[HN Gopher] Setting expectations for open source participation (...
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       Setting expectations for open source participation (2018)
        
       Author : zbentley
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2024-08-03 18:42 UTC (4 days ago)
        
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       | tdy_err wrote:
       | this all sounds pretty reasonable and, honestly, a given.
       | 
       | > you should view open source as a series of kind acts people
       | have done altruistically
       | 
       | > just because open source software is free for you doesn't mean
       | someone else hasn't paid some price on your behalf to get you
       | that code
       | 
       | Maybe this is directed towards people who don't write software?
        
       | bxparks wrote:
       | I think it is difficult to make general statements about all
       | "open source" projects, because there seems to be at least 3
       | different types of open source projects:
       | 
       | 1) Small projects, owned and maintained by a single person, with
       | maybe a few random contributors.
       | 
       | 2) Medium-sized projects maintained by handful of developers,
       | without much organizational structure.
       | 
       | 3) Large, almost enterprise-scale, projects used by thousands or
       | millions of downstream users, maintained by dozens or hundreds of
       | developers, requiring fairly complex organizational structure.
       | 
       | The article says that "instant you get that first contribution to
       | your code, it becomes an open source project with an open source
       | community of two", and the purpose of the project changes to
       | "collaborating on the maintenance of the project".
       | 
       | For me, absolutely not. For most of my personal projects that I
       | have open-sourced, I have _no_ desire to migrate from a Type 1
       | (small, personal) project to a Type 2 (medium-sized, multiple-
       | maintainers) project.
       | 
       | I accept PRs on a case-by-case basis, but I usually reject a vast
       | majority of them: they are often buggy and incorrect, or they
       | don't match the purpose and design of the project, or they are
       | correct but severely incomplete (e.g. missing edge-cases, missing
       | tests, missing documentation, etc). I have discovered that it
       | usually takes me more time and effort to code-review the drive-by
       | contributions into an acceptable state, than to just implement
       | the feature myself.
       | 
       | On the other hand, for Type 3 (large, enterprise-scale) critical
       | projects which affect numerous other parties, there is probably a
       | higher level of implicit and social expectations that the project
       | will handle bug reports and feature contributions from 3rd party
       | contributors in a reasonable manner. The development process of a
       | large project probably shouldn't rely on the whims and emotional
       | state of a single maintainer on the project.
       | 
       | With regards to "kindness", which the article mentions a few
       | times, I think for small projects, it might be reasonable to
       | expect the kindness of the community. But for large projects, it
       | is unrealistic that "kindness" will scale to thousands or
       | millions of users. Too many people are too narcissistic,
       | thoughtless, cruel, or all of the above.
       | 
       | In summary, it seems to me that the expectations and the dynamics
       | of an open-source project varies quite a bit, possibly depending
       | on the size and character of the project.
        
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