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I just think this isn't true. The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so; people just want

by aseipp 5y ago

I just think this isn't true. The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so; people just want to throw you patches and have you accept them and then never contribute again. Very, very few developers actually want to maintain anything. The trust barrier is also typically high. I don't just hand out a commit bit for no reason. This is all cultural, sure, but it is what it is. Maintenance isn't fun and people don't like it. From experience the ratio of random drive-by contributors to people who regularly contribute high-quality code to the point of qualifying as a "maintainer" is something like 20:1 or worse. That doesn't mean they become maintainers, just that 1 out of every 20 might have the chops, if they dedicated to it. This is true even of corporate contributors from well staffed companies; they only want me to accept the patch so they can do something else. I have literally had corporate engineers file reports to me saying "Please do this" (not maliciously, mind you) and when I respond "I don't have time", but actually knew the person in question enough to follow up with "But I would trust you to do this if I added you as a maintainer, since it's not hard", and they still rejected it as, effectively, "too much responsibility." Didn't even get to the point of whether their work would let them have time for it or not. They have no interest beyond that, I can't blame them in a sense. The idea that most projects actually have enough well-intended, frequent, sufficiently informed contributors to merit any actual "governance" structure at all beyond "Whatever the one or two authors do to make it all work" is completely detached from the reality of my own experience, is all I can say. And that's the reality for most open source projects that aren't stupidly famous, have literally zero monetary funding, and are still very important.

rectang 5y ago
Counterexample: Apache Software Foundation projects, and projects elsewhere which have adopted ASF style governance or something similar. While there is surely a long tail of Open Source projects which don't have (and shouldn't have) such a governance structure, many of the most widely used projects do. The bargain that project founders make is giving newcomers a real governance stake and thus ceding some control over the project, in order to make it worthwhile for contributors (and their employers) to invest — with some contributors eventually becoming maintainers. > The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so True. And that's perhaps why ASF-style governance has found a niche in Open Source: it provides one solution to a problem often seen as intractable.
zokier 5y ago
> The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so But the whole thread is about contributions from companies, where the employers are paid to do the companys biddinf. And while individuals might be apprehensive about doing maintenance, I see less reason for companies to want to avoid maintenance.

by aseipp 5y ago

rectang 5y ago

Counterexample: Apache Software Foundation projects, and projects elsewhere which have adopted ASF style governance or something similar. While there is surely a long tail of Open Source projects which don't have (and shouldn't have) such a governance structure, many of the most widely used projects do. The bargain that project founders make is giving newcomers a real governance stake and thus ceding some control over the project, in order to make it worthwhile for contributors (and their employers) to invest — with some contributors eventually becoming maintainers. > The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so True. And that's perhaps why ASF-style governance has found a niche in Open Source: it provides one solution to a problem often seen as intractable.

zokier 5y ago

> The reality of the situation is almost nobody actually wants to maintain anything unless they are paid to do so But the whole thread is about contributions from companies, where the employers are paid to do the companys biddinf. And while individuals might be apprehensive about doing maintenance, I see less reason for companies to want to avoid maintenance.