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On Citizenship in open-source software development

205 points by christophe971 13y ago

alttab 13y ago
I still think there should be one maintainer with absolute control. Otherwise, "citizens" could take away someone's open source project with "democracy" or mob rule. Imagine building something you are incredibly proud of to grow legs and walk away before you wanted it to.
- wmf 13y ago
  People who equate open source (really peer production, but they don't understand the difference) with democracy always forget that in democracy the citizens have to pay taxes.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    You pay taxes for government, regardless of how democratic it is or isn't, not for democracy.
- vidarh 13y ago
  "Absolute control" is gone the moment you make something open source. Even if Github doesn't make it easy, nothing stops anyone from forking your projects and convincing people to work on his fork instead other than social conventions. But social conventions are strong.
- masukomi 13y ago
  that's not a problem with this proposal. All pull requests approved by the community end up in a non-master branch. The officially sanctioned version (master ) would remain untouched until the maintainer merged in the community changes.
- saraid216 13y ago
  I don't think I'll ever stop being awestruck by the amount of fear the average hacker expresses when confronted by even the slightest democratic concept.
  - yarrel 13y ago
    You work at a co-op?
oelmekki 13y ago
Great idea. Maybe a quick fix for that, before implementing such a different change, would be to automatically point to the most active fork in project description when there hasn't been activity for a while. Being able to accept in a fork a PR made in upstream would be great, too.
- ewheeler 13y ago
  Agreed. And this wouldn't have to wait for github to implement. Perhaps its possible to create a webservice that could examine the forks in a network graph to identify the most active fork -- and provide a url for the repository that resolves to this most active fork. Something like bestfork.com/reponame --> github.com/newmaintainer/reponame EDIT to be more precise, my example github link should read github.com/defactomaintainer/reponame
- brendanobrien 13y ago
  +1 I think many of us would pitch in on a hacked-together version of this just hosted on github. The repo that builds this out could itself be a testing ground for the project.
julien_c 13y ago
If you add karma to Github you’ll need to actually turn it into a currency that you can buy/sell/exchange/etc.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  I'm not really sold on this idea, and if it ends up getting implemented, it should definitely be on a per-repo basis. I might very well turn something like this off, so the "karma" should only exist within the sphere of a repo or (forked) project. This would just lead to a StackExchange-like gamification of the whole system.
  - garretruh 13y ago
    Agreed. A dev with 100s of "karma points" on a certain PHP project should start at 0 on other projects (both of the same and different languages).
jjm 13y ago
I got so much flack for suggesting a year ago on a repo. The 'maintainer' came back with the point that he/she gave commit access to everyone-ish. The problem with that is you will get very aggressive individuals who will commit, and then others who will revert and this cat<->mouse game continues on until the community suffers, the project dead. Just some food for thought. I think all these experiments are worthy. Who knows what will happen but lets try.
- oelmekki 13y ago
  > The problem with that is you will get very aggressive individuals who will commit, and then others who will revert and this cat<->mouse game continues on until the community suffers, the project dead. Which is exactly how wikipedia works (with the concept of admins who can protect pages, though). I wonder if this could apply to FOSS development.
  - Tobu 13y ago
    doesn't work. Edit wars and arbitrative administrativia are a major social problem on Wikipedia, and it has a problem retaining contributors.
- j_s 13y ago
  The Pull Request Hack https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417
- saraid216 13y ago
  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.ht...
- smsm42 13y ago
  If the community is not functional - i.e. people can't find consensus on patches - I don't think automatic solution can fix it. It can enable functioning community to handle things better - i.e., enable to hold votes more efficiently if the community is into voting, or enable to process patches more quickly if it's ok for the community to merge them. But if some people want the patch in and some want it out, automatic merge is not going to solve it - only to piss off those who want it out and alienate them from the project. And give others feeling that it's ok to force decisions through without hearing out the others.
kmfrk 13y ago
On a more meta note, I find the channel of feedback and suggestions to GitHub to be virtually non-existent. I see plenty of great suggestions, and I myself have come up with a few, but they always end up as faint echoes leading to nothing. I find this particularly sad for a company that's marketed at being all about "open", participatory, community-driven, etc. The unreadable feeds on GitHub are emblematic of this problem. EDIT: Ditto for the Issues system, which scales really poorly. GitHub's a lot like Twitter in that, and I think it's a real shame. It discourages suggestions like these, in my opinion.
- Serow225 13y ago
  I've had good luck by just emailing support@github.com; they told me that this is their preferred way to submit suggestions/feature requests.
neilxdsouza 13y ago
Or try and make github/bitbucket into something like an open source app store. Provide features to allow project creators/developers to build a business model around their own projects. Not all can be commercialized but I am sure some can be - having a support business model. This could be on lines similar to nginx/varnish etc. Sourceforge tried sometthing like this, but maybe there were flaws in how they tried to implement it. You would need something like an SLA created once which can be shared by similar projects and have project leaders/communities (OSS Project leaders/communities) use variations of it which they use to provide support for their customers. All fee collections/payments etc happen through a github/bitbucket gateway.
trumbitta2 13y ago
Actually I think this is the project for another service. GitHub would put too much at risk in following such a huge change in its core. Really, this is a good idea, for a competitor.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- kmfrk 13y ago
