obviously a bug, but detecting those will often require inferences from how a code behaves during runtime to identify. LLMs might work for detecting the most basic cases because those appear most often in their data set, but whenever I see people suggest that they're good at reviewing I think it's from people that don't deeply review code.
reply