Thoughts on “Makers and Takers” by Dries Buytaert

I agree that there are not a lot of companies now that are open source. I think it is because open source as an idea is still pretty new. For the longest time, companies have been using proprietary as a model. You sell a product and get money. And even though open source could potentially be better, people are just sticking with what they are used to and what they think is safe. In a sense, I can relate this to Microsoft word and google docs. I remember when I first heard of google docs, I was like “what is that, and why should I care? I already have microsoft word and it is great because every teacher needs you to write your essay in microsoft word. Why should I care to figure out what Google Docs is?” And then one day, a substitute teacher came and said that the reason why everyone is using microsoft word instead of google docs is because everyone is used to it. They are comfortable with it, and they are afraid to venture out and use something new. Today, I believe google docs is superior to microsoft word. 1. because google docs is free, and 2. you can easily share your documents with anyone. Almost everyone has a gmail account. 3. it isn’t just google docs but also google slides and google sheets. These are some great services that are free.

From the article, I imagine the taker as a parasite. It benefits from the maker, while also slowly killing the maker. The taker needs the maker to profit, but by being a taker, they are also killing the maker. It seems like it is so much better to be a taker than a maker. you get to profit so much more, and not risk anything. This selfish thinking can cause makers to become takers. In my head, i’m imagining the makers as good guys and the takers as bad guys. I think this post makes use of some great examples to really get the point across. Such as the prisoners dilemma and the dish washing. It is one of those things where you hope that someone else would do it, so that you don’t have to. However, in my household, we have a centralized government, my parents, who tell me and my siblings exactly what to do. And if this one chore isn’t done, my parents will know exactly who to go to.

Contributions

For this week, me and my team were able to make some merge requests again. I noticed that on inkscape-web repo, they didn’t even have a contributing file, to tell users how they can contribute to inkscape-web. So I decided to open a issue. A moderator then commented saying that he thinks it’s a great idea. I requested a merge request and it was accepted. The link to the merge request can be seen here
and the link to the closed issue can be seen here