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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
In an age of political animus, increasing hostility toward "others," and 24/7 media coverage that seems to focus on the negative, a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology provides a glimmer of hope, particularly for those who live in the United States.
Written by Yale University academic Gabriel Grant, "Exploring the Possibility of Peak Individualism, Humanity's Existential Crisis, and an Emerging Age of Purpose" aims to clear up two competing views of today's cultural narrative in the United States. First is the traditional view of the next generation—millennials—whom many view as individualistic, materialistic, and narcissistic. Some even refer to millennials as "Gen Me" in response to those who develop their "personal brand" with selfies and social media posts.
In stark contrast there is a view of millennials as rejecting selfish values and leading America into a "great age of purpose." Unlike previous generations, simply earning money is not enough for them—significant data shows that younger people are searching for purpose in their lives and their work. Consider the fact that the non-profit group 80,000 Hours (whose name represents the amount of time spent at work in the average lifespan) even exists. 80,000 Hours provides career advice to help young people build careers with social impact. Universities and businesses are increasingly following this path to help millennial workers achieve their goal of finding purpose in their lives.
Both sides can provide reams of anecdotal evidence that supports their view of millennials, and until recently, there have been few studies on the issue. In his article, however, Grant theorized that Google's digitization of millions of books and the Ngram Viewer, a tool that shows how phrases have appeared in books, could allow a quantified analysis of culture over the past two centuries, and he used this approach to quantitatively test the popular notion that a drive for purpose is increasing. What he found is encouraging.
Yeah, because people with a healthy ego would never possibly do volunteer work...
Source: https://opensource.com/article/17/10/rise-open-source
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 10 2017, @01:41PM (3 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 10 2017, @02:56PM
Choosing an efficient solution by taking existing work is entirely selfish: You save yourself work, that is, you achieve the same result with less effort. With Open Source, you don't even have to pay for it. How is spending less effort not selfish?
When considering non-selfishness in relation to Open Source, you don't look at the users, but on the writers of the code: Is it selfish or selfless to release the code you've written as Open Source?
Note that the problem of contribution is also different than the problem of initial release. And you can assume that the decisions of companies are always selfish (indeed, if it is a publicly traded company, it would be outright illegal for them to act against their — that is, their investors' — interest). So selflessness, if it applies at all, only applies to individuals.
If you write some new code to solve a problem you have, you have in essence three options (well):
Now true altruism is if you analyse the situation, find that one of the first two options would work best for you, but decide for the third option anyway. Note that choosing the third option by itself is not a proof of altruism (it may just be the solution that you think fits your situation best).
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 10 2017, @05:58PM (1 child)
You are missing something important.
Let's say for the sake of argument that EMC/Isilon creates a improvement to the FreeBSD stack. It's such a big improvement that when they put it in place, their stuff will be orders of magnitude better than NetApp's. Now they have 2 options of what to do with that improvement:
1. Keep their patchset in house and maintain it. Doing this would give them a competitive advantage which they can use in advertising and sales. If it's a really really big advantage, they might even drive NetApp out of business, which means that they'll have more pricing power in the marketplace as well as the increased market share.
2. Contribute the patch upstream. Doing this would save them some of the money of maintaining it, but would give up their competitive advantage. This might make sense from a game theory standpoint, because NetApp might respond by closing off their improvements, but it's definitely less clear-cut.
This isn't an idle question: Vendors choosing option 1 is what led to the "Unix wars" of the 1980's and early 1990's.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:59PM
sudo mod me up