  There are two sides to this: a problem and a suggested solution. People abandoning projects are a real problem. One way to go about it is to give all the people watching it a notice when the repo owner hasn't interacted with the repo in, let's just say, three months. They could just leave it at that, or they could add a post mortem note with the most popular forks, or call for a vote for the unofficial official replacement repo. The problem is real, but like you, I don't like the suggested solution all that much.
  - pnathan 13y ago
    > People abandoning projects are a real problem This is a real problem, and I hope Github tries to address it before it becomes a desolate wasteland in 5-10 years. :-)
sanj 13y ago
Isn't this the model that Linus Torvalds (effectively) uses with Linux? He ultimately is the maintainer, but delegates responsibilities to trusted individuals for large chunks of the codebase. And they gain that responsibility based on prior work.
- ninkendo 13y ago
  Well, Linus still ultimately pulls from his lieutenants' repos though. Nobody has direct push access to Linus's repository but Linus (if I recall, at least.) That's functionally equivalent to github's pull request system. What's better about Linux is the fact that Linus cares enough to keep things up to date and have a functioning release process with freezes, etc. All of that can be done in github, it just requires maintainers to put in the effort.
magic_man 13y ago
If owner has abandoned his project why not fork it and fix it yourself?
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever. And because your fork, by definition, has diverged from "the mainline" because there really isn't any "mainline" anymore. You might have 2 or 3 or 10 or 100 other people who also forked just to fix one random bug or whatever, but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Best case, one of the forks clearly emerges as "the" new primary repo and everybody shifts their focus there. But that doesn't always happen. It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. Of course, one could argue that this state of affairs is still better than the "old way" where forking a project was a very heavyweight process and rarely happened at all. But that doesn't mean the current model couldn't be improved further. Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have.
  - christophe971 13y ago
    Perfect answer.
  - Sander_Marechal 13y ago
    > but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream.
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream. IMO, yes. Providing some kind of mechanism to make it easier to gain cohesion between all the disparate forks is definitely at least part of the answer. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this, though, and I don't pretend to have any real concrete suggestion in mind.
amalag 13y ago
I think this could be a great opt-in feature.
bryanlarsen 13y ago
What should happen is that is that the BDFL (aka king) should appoint a successor if they cannot give a project the attention that it deserves. I've seen this happen successfully many times, and have never seen the "wrong" person chosen. The problem is that this doesn't happen often enough. It's a very difficult thing to do, putting your baby up for adoption. So what GitHub should do is a little bit of social engineering to encourage inactive maintainers to bless a fork. It's more than that, of course: you have to ask somebody if they're willing to step up. It's unlikely that one of the forks is comprehensive but there are likely people that would be willing to make their fork comprehensive rather than see the project abandoned. Handing over the reigns to a committee does not work very well, in my experience. It's better than abandonment, but that's all you can say about it.
- oskarth 13y ago
  What about an email saying something like Looks like you haven't been very active on project <foo> lately, <bar>. Would you like to hand your baby over to <baz> or <quux> perhaps? where baz and quux are people who have been ranked as being most active in the given repo. EDIT: With a click here to hand over your repo to someone else (and lift that heavy burden off your shoulder), obviously.
  - ckdarby 13y ago
    There's no call to action. Someone (including myself) will open the email, realize there's no immediate call to action and be like, "Ya I'll get to that" and nothing will ever happen.
    - masukomi 13y ago
      Also, without something like the proposed citizenship with karma points and such, there's no good way for an automated system to suggest someone to turn it over to .
      - smsm42 13y ago
apalmer 13y ago
Ummmm, this seems like mental master-BEEP(watch your mouth shaft) Core redesign of GitHub's product from hosted source control repository to Open Source social construct. This seems like a completely different product from GitHubs core.
- ericb 13y ago
  This could be a totally optional mode, but a default.
- Tobu 13y ago
  GitHub might provide mechanism, but there is way too much policy in these proposals. Much of it could be implemented outside, though. If it's successful GitHub might take steps to remain the centre of gravity.
mrilhan 13y ago
I think almost every active user has something they want from GitHub, so I thought I'd get this off my chest in the comments: Personally, I use Issues a lot, and if it would be great to be able to upload any file related to that issue. I understand how that could be costly, and you might not want to push such a potentially complicated feature onto your 3.4m. So: - Let the majority use your free (meaning no-extra-costs) storage with current limitations. - Add a tab under the repo settings labeled 'File Storage' - Under Repo X > Settings > File Storage, let me use my own S3 key/bucket pair for that repository's Issues files. (Example: PSD, .zip/.rar/.tar/.bz2, etc related to the project.) Thanks for listening.
MetaCosm 13y ago
Article would have been MUCH better if he showed actual examples of these problems (specific github repos, dates, current state). Beyond that, I think Github fits the natural tendency of projects to be heavily driven by a small number of individuals. The idea of democratization is often silly on open source projects because the level of merit between individuals varies massively.
- davidw 13y ago
  > actual examples of these problems I think anyone who uses github enough has run into more than a few. Look at github's very own fork of one project: https://github.com/github/aws-s3/tree/url_for-with-parameters https://github.com/github/aws-s3/tree/url_for-with-parameter... https://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/304972225411440641 https://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/304972225411440641
gcb0 13y ago
