They also have other open source things here http://github.com/uber, why shame them for not contributing to the specific things, which they may as well use vanilla
So this company has a team that stalks unfriendly journalists to find some dirt on them, and thats okay but if they don't contribute to Celery they have really crossed the line?
In BSD-style licenses, if you make changes you can distribute them with a new license. In GPL-style licenses, the source for any modifications must be distributed along with any modified binaries. In AGPL-style licenses, the source for any modifications must be available to users, even if no binaries are ever distributed. So, in some cases, I'm sure not contributing upstream is actually illegal.
I can understand why lots of companies would use open source software but not contribute changes: if you already have your employees sign away their IP to the company, then there are legal complications to figuring out how to contribute, and if the company is publicly traded then internal modifications to open source software in order to support features that have not yet been announced may constitute an information leak if contributed upstream (and thus give illegal trading advantage to maintainers, etc). It's a big can of worms.
This seems odd. It feels unfair to shame companies because they may or may not contribute to a handful of projects you've picked out. I'd also encourage the author to do a bit more digging. The first entry calls out Instagram for allegedly not contributing to Django but they have a fork of it here: https://github.com/Instagram/django and without doing much digging, it's easy to say they've contributed at least once.
Several of the companies listed make incredible contributions to OSS.
A 3 years old fork of Django doesn't seems to be a real contribution. Have a look at instagram and its size and tell me a 3 years old fork of their web framework of choice, something that made them $$$ is something to be called a contribution.
Contribution is not only code, it can be $$$, hosting, hiring a developer to work on the project or many many other ways.
When a software library is released with a license such as MIT or BSD it says: use this for whatever you want as long as you preserve this notice. There is NO requirement to "contribute back".
Uber is a douchebag company, who knew? On a serious note, there is no obligation for any user no matter how big to contribute anything upstream in open source. If that were the case, we would be in big debt to the maintainers of the Linux kernel, GNU, OpenSSL, and so much more.
this list is not complete enough, tons of companies should be in there but I need time and suggestion. Once a while I come up for new companies to put them there, but I just forgot to do.
I work for a company that uses open source. Sure, we might have the resources to contribute, but... the "fixes" we implement tend to be hacks particular to our overly complicated and Rube Goldberg-esque infosec infrastructure that I guarantee would have us on a different wall of shame all together if the code ever saw the light of day.
Besides, code leaving larger institutions outside of the tech industry has other hurdles involving things like compliance and lengthy legal reviews...
Yeah, Uber sucks. I’ve deleted their creepy app and won’t use the service until they go ahead and up they game.
BuuuUUUuuuut, this shaming is not an information-rich presentation. It would be interesting to see a presentation on which big, heavily-invested companies are not good OSS citizens, but this is not that presentation.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 63.4 ms ] threadAnd maybe these companies did not have anything to contribute back?
Uber uses Celery, but I can't imagine their main worries being fixing bugs on Celery (or even better, fixing them in a contributable form)
Several companies have internal fixes and workarounds for OSS, and that is fine. Because not everything belongs upstream
There are millions of websites using MySQL and Postgres that make money but don't contribute back?
Add nginx/Apache to this list too? would cover most of the internet then.
When they contribute, they make it sure everyone knows about it.
Also - contributing to open source is a lot more than code. (Good) Bug reports, docs, and evangelism are all valid forms of contributions.
It's like shaming people for not paying for the free candy that you hand out.
I can understand why lots of companies would use open source software but not contribute changes: if you already have your employees sign away their IP to the company, then there are legal complications to figuring out how to contribute, and if the company is publicly traded then internal modifications to open source software in order to support features that have not yet been announced may constitute an information leak if contributed upstream (and thus give illegal trading advantage to maintainers, etc). It's a big can of worms.
So this is just an attack on companies that can't give back. Amazing insight.
Several of the companies listed make incredible contributions to OSS.
Instagram being a golden sponsor of Django (https://github.com/Alir3z4/oss-wall-of-shame/pull/3) but still it's not officially claimed that it started to sponsoring yet.
A 3 years old fork of Django doesn't seems to be a real contribution. Have a look at instagram and its size and tell me a 3 years old fork of their web framework of choice, something that made them $$$ is something to be called a contribution.
Contribution is not only code, it can be $$$, hosting, hiring a developer to work on the project or many many other ways.
Uber came to my sight first.
Besides, code leaving larger institutions outside of the tech industry has other hurdles involving things like compliance and lengthy legal reviews...
BuuuUUUuuuut, this shaming is not an information-rich presentation. It would be interesting to see a presentation on which big, heavily-invested companies are not good OSS citizens, but this is not that presentation.