I don’t think the article is terrible, but it does lean on that analogy a little bit too much IMO. It is worth inspecting where schools and programs differ.
If you could clone a school essentially for free, and also a poorly constructed school was not at risk of killing a bunch of kids, I guess we’d be much less skeptical of amateurs building schools.
I do think people write programs best when they are the primary audience, so the idea of just, like, going around with the explicit intent of finding open source projects to contribute to seems a bit misguided. But the stakes are not very high. If nothing else I imagine most open source projects must be able to ignore non-useful contributions, right?
If you could clone a school essentially for free, and also a poorly constructed school was not at risk of killing a bunch of kids, I guess we’d be much less skeptical of amateurs building schools.
I do think people write programs best when they are the primary audience, so the idea of just, like, going around with the explicit intent of finding open source projects to contribute to seems a bit misguided. But the stakes are not very high. If nothing else I imagine most open source projects must be able to ignore non-useful contributions, right?