1. Gets lots of karma from silly/fake projects 2. Send in a PR to a high profile project with obfuscated malicious code 3. ??? 4. Profit.
- BCM43 13y ago
  Why can't you do this now?
  - gvc 13y ago
    Yeah, I'm not really sure what his point was with that. It's not that the article proposes a god github account that call push to any repo without being watched.
  - gcb0 13y ago
    because you either have to: - convince everyone that your fork is better - pass the obfuscated code by the project owner who is very knowledgeable of the code base he started.
- roryokane 13y ago
  You can avoid this problem by making karma repo-local.
postfuturist 13y ago
"automatic merging" upon consensus -- had to laugh at this idea, the ratio of merge requests that would merge cleanly, automatically is low. Generally they have to be rebased against the exact branch they are to be merged against with human intervention to rectify not only merge conflicts and broken tests but possible interaction issues with recent changes on master branch. In any case, arbitrary changes can (and sometimes should) be made to bring the branch in line with the main code. So branch merges that were "voted in" still need human intervention to merge. Should that then be re-voted on, given that merges and conflict-resolved rebases/merges can include arbitrary changes? Obviously, but what if more changes go into the target branch while folks are getting around to ratifying the rebased merge branch? There still needs to be trusted "merge officers" or whatever who can and will clean up, test, and merge popular branches which were voted on. You can't get around that.
- saidajigumi 13y ago
  As the maintainer of an an alternately alive/not-really-alive github-based project, a problem with changes being voted in is that many submitted PRs are of fairly low quality. Just because an idea is needed by the consumers of a project doesn't mean that any given implementation will be satisfactory. Many voters will tend to be uncritical and/or have different standards. E.g. did the submitted change include tests? Did it pass existing tests? Did it implement a feature that was actually needed (e.g. did it solve a "docs" bug via a "code" patch)? Bikeshedding over existing functionality? The list goes on. I'll also note that GitHub's great CI integration support (used by Travis CI, the Jenkins GitHub plugin, etc.) can significantly aid the proposals in TFA. E.g. a PR that doesn't pass CI would automatically be ineligible for merging.
tmorton 13y ago
Should this be handled by Github? Package systems like RubyGems seem like the natural point to designate an "owner" of a library.
- tracker1 13y ago
  I agree for the most part... as long as that package system has a way of rolling to a new maintainer because of action/inaction of the old maintainer.
- jmmcd 13y ago
  Yes this is a crucial point. For most end users, the version on PyPI, CPAN, RubyGems, whatever, is the canonical version. Only the original author has the right to push a new release there. So whatever solution Github and/or its community comes up with for the overall issue, it needs to take account of this.
qdot76367 13y ago
I run a lot of projects on github (http://github.com/qdot http://github.com/qdot). Probably way too many, especially since it's mostly weird device drivers, which means I don't have a lot of people stopping by to help because the learning curve is kinda steep. This means I tend to have things bitrot as I move on to new and different hardware. The problem is, hardware never dies, it just gets discontinued, its ebay price rises, and the people using it get more and more zealoty as the ranks of users are pared down to those who REALLY require whatever hardware it is. So any time I release a driver, I expect to get email from that point until the end of time. Which sucks, 'cause I have serious project ADD and get bored quick. Here's two things I've come up with to help the situation in what little ways I can. I've started releasing all software I think might require further community maintenance under an organization instead of my personal account. For instance, I've got a bunch of health device drivers that I wrote, many of which I don't care about anymore. Instead of letting them rot on my personal account, I opened an org for them (http://github.com/openyou http://github.com/openyou). This means I can still have a part on the projects, as well as fork back to my personal account to keep pull request workflows going, but if community wants to come along and work on it, I just add them to the org, give them the perms, and we're good. Having the projects on the org makes things look a bit more "open" then just having it sit on my personal account. I'm also trying to live in all parts of the cycle. This means if I find a project that's gone quiet that I still use (and I can't get ahold of the author, or if I can, get the authors permission, which hasn't been a problem thus far), I'll create an org, fork to the org, find people in the issues lists that have things that haven't been resolved, and reach out to see if I can get a community group started for new maintenance. This seems to work out well.
shahjigar 13y ago
I think github is moving there... Currently it has graph on individual's profile that tells what he has contributed. - Something like OpenBadges can be added to "top contributor to repo" etc. One can compare fork and see age of the same. So say original contributor is no longer maintaining it, one can check fork. Visually. - A good value addition could be showing it somehow on front page. Issue voting - Yes, number of people watching could be good. My addition would be - Explicit mention of license mention on landing page. like google-code - tags like google-code
incompatible 13y ago
Voting seems unattractive to me. If I trusted somebody and had enough respect for their work to give them commit access to a repo of mine, then I'd also trust them to merge whatever 3rd party patches they wanted. No point in tying things up with a slow layer of democracy. I can imagine having problems getting people to bother to vote at all on work they have no interest in. Actually I don't have my own repos these days, but it's irritating to me how large the barriers to contribution really are in the free software world. We have complicated software, often more complicated that it should be, written in all kinds of different languages and frameworks, to the point that just finding the latest sources, getting the dependencies, figuring out how to build it is hard enough, then also understanding it well enough to make your changes, and then also dealing with the idiosyncrasies of whatever person or group is maintaining the thing, to actually get a patch accepted. It's not easy even for a decent programmer.

