GitHub Urges Companies To Participate In 'Open Source Fridays' (opensourcefriday.com)

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GitHub Urges Companies To Participate In 'Open Source Fridays' (opensourcefriday.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday July 1, 2017 @08:54AM from the TGIOS dept.

An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat: GitHub wants to help more people become open source contributors with a new initiative called Open Source Friday. As the name implies, the program encourages companies to set aside time at the end of the week for their employees to work on open source projects. It's designed to bolster the ranks of open source contributors at a time when many businesses rely on freely available projects for mission-critical applications. Open Source Friday isn't just about getting businesses to offer their employees' time as a form of charity, it's also a way to improve key business infrastructure, according to Mike McQuaid, a senior software engineer at GitHub...

McQuaid hopes that carving out employees' time on Fridays could help provide additional structure and incentive to participate in the ecosystem... Users don't need to be engineers in order to take part, either. While code contribution is important to the success of a project, creating and maintaining documentation is also key.
OpenSourceFriday.com includes tips for interested contributors, as well as a page suggesting to employers that they could see benefits like developers learning to code faster, better, and more transparently.

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Not really new by Aighearach · 2017-07-01 09:12 · Score: 3, Funny

In the old days we did Microsoft Free Fridays, so there is at least some tradition.
We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-01 09:22 · Score: 3, Informative

employees that were pretty damn good, but they fired them because they are white males. I will never trust GitHub again since they're getting rid of some of their best employees.
1. Re: We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-01 09:24 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  As I understand it, they only fired employees that demanded vacation time that they had earned. As someone that I'm over twenty years that has never taken a vacation day off, they are lazy. You want to get rid of lazy people.
2. Re: We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-01 10:59 · Score: 1
  
  In the Seattle area, it's very common to not allow vacation time since the state doesn't require companies to pay out unused vacation time. Washington state encourages companies to not allow vacation time. I haven't taken more than a long weekend since I started at MSFT in 1994.
3. Re: We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-01 11:15 · Score: 1
  
  In the Seattle area, it's very common to not allow vacation time since the state doesn't require companies to pay out unused vacation time.
  Blame Washington state instead of your employer. My wife is a CPA and worked at seven start-ups in the Seattle area including Valve, and they never allowed vacation time since it hurt the company since if they didn't allow employees they weren't required by the state to pay it out. It was her financial responsibility to recommend against allowing vacation time. The last start-up she worked for fired employees for asking for vacation time, and Washington state allowed them to pay nothing for their accrued vacation time. It is this state's laws that are screwing us.
4. Re: We hired two of their former... by 110010001000 · 2017-07-01 13:02 · Score: 1
  
  Who knew the "Seattle guy" was racist as well as crazy? Let me guess: you only get dial up in Seattle too?
5. Re: We hired two of their former... by 110010001000 · 2017-07-01 13:03 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah but you only have dialup Internet at home. So why do you need a day off?
6. Re: We hired two of their former... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-01 13:39 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Wow, fuck you. A mental break is needed. If one person leaving for two weeks screws everyone, it's because the employer isn't hiring enough people. You're a pathetic pawn.
SJW angle by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-01 09:34 · Score: 1

This request unfairly makes Friday more privileged than other less-advantaged week days. Therefore we should boycott all OSS projects until they agree to open source every day of the week... let's be MTWTF-inclusive, people!
1. Re:SJW angle by 110010001000 · 2017-07-01 13:06 · Score: 1
  
  In 2017 Friday can be any day of the week it decides to be!
Re:Most companies will never do this.. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-01 09:44 · Score: 1

Open source is a source of slave labor.
Please. by 0100010001010011 · 2017-07-01 09:54 · Score: 1

In a lot of bigger old companies OpenSource is a forbidden word. Working with AUTOSAR and ISO26262 at separate companies it's sad how many companies are reinventing the wheel on their own because: "Our competitors might steal our work." Our legal team forbid us from sending in bug reports to something as popular as Numpy because: "The information could reveal _____ proprietary information." Despite the fact that where it was found is such a niche of a niche of a part of the programming industry that I could hand out our source code and there may be 1000 people at 10 different companies that even knew what it did.
I'd love to see what VW, BMW, Benz, Caterpillar, Cummins, Ford, and Toyota are doing for their on-highway software certifications. Maybe provide some feedback. I'd like to share with them what I use, maybe they can improve it and save some time doing the same thing.
Go through the Fortune 500 and see how many companies have an active GitHub repository. Everyone on slashdot did a doubletake when Walmart opensourced its cloud ops. It seemed to be a shock that Walmart got as big and efficient as they did without some technology pulling the strings.
NXP just released a $35 development board that is hampered by terrible software and outdated business practices. Despite being "free" you need a license key that multiple people have trouble with. All of the Matlab and Simulink code they released is protected. However for the first time, ever, the GCC source code for e200 core PPC chips with VLE extensions has been released for free. Previously you had to have a WindRiver or GreenHills.
Who knows what random product or software people could come up with if they were allowed to work with peers doing the same thing. Even if it was for a sworn corporate mortal enemy.
1. Re:Please. by 110010001000 · 2017-07-01 13:13 · Score: 1
  
  Actually you would be surprised at all the big companies that take open source, but never give back. Some companies think that their software is a "secret sauce" that only they are able to create. Of course, ridiculous. Customers don't pay for source code. They pay for solutions. There is a huge gap between source code and a solution.
2. Re:Please. by 0100010001010011 · 2017-07-01 13:47 · Score: 1
  
  Which is why I BSD everything I do/can write. I still have to eat and if you want a custom specialized version I'll write it for you for $$/hr, it's all yours. Turns out it's good business.
  Turns out that a lot of companies do end up rolling back. Look at every corporation and commit that touches FreeBSD's code base. How much has Apple contributed to CUPS, LLVM, ZeroConf, etc? Even Microsoft has joined the bandwagon as of late.
  No, it's not the Star Trek Unicorns Communist GPLv3 that some people claim is the One True open source, but it puts food on my table and puts the food on the tables of a lot of developers.
Has the OSS community become less toxic? by JohnFen · 2017-07-01 09:58 · Score: 1

I work on my own OSS projects, but I stopped contributing to other groups projects years ago. The percentage of awful people in the community is small, but they are extremely vocal and inescapable. It's not worth the aggravation to take part in that nonsense.
1. Re:Has the OSS community become less toxic? by Dutch+Gun · 2017-07-01 13:01 · Score: 1
  
  I released my first open source project a while ago. So far, not much interest other than me. On the plus side, it means my project's "community" is extremely harmonious.
  
  --
  Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
2. Re:Has the OSS community become less toxic? by cheesybagel · 2017-07-01 14:28 · Score: 1
  
  Just ignore them. That's what I do. Now... where is that killfile.
Free Friday ... by angel'o'sphere · 2017-07-01 11:50 · Score: 1

In small companies people _work_ on friday.
In big companies, software developers usually have free, or half a day free.
And honestly, there are two kinds of open source projects: those that are relatively easy from a functionality point of few, but the code is utter mess (like lucine) and those that are far beyond of the capabilities of a random developer.
I for my part grant them the free day.
OS should be developed by enthusiasts, not by 'force'.

--
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.