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What I found (I wrote a pretty large open source project and receive hundreds of emails every day about it) is that most people are only willing to contribute t
by TAForObvReasons 10y ago
What I found (I wrote a pretty large open source project and receive hundreds of emails every day about it) is that most people are only willing to contribute to open source to the extent that it scratches their itch. They feel that their obligation ends as soon as the code is written, and the maintenance of their code falls on you.
So from a maintainer perspective, you have to act like people's contributions are your contributions. You have to evaluate the code as if you have to maintain it later, you have to understand the circumstances surrounding it, etc. You have to be aware of everyone's concerns at the same time and make sure you don't end up messing up other people's use cases without good reason. And more often than not PRs reflect a "selfishness" of sorts wherein it solves their problem but breaks the general case.
In four separate occasions, people tried to take control of my github organization and npm repos by complaining to github and npm support, because they disagreed with the trajectory of the project. Some people seem to have no respect for OSS.
- GrinningFool 10y ago> In four separate occasions, people tried to take control of my github organization and npm repos by complaining to github and npm suppo THat blows my mind a bit. Particularly since forking a repository is not exactly a difficult thing.
- drvdevd 10y agoThis just sounds like an attempt to take control of a popular project. An attack. [edit] an interesting vector: open source politics
- beachstartup 10y agorunning a company results in many of the same kinds of situations. lots of people are crazy. they walk among us!
- antirez 10y agoExactly that. For this reason in order to merge something I don't just need to like it. I also need to understand the code base line by line otherwise when there are changes to be made is a nightmare.