205 points by christophe971 13y ago

I still think there should be one maintainer with absolute control. Otherwise, "citizens" could take away someone's open source project with "democracy" or mob rule. Imagine building something you are incredibly proud of to grow legs and walk away before you wanted it to.

wmf 13y ago
People who equate open source (really peer production, but they don't understand the difference) with democracy always forget that in democracy the citizens have to pay taxes.
- stormbrew 13y ago
  You pay taxes for government, regardless of how democratic it is or isn't, not for democracy.
vidarh 13y ago
"Absolute control" is gone the moment you make something open source. Even if Github doesn't make it easy, nothing stops anyone from forking your projects and convincing people to work on his fork instead other than social conventions. But social conventions are strong.
masukomi 13y ago
that's not a problem with this proposal. All pull requests approved by the community end up in a non-master branch. The officially sanctioned version (master ) would remain untouched until the maintainer merged in the community changes.
saraid216 13y ago
I don't think I'll ever stop being awestruck by the amount of fear the average hacker expresses when confronted by even the slightest democratic concept.
- yarrel 13y ago
  You work at a co-op?

oelmekki 13y ago

Great idea. Maybe a quick fix for that, before implementing such a different change, would be to automatically point to the most active fork in project description when there hasn't been activity for a while. Being able to accept in a fork a PR made in upstream would be great, too.

ewheeler 13y ago
Agreed. And this wouldn't have to wait for github to implement. Perhaps its possible to create a webservice that could examine the forks in a network graph to identify the most active fork -- and provide a url for the repository that resolves to this most active fork. Something like bestfork.com/reponame --> github.com/newmaintainer/reponame EDIT to be more precise, my example github link should read github.com/defactomaintainer/reponame
brendanobrien 13y ago
+1 I think many of us would pitch in on a hacked-together version of this just hosted on github. The repo that builds this out could itself be a testing ground for the project.

