Hey friends! Sloan, DEV Moderator and mascot, coming back at ya with another question submitted by a DEV community member. 🦥
For those unfamiliar with the series, this is another installment of Sloan's Inbox. You all send in your questions, I ask them on your behalf anonymously, and the community leaves comments to offer advice. Whether it's career development, office politics, industry trends, or improving technical skills, we cover all sorts of topics here. If you want to send in a question or talking point to be shared anonymously via Sloan, that'd be great; just scroll down to the bottom of the post for details on how.
Let's see what we have for this week...
Today's question is:
I'm a late-in-life career changer and pretty new to the world of software development. The deeper I go, the more fascinating it gets! It makes sense to me that there's so much free learning materials out there on the web because software developers are very online people. Still, the whole concept of open source is kind of surprising to me. The fact that there's a place like GitHub where people are writing code together freely and creating amazing software is truly awesome. My question is why do folks do this? How did this come to be? Don't get me wrong, I'm really happy it's like this. But, it can't be all roses, right? Are there downsides I've yet to learn about it? Are we in jeopardy of losing open source? It feels too good to be true.
Share your thoughts and let's help a fellow DEV member out! Remember to keep kind and stay classy. 💚
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Top comments (2)
I think it just happend, because the kind of people who were invested in the internet at the beginning was the kind of people at ease with this approach.
And people called it open source after the facts.
The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware, to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed hacking. However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves, but how it is done and whether it is exciting and meaningful. Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and therefore the term "hacks" came about, with early examples including pranks at MIT done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and cleverness. The hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hacking originally involved entering restricted areas in a clever way without causing any major…
I just found this… as I am already halfway into an article about this. Will come out soon.