Category: open source

Not all heroes wear capes.

The core Date/Time component is a rabbit hole which is not for the faint of heart, and I’m glad to see these changes coming to WordPress 5.3.

I think this is over all a good thing, although I’m hesitant to take this as some sort of goodwill sign from Microsoft. I find that it’s easier to deal with the disappointment that inevitably arises when platforms remove or limit features if one keeps in mind that these are business decisions and nothing more. Plus, honestly, I still don’t trust Microsoft when it comes to free/open source software. Their newfound love for open source hasn’t been around long enough to erase their very long history of having an anti-open-source stance. This article opines that most developers have come to terms with Microsoft’s Github acquisition. Well of course we have. Most of us use Github either for our own projects or for projects we contribute to, and it’s easier to just come to terms than it is to spin up decentralized operations and move everything over to those. Decentralized is the better approach, although I think managing the social aspects of software contribution is still a hurtle. I need to look into this more.

This is a good read regarding the event-stream ongoing saga, and I agree with it, but I also have some things to add to it. For those of you who may not be familiar, (non-developers), event-stream was pulled from Node Package Manager, (something that gets used pretty frequently when building software in order to manage dependencies, otherwise known as other code bits you need in order to run/build your code bit), because it relied on another package which was found to have vulnerabilities. It was then handed over to someone else, who promptly added a cryptocurrency iner to it, at which point the internets freaked out. Frankly I don’t completely blame the new maintainer for adding the cryptocurrency miner. There are very large corporations who have no problem using open source software for their benefit, all while not supporting the maintainers. See for example: Apple and Microsoft. And if you can’t be relied on to hit that donate button, well then we’ll just use your processing power because eating habbits need to be supported. I’d like to add to the post I’m linking to though that, while I think code does need to be simpler and thus easier to understand, I also think maybe we need to simplify our build processes. But back to the “understanding” point, reading code is a learned skill, and I think to a certain extent it’s on the users, (and in this case the users are developers), to learn how to read code. As much as I’d like code to be simpler, outside of everyone who writes code taking courses/reading books on best practice and then applying all that, I don’t see this happening.