Software Trollers Need To Stop
A lot of damage can be created by very minor work done by just one person. Software is fun for developers, but trolling them in the name of “FUN” just does not work.
The above image is a merge request created by a person with no use to an Nvidia module which is open source.
I’ll go through as many types of trollers as I can think of when it comes to software.
Open Source Trollers
The general community is the biggest resource and consumer for open source products. Therefore, it’s us, the public who usually change an open-source product — NOT the maintainers. So we apply for something called a merge request through git to contribute to code.
Example Of Some Useful Merges
Here is an example of a helpful merge. It actually makes the code look better and also makes it easy to understand. Now it’s up to NVIDIA and they can either reject or apply it depending on what and how they want the product to be.
This Is What A Troll Does
The worst part is that it’s not helpful even to the person doing it him/herself. Of course, it’s not just NVIDIA getting this. It’s also all popular open-source products, and occasionally some non-popular ones as well.
It’s pointless and harmful, spreading a great deal of toxicity in the software community.
Patent Trollers
This is probably one of the most brutal things you can do to an open-source product.
Remember… If your product is open source, anybody can copy, edit, and even resell it with a different brand if he/she wants to… even as a proprietary. This not only means you have NO patent over your own software tech, but it also means that once your code is out, you have no control over the people who are gonna use it (very unlike proprietary).
On one hand, we have products like Streamlabs OBS, who not only literally stole the SEO, and ad sense but also took the code of OBS and re-worked it, even when OBS did not appreciate what they were doing. They then made their own version called Streamlabs OBS and sold it as a closed source. Although this kind of practice is not appreciated in the open-source community, this is NOT what I’m talking about when I say patent trollers.
Patent trollers are basically selfish entities who decide to patent your product, considering that your product is open source. This is a huge blow for the open-source product itself, because now… not only does it have a huge closed course competitor, but it also cannot continue, because it’s using someone else’s patent.
Wrong Software Trollers
Around 2007(the exact date is not disclosed), a new app or should I say “GAME” came into existence. Its literal name being “The Choking Game”, it’s basically an application software where you get “money” if you choke someone. More than 37 lives were severely injured through choking and more than 10 lives were taken away from the small dot in our galaxy from this game before it was officially banned from the internet after almost a month of being available.
Sadly, the game STILL exists on the deep web. I’m not going to say anything else because I don’t want to encourage anything, but this should be an example to prove that once you have something good posted, it could be taken down and nobody cares the next day. But once you have something bad posted, your work is never given up.
The developer of this software was arrested and was also asked to give an undisclosed amount of money to the family of people who lost their lives.
Justice was given, but the damage was already done. The problem with this is not that there are people who do this. There will always be people to do anything you ask for. The problem is when there are developers who use these people and their weak minds for corporate strategy and their own profit. This is another way people just get scammed, and in some very rare cases, we also have people who lose their lives due to idiotic stuff like this.
If you know anything about this, feel free to comment on it, I’ll also add it to the article.
Conclusion
This took almost a month for me to research, ‘cause… well… You won’t get it through simple google searches since the incident is too old for YouTube or websites to pick up on.
I hope you guys got something out of this. I have something VERY huge coming up in the future, which took a very long time for research and so on. Stay tuned for that.
I’ll also make more videos on software and tech on my YouTube channel, so make sure you check that out as well. I’ll post much smaller stuff on Twitter. That’s about it for this article, I hope you guys enjoyed it, and I’ll meet you in the next one.
You’re Awesome :)
FadinGeek
