Week 13
Open Source Fundamentals..? 
Thoughts on “Makers and Takers” by Dries Buytaert 
Buytaert’s article (or much-rather thesis 
) explores a lot of economic practices–both foundational and experimental–and their potential applications to successfully scaling and sustaining Open Source Projects. Before he gets to the golden three business models for public goods (privatization, centralization, and self-governance) he introduces an interesting concept of Makers and Takers.
All hail the creators 
. Buytaert’s naming of the good guys in open source communities is not without its purpose. The term makers paints a picture of active self-starters, go-getters, and creators. They are the very fabric of any Open Source project, investing in code, fixing bugs, and growing the community of contributors.
Gorg, the Takers 
. Takers are companies that use Open Source projects and chose not to give back to those projects despite having the means to. Buytaert portrays Takers as selfish and greedy proprietors.
Buytaert’s Assessment 
. Takers harm open source projects, and force Makers to become Takers. Sounds simple enough, an us-vs-_them_ concept, or a contangious greed. It’s also pretty dark or Hobbes-like. Buytaert’s solution to this rivalry is the adoption of a public good business model. His exploration and research into the various public models types are interesting at their foundation. However, his argument does heavily rely on the negative consequences to the darwinistic nature of company competition. His opening belief is that competition hurts and destroys good companies financially and socially (minimizing the importance of fostering good communities). If a proprietary company uses an open core company’s software and does not contribute to it, then their competition with the open core company will ultimately hurt the original open source project. His assessment is pretty convincing, and albeit there is probably some truth or proof to it somewhere, but I wonder if this is always the case. I wonder if its possible that proprietary competition doesn’t always have to decimate an open source company? Maybe the competition can further push and encorage open source communities to grow and thrive in amazing ways that it couldn’t before. Maybe. Afterall companies like RedHat have thrived in impressive ways (although their specific business model isn’t based on an open core concept). Moreover, does the adoption and sudden switch an an exclusive community (as he suggests for self-governance) really a model built for the open source world? Overall this article was though-provoking and introduced a lot of intertwining and complex concepts both economically and socially that requires more time to unpack.
$ cd Next.js
$ git log --reverse
commit message Thursday May 7 
:
Code reviewed some PRs that my awesome team members made to our Next.js project example for the Next.js + MongoDB pairing. After merging Michelle’s code for our shared task into our team’s production branch (the with-mongodb branch), I started building on top of those changes. My goal was to remove any external dependencies that was not related to MongoDB and Next.js from the project, which meant that a great deal of refactoring was needed for the client-side of our application.
commit message Friday May 8 - Sunday May 10 
:
I spent the entire weekend going through the project and refactoring out the previous style library we were using to test the code. The advantage of doing this, is that our application is now lighter dependency-wise and easier to read without the complications associated to library components. In addition to this, I also modularized some rendering and functionality logic and fixed any small errors or bugs that I encountered in the code. There weren’t many because my teammates did an amazing job!! 
. I opened this PR to our collaboration branch.