julien_c 13y ago

If you add karma to Github you’ll need to actually turn it into a currency that you can buy/sell/exchange/etc.

kmfrk 13y ago
I'm not really sold on this idea, and if it ends up getting implemented, it should definitely be on a per-repo basis. I might very well turn something like this off, so the "karma" should only exist within the sphere of a repo or (forked) project. This would just lead to a StackExchange-like gamification of the whole system.
- garretruh 13y ago
  Agreed. A dev with 100s of "karma points" on a certain PHP project should start at 0 on other projects (both of the same and different languages).

jjm 13y ago

I got so much flack for suggesting a year ago on a repo. The 'maintainer' came back with the point that he/she gave commit access to everyone-ish. The problem with that is you will get very aggressive individuals who will commit, and then others who will revert and this cat<->mouse game continues on until the community suffers, the project dead. Just some food for thought. I think all these experiments are worthy. Who knows what will happen but lets try.

oelmekki 13y ago
> The problem with that is you will get very aggressive individuals who will commit, and then others who will revert and this cat<->mouse game continues on until the community suffers, the project dead. Which is exactly how wikipedia works (with the concept of admins who can protect pages, though). I wonder if this could apply to FOSS development.
- Tobu 13y ago
  doesn't work. Edit wars and arbitrative administrativia are a major social problem on Wikipedia, and it has a problem retaining contributors.
j_s 13y ago
The Pull Request Hack https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417
saraid216 13y ago
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.ht...
smsm42 13y ago
If the community is not functional - i.e. people can't find consensus on patches - I don't think automatic solution can fix it. It can enable functioning community to handle things better - i.e., enable to hold votes more efficiently if the community is into voting, or enable to process patches more quickly if it's ok for the community to merge them. But if some people want the patch in and some want it out, automatic merge is not going to solve it - only to piss off those who want it out and alienate them from the project. And give others feeling that it's ok to force decisions through without hearing out the others.

kmfrk 13y ago

On a more meta note, I find the channel of feedback and suggestions to GitHub to be virtually non-existent. I see plenty of great suggestions, and I myself have come up with a few, but they always end up as faint echoes leading to nothing. I find this particularly sad for a company that's marketed at being all about "open", participatory, community-driven, etc. The unreadable feeds on GitHub are emblematic of this problem. EDIT: Ditto for the Issues system, which scales really poorly. GitHub's a lot like Twitter in that, and I think it's a real shame. It discourages suggestions like these, in my opinion.

Serow225 13y ago
I've had good luck by just emailing support@github.com; they told me that this is their preferred way to submit suggestions/feature requests.

neilxdsouza 13y ago

Or try and make github/bitbucket into something like an open source app store. Provide features to allow project creators/developers to build a business model around their own projects. Not all can be commercialized but I am sure some can be - having a support business model. This could be on lines similar to nginx/varnish etc. Sourceforge tried sometthing like this, but maybe there were flaws in how they tried to implement it. You would need something like an SLA created once which can be shared by similar projects and have project leaders/communities (OSS Project leaders/communities) use variations of it which they use to provide support for their customers. All fee collections/payments etc happen through a github/bitbucket gateway.

trumbitta2 13y ago

Actually I think this is the project for another service. GitHub would put too much at risk in following such a huge change in its core. Really, this is a good idea, for a competitor.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
kmfrk 13y ago
There are two sides to this: a problem and a suggested solution. People abandoning projects are a real problem. One way to go about it is to give all the people watching it a notice when the repo owner hasn't interacted with the repo in, let's just say, three months. They could just leave it at that, or they could add a post mortem note with the most popular forks, or call for a vote for the unofficial official replacement repo. The problem is real, but like you, I don't like the suggested solution all that much.
- pnathan 13y ago
  > People abandoning projects are a real problem This is a real problem, and I hope Github tries to address it before it becomes a desolate wasteland in 5-10 years. :-)

sanj 13y ago

Isn't this the model that Linus Torvalds (effectively) uses with Linux? He ultimately is the maintainer, but delegates responsibilities to trusted individuals for large chunks of the codebase. And they gain that responsibility based on prior work.

