7 ms·

I think you've read something into my post that I didn't intend. I'm specifically talking about the community of people who do contribute. If you look at the

• purple_turtle 11mo ago
  Post explicitly makes request to all project leaders: "I'm begging project leaders everywhere". As one of them I want to state that others, including you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project. I want to express that I am thankful that this one is phrased as suggestion. But I utterly reject that open source project is substantially similar to governing a country in responsibility and preferred setup. So I reject your analogy and suggestions as highly flawed.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • glenstein 11mo ago
    I don't take it as a request that you open your process to granular shot calling or feature requests from from users. Ignore them all you want! But I would put transition/succession in a different category. Maybe in a sense requesting your project have its own life-after-death counts as "shot calling" from your perspective because it's still essentially about what "they" want rather than a sober reflection on your time/capacity/interest, but I think at least that it's different from ordinary feature requests.
    • Aperocky 11mo ago
      It does sounds like forking is the right way to go in that case. Several successful product are forked and maintained after the original author lost interest without any involvement from them.
  • shkkmo 11mo ago
    > As one of them I want to state that others, including you, are not entitled to decide how I run my project. If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a very good leader. That is, of course, your right. But if you were interested in the long term survival of your project and attracting other developers to contribute, then it behooves you to consider the desires and needs of the community of contributors. > But I utterly reject that open source project is substantially similar to governing a country in responsibility and preferred setup. "Consent of the governed" is about countries, it is about leadership and where the privilege of leadership comes from. If you are leading a software project, does your authority come from god? Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed".
    • purple_turtle 11mo ago
      > If that is the attitude that you take towards everyone who contributes to your project, then you probably aren't a very good leader. That is, of course, your right. Word "decide" was there deliberately. I am not fully opposed to consideration of suggestions made by others. Though I may consider them and reject, like here. And I will take opinions of contributors into much serious considerations than this blog post, for multiple reasons. From position of maintainer in one of projects: primary risk to the project is main author running into too many annoying people and focusing on other hobbies. And I in fact did it with one of projects. Some other maintainers also left. The same people who caused this by their entitlement are now complaining about project being stagnant. > Or does it come from the willingness of the people working on that project to listen to you? That is "consent of the governed". Major difference is that for countries if someone does not consent to decisions of ruler/parliament/etc. they have little to no recourse. It ranges from extremely hard to impossible to change law or national policies or migrate to another country. In comparison the worst case of forking open source project is much easier. Control of open source project is much weaker and people forced to contribute are fairly unusual and rare (though in such cases I would consider my responses to blog post to be not applying, my comments were more focused on hobby projects). If someone does not want to participate they may easily stop. This does massively differ from countries.
    • deleted 11mo ago
• peauc 11mo ago
  What kind of issues are you referencing with Ruby ? I have followed the Wordpress drama.
  • edent 11mo ago
    See, for example, https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/ https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
    • jeltz 11mo ago
      As far as I know that is really the only example. And to clarify it is about a struggle between who controls Rubygems and Bundler, not Ruby itself. A key component to be sure but maybe not that relevant to this discussion when the ones running the infra hijacks the GitHub project. That was an inside coup.
  • beanjuiceII 11mo ago
    he will present one side of the ruby story and use that as the moral high ground
• lapcat 11mo ago
  > If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress and Ruby, they are causing discontent within the existing organisation of contributors. This is why I think the article is a bit of misdirection. Your criticism is about project governance not about project succession. You want the leaders of WordPress and Rails to step down now because you don't like how they behave in power, not because of the danger that the leaders might die or disappear and leave a power vacuum. I feel that the Mastodon example is a red herring here.
  • edent 11mo ago
    Governance and succession are intimately tied. I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance.
    • lapcat 11mo ago
      > I feel that part of the problem with WordPress and Rails is that that there is no model for replacing poor governance. But Eugen Rochko was not replaced. He voluntarily stepped down from power because he was personally dissatisfied in the leadership role. Nobody was calling for his ouster. He could have continued as leader of Mastodon for many more years with nobody batting an eyelash. So again, Mastodon is a red herring.
    • msh 11mo ago
      There is a model, it’s called forking the code.
      • tremon 11mo ago
        Forking the code fractures the community. The discussion at hand focuses on the community, not the code.
