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>PRs and public ownership of future project direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_a

>PRs and public ownership of future project direction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar That's kind of the point of open-source, public ownership. Sure, you need someone to be in charge and reject outright bad ideas, but when you're refusing to add options that support other people's personal preferences that's when it's starting to become a problem. It's all these authoritarians that think they need to own the direction of the project that are causing these issues. I'm sure dirty info-hippies who believe in communal project ownership have their own problems too, and that there's a balance, but it seems like we've over-swung.

acdha 7y ago
Do you have examples of working pull-requests which were rejected for what you consider bad reasons? I’m sympathetic to maintainers choosing not to take on additional technical debt so I’d especially be looking for things like willingness to shoulder long-term support costs and other constraints imposed by accepting a PR.
- traverseda 7y ago
  One thing that comes to mind is gnome's refusal to implement type-ahead in nautilus and the gtk3 file picker. It's a very popular and visible issue that I won't get into here, but suffice to say that there are a lot of people who would really like a more traditional type-ahead. There aren't any specific pull requests I'm aware of although there are forked versions available. When asked about it the developers involved just say "no", and any attempt to work on a compromise or discuss what would be necessary to include a flag somewhere deep in gcnonf to revert the behavior is met with a resounding "we're not interested in that feature". Which is fine, but don't keep other people from implementing a feature that they like just because it doesn't fit in with your vision. That attitude seems pretty endemic to open-source projects involving a lot of (ex) redhat engineers. It's not that the PR is being refused, it's that it's impossible to even have the discussion.
0815test 7y ago
If you don't like the current maintainers' policy on "future project direction", you can always fork the project. Yes, this involves an increased maintenance burden since you need to actively review what the upstream is doing and figure out how to cleanly pull their changes - but guess what, that's the very same burden that dealing with your proposed changes would have placed on the upstream themselves! "Authoritarianism" doesn't really come into it.
- traverseda 7y ago
  There are ways to architect software so that it can be cooperatively developed, so that you can fork and maintain an individual component instead of an entire stack.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Are those stinky SJW info-hippies getting uppity and threatening Open Source again? http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-Blog/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Eric-S.-Raymond http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruc... >The Decline and Fall of Eric S. Raymond >Around the start of the millennium, Eric S. Raymond was one of the philosophical leaders of open source. His essay and book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was obligatory reading for executives trying to understand open source. Now, after lying low for over a decade, Raymond is getting attention again, this time for two blog entries in which he rants about how so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) threaten open source. >[...] Raymond's call to defend open source from SJWs is as deceptive as anything he attributes to his enemies. Free and open source software is too widespread to need defending, and his attempt to create an issue does not map well on to actual events. For those who remember his earlier contributions to open source, his recent comments make for a disappointing epilogue.

acdha 7y ago

Do you have examples of working pull-requests which were rejected for what you consider bad reasons? I’m sympathetic to maintainers choosing not to take on additional technical debt so I’d especially be looking for things like willingness to shoulder long-term support costs and other constraints imposed by accepting a PR.

traverseda 7y ago
One thing that comes to mind is gnome's refusal to implement type-ahead in nautilus and the gtk3 file picker. It's a very popular and visible issue that I won't get into here, but suffice to say that there are a lot of people who would really like a more traditional type-ahead. There aren't any specific pull requests I'm aware of although there are forked versions available. When asked about it the developers involved just say "no", and any attempt to work on a compromise or discuss what would be necessary to include a flag somewhere deep in gcnonf to revert the behavior is met with a resounding "we're not interested in that feature". Which is fine, but don't keep other people from implementing a feature that they like just because it doesn't fit in with your vision. That attitude seems pretty endemic to open-source projects involving a lot of (ex) redhat engineers. It's not that the PR is being refused, it's that it's impossible to even have the discussion.

0815test 7y ago

If you don't like the current maintainers' policy on "future project direction", you can always fork the project. Yes, this involves an increased maintenance burden since you need to actively review what the upstream is doing and figure out how to cleanly pull their changes - but guess what, that's the very same burden that dealing with your proposed changes would have placed on the upstream themselves! "Authoritarianism" doesn't really come into it.

traverseda 7y ago
There are ways to architect software so that it can be cooperatively developed, so that you can fork and maintain an individual component instead of an entire stack.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Are those stinky SJW info-hippies getting uppity and threatening Open Source again? http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruce-Byfield-s-Blog/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Eric-S.-Raymond http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Off-the-Beat-Bruc... >The Decline and Fall of Eric S. Raymond >Around the start of the millennium, Eric S. Raymond was one of the philosophical leaders of open source. His essay and book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar was obligatory reading for executives trying to understand open source. Now, after lying low for over a decade, Raymond is getting attention again, this time for two blog entries in which he rants about how so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) threaten open source. >[...] Raymond's call to defend open source from SJWs is as deceptive as anything he attributes to his enemies. Free and open source software is too widespread to need defending, and his attempt to create an issue does not map well on to actual events. For those who remember his earlier contributions to open source, his recent comments make for a disappointing epilogue.