ninkendo 13y ago
Well, Linus still ultimately pulls from his lieutenants' repos though. Nobody has direct push access to Linus's repository but Linus (if I recall, at least.) That's functionally equivalent to github's pull request system. What's better about Linux is the fact that Linus cares enough to keep things up to date and have a functioning release process with freezes, etc. All of that can be done in github, it just requires maintainers to put in the effort.

magic_man 13y ago

If owner has abandoned his project why not fork it and fix it yourself?

mindcrime 13y ago
Because now you're on the hook to maintain that fork forever. And because your fork, by definition, has diverged from "the mainline" because there really isn't any "mainline" anymore. You might have 2 or 3 or 10 or 100 other people who also forked just to fix one random bug or whatever, but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Best case, one of the forks clearly emerges as "the" new primary repo and everybody shifts their focus there. But that doesn't always happen. It's a real problem with the fork-centric model that Github promotes. Of course, one could argue that this state of affairs is still better than the "old way" where forking a project was a very heavyweight process and rarely happened at all. But that doesn't mean the current model couldn't be improved further. Is this Citizenship idea the right way? I don't know, but - at worst - it's a good discussion to have.
- christophe971 13y ago
  Perfect answer.
- Sander_Marechal 13y ago
  > but there's no real cohesion or interaction between all these isolated forks. Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Isn't this the real issue that should be fixed then? Some way when you form a repo, you get notice of all the forks and PR's of the original repo, giving you the possibility to merge everyone's work and become the defacto upstream. IMO, yes. Providing some kind of mechanism to make it easier to gain cohesion between all the disparate forks is definitely at least part of the answer. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this, though, and I don't pretend to have any real concrete suggestion in mind.

amalag 13y ago

I think this could be a great opt-in feature.

bryanlarsen 13y ago

What should happen is that is that the BDFL (aka king) should appoint a successor if they cannot give a project the attention that it deserves. I've seen this happen successfully many times, and have never seen the "wrong" person chosen. The problem is that this doesn't happen often enough. It's a very difficult thing to do, putting your baby up for adoption. So what GitHub should do is a little bit of social engineering to encourage inactive maintainers to bless a fork. It's more than that, of course: you have to ask somebody if they're willing to step up. It's unlikely that one of the forks is comprehensive but there are likely people that would be willing to make their fork comprehensive rather than see the project abandoned. Handing over the reigns to a committee does not work very well, in my experience. It's better than abandonment, but that's all you can say about it.

oskarth 13y ago
What about an email saying something like Looks like you haven't been very active on project <foo> lately, <bar>. Would you like to hand your baby over to <baz> or <quux> perhaps? where baz and quux are people who have been ranked as being most active in the given repo. EDIT: With a click here to hand over your repo to someone else (and lift that heavy burden off your shoulder), obviously.
- ckdarby 13y ago
  There's no call to action. Someone (including myself) will open the email, realize there's no immediate call to action and be like, "Ya I'll get to that" and nothing will ever happen.
  - masukomi 13y ago
    Also, without something like the proposed citizenship with karma points and such, there's no good way for an automated system to suggest someone to turn it over to .
    - smsm42 13y ago

apalmer 13y ago

Ummmm, this seems like mental master-BEEP(watch your mouth shaft) Core redesign of GitHub's product from hosted source control repository to Open Source social construct. This seems like a completely different product from GitHubs core.

ericb 13y ago
This could be a totally optional mode, but a default.
Tobu 13y ago
GitHub might provide mechanism, but there is way too much policy in these proposals. Much of it could be implemented outside, though. If it's successful GitHub might take steps to remain the centre of gravity.

mrilhan 13y ago

I think almost every active user has something they want from GitHub, so I thought I'd get this off my chest in the comments: Personally, I use Issues a lot, and if it would be great to be able to upload any file related to that issue. I understand how that could be costly, and you might not want to push such a potentially complicated feature onto your 3.4m. So: - Let the majority use your free (meaning no-extra-costs) storage with current limitations. - Add a tab under the repo settings labeled 'File Storage' - Under Repo X > Settings > File Storage, let me use my own S3 key/bucket pair for that repository's Issues files. (Example: PSD, .zip/.rar/.tar/.bz2, etc related to the project.) Thanks for listening.

