Easy question: I get a paycheck every other week from my employer, Red Hat, who pays me and thousands of other people to build, maintain, and support enterprise open source software.
A Python script is not the answer when I'm trying to do something quick and dirty at the shell.
The beauty of shell scripting is that it evolves seamlessly from trying to solve simple problems at my command prompt. I pipe a couple of things together, and then I realize I could use a loop and a few conditionals, and suddenly it makes sense to store this in file in case I want to do this again. Boom, program done.
It now works on every computer I own.
I love Python. I use it almost every day. But I'll be damned if I'm going to go rewrite every shell snippet I hack together into Python just because it exists.
Not intentionally picking on Listmonk (or you), but when I hear "alpha-quality code" and start thinking about the complexities of marketing emails with GDPR, CCPA, and the constant threat of blacklists and otherwise getting blocked by big G, I run for the hills.
> Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now
Not true. Jim (and Red Hat under him) reported directly to Ginni. Red Hat was under IBM cloud for revenue reporting, though, but the distinction is material.
I assume if the entire world is spending billions of dollars reworking culture, infrastructure, software, etc., that swapping to making weekly pay the norm is just a bit of noise in that transition.
Our system: I make more, and I pay for the biggest expenses (mortgage, and previously cars and student loans before we paid those off) and have healthcare and whatnot taken from my paycheck.
She makes less but still a decent amount and pay for the smaller bills.
Every once in a while, she'll pay for a big-ticket item (like a vacation or a large house repair) out of her savings, which accumulate faster than mine, to catch up.
It works because we started together with next to nothing, so we're both big savers: Our combined income our first year together after college a little over ten years ago was probably a quarter of what we'll make this year. We both max out (or come very close to maxing out) retirement now. She has more cash on hand because I'm paid proportionately more in various types of stock incentives, so when my incentives vest I tend to sell the company stock to diversify but keep the money in investments).
We live in a small house, no kids, reasonably cheap cars, vacations are often tacked on to work trips to save money, no expensive hobbies.
I doubt I'll "retire" early but our savings mean if I decide to leave tech in a decade and become a woodworker or park ranger, I can with no monetary consequences.
Totally freelance? Not sure. Small teams doing custom site development? Absolutely.
I've seen large companies pay six figures to stand up a microsite, the kind of thing that one person could easily put together in a few weeks.
The catch is that you don't necessarily have a few weeks, you have a few days to go from concept exploration to go-live. It really becomes more about project management than web development in these instances, having a network who you can turn to quickly when you need more hands on deck.
And though I hate the phrase "full-stack" because it means so many things that it sometimes seems like it means nothing, they do really expect a well-rounded technologist.
I'm working with a consultant right now on a web project for my employer. I talked to him yesterday about IE11 fallbacks for Flexbox, proxy setup, CDN configuration, logging and metrics, debugging a custom legacy spaghetti-coded marketing-tech JavaScript, modifying a Drupal PHP module to support project-specific requirements, configuring cron, and a handful of other things, and I fully expect when I talk to him today he's going to have all of those tasks finished.
Those people are invaluable. Someone who can write a little HTML and CSS and maybe stand up WordPress? I'm sure there are jobs for that, but I don't have any need to hire them as a freelancer because I expect everyone on our staff to have those abilities.
That said, doing freelance web dev is _exactly_ how I got my foot in the door with the job I have now. But it paid squat for the time I was doing it, and I hated it because my time ended up being 50%+ of the time running the business side of things instead of building website, which is the part I actually enjoyed.
> Amateur is ad hominem, and also simply incorrect.
You're right. I do owe you an apology for that. Sorry.
I still find the circumstances _around_ license discussions like this to be filled with a frustrating amount of amateur lawyering that can be misleading and dangerous. As an open source developer and content creator, I can't tell you how many times I've come across something in GitHub with a "clever" license and thought "great, now not only can I not use any of this, but I see a whole contributor community who clearly believe they are contributing to an open source license when they very much are not."
We have the open source licenses we do for a reason. They've been vetted. They work. They meet established criteria. It's okay to consider new ones, but the process for that isn't just to make something up and hope it works.
Amateurs have no more business playing lawyer and writing general-purpose software licenses than they do playing doctor and handing out surgical advice. It's not thought-provoking, it's dangerous and harmful to people who don't understand why licenses like this could cause them huge unmitigated legal headaches down the road.
So, uh, generate the power somewhere other than on shady roofs?
Seriously, I don't get the weird obsession with rooftop PV as if it's the only way to be green. PV is great, but, it doesn't work for every house. Personally, I have big oaks out front helping block passive solar windows in the summer, and the peak of my roof runs north-south so cell mounting would be tricky. That doesn't mean I can't get clean energy, it just means I buy it from a utility company, who are buying it from my neighbor's house where the orientation and canopy placement makes sense to do PV.
I don't think you understand the Linux vendor support model.
The labor isn't "donated" in any sense of the word. It's not like these big companies just pay hundreds of kernel developers to sit around and make commits to whatever they're in the mood to do today.
Clients pay Linux vendors to get the hardware support, features, etc. that they need written into the Linux kernel, and the vendors do that for them. They write the code, test it, harden it, and get it upstreamed so that the client isn't stuck carrying a patched kernel on their own in perpetuity.
It's not the financial interest of Linux consumers (think: banks, airlines, healthcare systems, militaries, cloud platforms, entertainment producers, etc.) to pay millions of dollars a year to have their own in-house kernel development and support team when they can pay a vendor to do it.
It's not just about support in the sense of someone to pick up the phone, it's about support in the sense of maintaining and developing mission-critical software for large enterprises.
And with that, indemnity.
Do your shareholders want to hear that you're working with a tried, tested, trusted vendor to make sure your systems that can never, ever, ever go down are in fact designed that way? Or do they want to hear, don't worry, Dave in IT's got it, he got a kernel patch accepted once? In many industries, IT is just a cost center and a risk. Corporations and governments are motivated to lower their IT-related risk in the most financially-prudent manner, which usually means a vendor.
I'm used to roadmaps and software planning cycles in months or years so "weeks" is probably before I could even get somebody to open an email to start thinking about this. :)
I see on Commento.io it explicitly mentions being able to import from Disqus comments, but the "Import from a different service" is behind a signup wall.
Rather than signing up for a service that may or may not work for my site, I'm curious, does it allow importing from existing native Drupal and/or WordPress commenting systems?
That's my biggest pain point right now. Exposing public login to my CMS is a security risk (see: plugins/modules with permission escalation bugs) and frankly a pain I don't want to manage anymore. Migrating old comments to a new system is preferable to keeping the legacy comments system (and user accounts) in place while maintaining a second system on top of it for new comments.
We're still hiring, by the way.