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Not sure I understand. a) lead dev is stepping down b) lead dev has not groomed a successor c) this is where I am lost. he says patches welcome... But who wi

Not sure I understand. a) lead dev is stepping down b) lead dev has not groomed a successor c) this is where I am lost. he says patches welcome... But who will merge if he has no time or has no successor?

eponeponepon 9y ago
He also says there are some people that he "trusts". I hope that means Fdroid won't stagnate, or worse, disappear down the Sourceforge route.
iSnow 9y ago
I think there's an implied d) No one stepped up and lead dev has stopped caring
- gpvos 9y ago
  Well, in a comment he says he'll stay on the IRC channel to answer questions.
coldtea 9y ago
>c) this is where I am lost. he says patches welcome... But who will merge if he has no time or has no successor? It's not like he's irreplaceable, even if there's not currently a successor.
- nopenada 9y ago
  > It's not like he's irreplaceable, even if there's not currently a successor. That's where you're wrong. Most open source projects have a single maintainer who does the vast majority of the work. It is not uncommon for them to put in 30 hours per week or more for free. In theory someone could step up and replace them - but no one ever does because that requires actual work. Maintaining a large project is a thankless task. People are constantly bitching and complaining why you haven't implemented useless feature X or fixed random bug Y for their commercial product. Github is full of self-entitled whining users who never give back to the community and expect everything for free and fixed in a timely manner. Large open source projects being driven by unpaid volunteers is simply not viable or sustainable. All big projects (Linux, GCC, LLVM) are sponsored by the likes of IBM, Google, Facebook, Red Hat and Apple. It's the only model that works.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - jancsika 9y ago
    I agree and have firsthand experience with everything you said except the last paragraph. (And Debian is a quick counterexample.) There are viable large volunteer projects. The way they become viable is to interpret single points of failure as damage, and to fix that damage. That damage definitely includes relying on a single maintainer's ability and knowledge to keep the project going. There's even a term for it-- "bus factor"-- which answers the question of how many of the core developers could get hit by a bus with the project remaining healthy and maintained. If the "bus factor" is 1 and the userbase is large, that's a critical bug in maintainership.
  - X86BSD 9y ago
    I disagree. The BSD's surely meet your definition of "large open source projects being driven by unpaid volunteers" and I argue they are not only viable but the longest running if not largest open source projects ever.
smoyer 9y ago
There are four "Owners", one "Master" and several "Developers" with permissions to commit to the f-droid project - https://gitlab.com/groups/fdroid/group_members https://gitlab.com/groups/fdroid/group_members.

eponeponepon 9y ago

He also says there are some people that he "trusts". I hope that means Fdroid won't stagnate, or worse, disappear down the Sourceforge route.

iSnow 9y ago

I think there's an implied d) No one stepped up and lead dev has stopped caring

gpvos 9y ago
Well, in a comment he says he'll stay on the IRC channel to answer questions.

coldtea 9y ago

>c) this is where I am lost. he says patches welcome... But who will merge if he has no time or has no successor? It's not like he's irreplaceable, even if there's not currently a successor.

nopenada 9y ago
> It's not like he's irreplaceable, even if there's not currently a successor. That's where you're wrong. Most open source projects have a single maintainer who does the vast majority of the work. It is not uncommon for them to put in 30 hours per week or more for free. In theory someone could step up and replace them - but no one ever does because that requires actual work. Maintaining a large project is a thankless task. People are constantly bitching and complaining why you haven't implemented useless feature X or fixed random bug Y for their commercial product. Github is full of self-entitled whining users who never give back to the community and expect everything for free and fixed in a timely manner. Large open source projects being driven by unpaid volunteers is simply not viable or sustainable. All big projects (Linux, GCC, LLVM) are sponsored by the likes of IBM, Google, Facebook, Red Hat and Apple. It's the only model that works.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jancsika 9y ago
  I agree and have firsthand experience with everything you said except the last paragraph. (And Debian is a quick counterexample.) There are viable large volunteer projects. The way they become viable is to interpret single points of failure as damage, and to fix that damage. That damage definitely includes relying on a single maintainer's ability and knowledge to keep the project going. There's even a term for it-- "bus factor"-- which answers the question of how many of the core developers could get hit by a bus with the project remaining healthy and maintained. If the "bus factor" is 1 and the userbase is large, that's a critical bug in maintainership.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  I disagree. The BSD's surely meet your definition of "large open source projects being driven by unpaid volunteers" and I argue they are not only viable but the longest running if not largest open source projects ever.

smoyer 9y ago

There are four "Owners", one "Master" and several "Developers" with permissions to commit to the f-droid project - https://gitlab.com/groups/fdroid/group_members https://gitlab.com/groups/fdroid/group_members.