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Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs (medium.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Seems like he's been pushed into using LLMs as a way to cope with the deluge of LLM-generated security reports.

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[–] 7 points 4 months ago* (7 children)

But where will the maintainers for these alternatives come from, when barely anybody has stepped up in the 30 years of rsync's existence?

Universal Healthcare would increase the pool of willing developers by an order of magnitude here.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    No disagreement here but I'm not sure that's on the menu right now

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (3 children)

    Universal Healthcare would increase the pool of willing developers by an order of magnitude here.

    I'm not so sure. The problem is not a lack of developers. The problem is a lack of developers interested in working on rsync, or on any other specific project you can name. Most developers would rather work on their own projects.

    I would also question whether or not universal healthcare (though unquestionably a good thing) would actually result in such an increase in available developers. The following study looked at the geographical distribution of OSS developers in 2021, via Github contributions, and found that the US had a similar number of OSS developers per capita compared to similar countries that do have universal healthcare (see table 2):

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162522000105

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    Github and the whole culture that it came out of it used to (it feels sooooo good to say that in the past tense) be globally hinged on Silicon Valley, why would you not expect to see a anomalously high number of US developers on it?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    That's definitely a possibility, along with the possibility that countries with worse English language skills might be underrepresented on GitHub, despite having universal healthcare. Conversely, if the US is over-represented on GitHub, then the pool of US developers who are not already active on GitHub may also be depleted compared to other countries. However, that is not something we can read out of the available evidence.

    The most we can conclude is probably that the US getting universal healthcare might result in an increase in available OSS developers, depending on which assumptions turn out to be correct, but suggesting that it would lead to an order of magnitude increase is surely premature

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    suggesting that it would lead to an order of magnitude increase is surely premature

    The US is continuing to worsen in performance on meaures of small business entrepreneurship in essentially all industries in the US, software and software adjacent industries are no different especially if you don't get distracted by the AI bubble inflating that value of a bunch of illusions claiming to be businesses.

    It is easy to see how the inability of the average person to try a new idea, or risk taking on a project that may not pay off immediately translates directly to a lack of available developers for open source software projects.

    The impact of Universal Healthcare would be huge for open source development in the US, the amount of programmers that would be pushed over the line from "just making ends meet while having a work life balance" to "ok maybe I could devote some time to open source development".

    Don't get me wrong though, I think we need to normalize straight up paying developers for Open Source Development. Just because it is open source doesn't mean it doesn't take labor, that is not the argument I am making.

    https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2018/oct/affordable-care-act-impact-small-business

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