<story><title>The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code</title><url>https://twitter.com/feross/status/1330582600813924352</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>randmeerkat</author><text>Imagine if Nintendo gave away their devices just so they could have the “feeling” of knowing people are using it, rather than selling it for money.&lt;p&gt;It’s weird to me that developers write code that other companies use to make profits, while they just get paid with a “feeling” of satisfaction.</text></item><item><author>javajosh</author><text>The company is giving him something, which is a huge vote of approval to his library. &amp;quot;You ship it, you own it&amp;quot; means Nintendo just said, &amp;quot;This guys code is Nintendo-handheld quality code!&amp;quot; Big endorsement. And literally no-one in the world knows more about that code than him.&lt;p&gt;Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you&amp;#x27;d like it to run.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.</text></item><item><author>BerSerKer</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m happy for the guy. That&amp;#x27;s no mean feat.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no strings attached, a big company used it for god knows what and acknowledged him. Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? As far as we know they didn&amp;#x27;t demand any updates or support from him, why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>javajosh</author><text>A bit too close to a troll, but there is a germ of a good point, which is whether its ethical for Nintendo to profit from this code. I think the answer is clearly yes, for the simple reason that the author chose to release his code for the world to use. Most projects will die in obscurity, unused (and unmourned).&lt;p&gt;There are a ton of project owners who would love nothing more than to be used by a big, popular platform. That&amp;#x27;s a pretty big win with hardly any risk. It means their thing beat out something that could have been made in-house by the world&amp;#x27;s best devs. Can you imagine discovering that your little thousand-star github library is present in, I don&amp;#x27;t know, Gmail? Presumably, at the very least, it means an auto-hire if you apply to any of the biggies for a &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; high total comp.&lt;p&gt;(And if you refuse on principle to cash in on that endorsement? I say good for you and I would like to hire you to be on my &amp;quot;wizard council&amp;quot;. These are people I subscribe to to be diligent, principled, skeptical, and open about any software update I consume. This would include, BTW, a holistic definition of &amp;quot;software&amp;quot; to include firmware, FPGAs and so on. Please talk to me like an adult about InfoSec! Thank youuuu!)</text></comment>
<story><title>The Nintendo Switch uses my open source code</title><url>https://twitter.com/feross/status/1330582600813924352</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>randmeerkat</author><text>Imagine if Nintendo gave away their devices just so they could have the “feeling” of knowing people are using it, rather than selling it for money.&lt;p&gt;It’s weird to me that developers write code that other companies use to make profits, while they just get paid with a “feeling” of satisfaction.</text></item><item><author>javajosh</author><text>The company is giving him something, which is a huge vote of approval to his library. &amp;quot;You ship it, you own it&amp;quot; means Nintendo just said, &amp;quot;This guys code is Nintendo-handheld quality code!&amp;quot; Big endorsement. And literally no-one in the world knows more about that code than him.&lt;p&gt;Last but not least is just the feeling that your code is running in so many places! What a feeling of accomplishment. Over a career, you start to think more and more about what code you have running in the world. Where it used to run. Where you&amp;#x27;d like it to run.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s a pretty satisfying feeling, and it also makes him one of the few bona fide people in the world at whom you can throw money to fix (or change) the library.</text></item><item><author>BerSerKer</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m happy for the guy. That&amp;#x27;s no mean feat.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m just kinda curious about some comments on Twitter and here. Ok, the guy made an open source library, with no strings attached, a big company used it for god knows what and acknowledged him. Why would the company give him anything more than acknowledgement? As far as we know they didn&amp;#x27;t demand any updates or support from him, why are they expected to give him freebies, contribute to the code or anything else?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway09223</author><text>Creation isn&amp;#x27;t zero sum. I make things all the time which create shared benefit.&lt;p&gt;I spent this Saturday morning working in my front yard. It looks nice for my benefit, but it also benefits my neighbors. It would be really strange for me to approach my neighbors and ask for financial remuneration because they&amp;#x27;ve been enriched by my yardwork. Yardwork is enjoyable and I like making the world better in this fashion.&lt;p&gt;I wouldn&amp;#x27;t join a yardwork company and work for free.&lt;p&gt;Software is similar. We can use OSS to share the benefit when we do something we want or need to do anyway.</text></comment>