        • cortesoft 11mo ago
          If you feel like you need to fork the code, the community is already fractured. If the community agrees with you that the original author is doing things wrong, and your new approach is better, they will move with you to the fork. If the rest of the community doesn't agree with you, they will stay. If some stay and some go, it means only some of them agreed with you. That's the thing about open source - you don't actually have to form a consensus. You can split off whenever you want.
• ecshafer 11mo ago
  Communists take over a country and millions of people die. Fascists take over and millions of people die. Wordpress is some legal issues that is going to result in a law suit and some word press developer having to work overtime. Ruby Bundler has some people losing maintainer access and some hurt feelings. Lets not compare apples and oranges here.
  • purple_turtle 11mo ago
    Or rather apples and planes. Or oranges and ICBMs.
• btilly 11mo ago
  Even if people are reading something into your post that you don't intend, they are reading it for good reason. Which is that your post sounds exactly like an attack on any technically competent person that runs an open source project. This fits squarely into a pattern that open source people deal with all of the time. Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work. The result is toxic politics that, if it is left to stand, drives away technically competent contributors. And which makes leading that project a misery. If you don't want to come across this way, you absolutely need to get rid of rhetoric like the paragraph beginning with, "The last year has seen several BDFLs act like Mad Kings." Anyone who has encountered this antipattern will see exactly what that leads to. It is a rhetorical club that can be levied against any technically competent person who objects to something based on technical concerns. The self-proclaimed "community leader" doesn't need to address those technical concerns. They just need to imply the ad hominem. Suggest that the contributor is the would-be Mad King. There are a number of ways that this can end. All of them are bad. Now I'm not saying that you are bringing up an unimportant issue. But you REALLY need to check your tone if you wish to convince the people that you are supposedly addressing.
  • travisgriggs 11mo ago
    > Namely that someone tries to gain control of a project by appeals to "community", while subtly insulting the people who actually did the work. Lately, I’ve taken to labelling these different behaviors with D words: Doers, Discussers, Deciders, etc. It’s amazing to me how often people want to create a specialty for themselves, where the doing is relegated to the doers, but all the doing is dictated by others. This happens in businesses, NGOs, communities, churches, just about everywhere.
    • btilly 11mo ago
      It isn't amazing when you see how it tends to work out for those who succeed in a corporate context. There is a natural competition to become an "idea person" in an organization. If the project goes well, the idea person gets the credit. If the project goes poorly, the people who actually built it get the blame. And it takes far less work to produce promising ideas, than to actually build stuff. The result is that succeeding in getting other people to implement your ideas becomes a fast track to promotion. Unfortunately, the farther that you get from the actual implementation, the worse your ideas get. Compounding that is the fact that the ideas that convince executives far too often are the ones that play buzzword bingo in the right way, rather than the ones which are grounded in pragmatism. This is why I've learned to be suspicious of anyone with a job title of "architect". Some are amazingly good. But most that I've dealt with, are decidedly not. But when you hear them talk about it, they always sound like they are amazing.
• trueismywork 11mo ago
  Even those contributors are not entitled to anything apart from what the license allows. Recent events like terraform-opentofu have shown that the actual name has no moat. People will migrate quickly to where rhe community is. So as long as license is good and there's no CLA, everything is fine.
• msteffen 11mo ago
  In support of your point, after Hashicorp relicensed Terraform (thereby killing, or at least squeezing, a lot of Terraform consultancies who had collectively contributed a massive amount to Terraform and prompting the creation of OpenTofu), Oxide and Friends spent several episodes discussing what was reasonable for open source maintainers to do. They had a great discussion with Kelsey Hightower about it[^1], and his answer (which I liked a lot) was basically just that maintainers’ only real obligation was to be transparent about governance. If you want to be a dictator and ignore bugs and contributions that aren’t personally compelling to you, that’s fine—but please just put that in the repo. That way, people who are trying to build a business on open source work and want customers, or to build trust with users for any other reason, can distinguish themselves from maintainers that don’t care (as is their right). Otherwise the reputation of Open Source as a whole suffers. [^1]: The whole episode is good but here’s the part where Kelsey argues that people just need to be transparent: https://youtu.be/13ctYOu8TsA?si=cI8TwHX6tAaCwH6o&t=1320 https://youtu.be/13ctYOu8TsA?si=cI8TwHX6tAaCwH6o&t=1320