MetaCosm 13y ago

Article would have been MUCH better if he showed actual examples of these problems (specific github repos, dates, current state). Beyond that, I think Github fits the natural tendency of projects to be heavily driven by a small number of individuals. The idea of democratization is often silly on open source projects because the level of merit between individuals varies massively.

davidw 13y ago
> actual examples of these problems I think anyone who uses github enough has run into more than a few. Look at github's very own fork of one project: https://github.com/github/aws-s3/tree/url_for-with-parameters https://github.com/github/aws-s3/tree/url_for-with-parameter... https://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/304972225411440641 https://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/304972225411440641

gcb0 13y ago

1. Gets lots of karma from silly/fake projects 2. Send in a PR to a high profile project with obfuscated malicious code 3. ??? 4. Profit.

BCM43 13y ago
Why can't you do this now?
- gvc 13y ago
  Yeah, I'm not really sure what his point was with that. It's not that the article proposes a god github account that call push to any repo without being watched.
- gcb0 13y ago
  because you either have to: - convince everyone that your fork is better - pass the obfuscated code by the project owner who is very knowledgeable of the code base he started.
roryokane 13y ago
You can avoid this problem by making karma repo-local.

postfuturist 13y ago

"automatic merging" upon consensus -- had to laugh at this idea, the ratio of merge requests that would merge cleanly, automatically is low. Generally they have to be rebased against the exact branch they are to be merged against with human intervention to rectify not only merge conflicts and broken tests but possible interaction issues with recent changes on master branch. In any case, arbitrary changes can (and sometimes should) be made to bring the branch in line with the main code. So branch merges that were "voted in" still need human intervention to merge. Should that then be re-voted on, given that merges and conflict-resolved rebases/merges can include arbitrary changes? Obviously, but what if more changes go into the target branch while folks are getting around to ratifying the rebased merge branch? There still needs to be trusted "merge officers" or whatever who can and will clean up, test, and merge popular branches which were voted on. You can't get around that.

saidajigumi 13y ago
As the maintainer of an an alternately alive/not-really-alive github-based project, a problem with changes being voted in is that many submitted PRs are of fairly low quality. Just because an idea is needed by the consumers of a project doesn't mean that any given implementation will be satisfactory. Many voters will tend to be uncritical and/or have different standards. E.g. did the submitted change include tests? Did it pass existing tests? Did it implement a feature that was actually needed (e.g. did it solve a "docs" bug via a "code" patch)? Bikeshedding over existing functionality? The list goes on. I'll also note that GitHub's great CI integration support (used by Travis CI, the Jenkins GitHub plugin, etc.) can significantly aid the proposals in TFA. E.g. a PR that doesn't pass CI would automatically be ineligible for merging.

tmorton 13y ago

Should this be handled by Github? Package systems like RubyGems seem like the natural point to designate an "owner" of a library.

tracker1 13y ago
I agree for the most part... as long as that package system has a way of rolling to a new maintainer because of action/inaction of the old maintainer.
jmmcd 13y ago
Yes this is a crucial point. For most end users, the version on PyPI, CPAN, RubyGems, whatever, is the canonical version. Only the original author has the right to push a new release there. So whatever solution Github and/or its community comes up with for the overall issue, it needs to take account of this.

qdot76367 13y ago

I run a lot of projects on github (http://github.com/qdot http://github.com/qdot). Probably way too many, especially since it's mostly weird device drivers, which means I don't have a lot of people stopping by to help because the learning curve is kinda steep. This means I tend to have things bitrot as I move on to new and different hardware. The problem is, hardware never dies, it just gets discontinued, its ebay price rises, and the people using it get more and more zealoty as the ranks of users are pared down to those who REALLY require whatever hardware it is. So any time I release a driver, I expect to get email from that point until the end of time. Which sucks, 'cause I have serious project ADD and get bored quick. Here's two things I've come up with to help the situation in what little ways I can. I've started releasing all software I think might require further community maintenance under an organization instead of my personal account. For instance, I've got a bunch of health device drivers that I wrote, many of which I don't care about anymore. Instead of letting them rot on my personal account, I opened an org for them (http://github.com/openyou http://github.com/openyou). This means I can still have a part on the projects, as well as fork back to my personal account to keep pull request workflows going, but if community wants to come along and work on it, I just add them to the org, give them the perms, and we're good. Having the projects on the org makes things look a bit more "open" then just having it sit on my personal account. I'm also trying to live in all parts of the cycle. This means if I find a project that's gone quiet that I still use (and I can't get ahold of the author, or if I can, get the authors permission, which hasn't been a problem thus far), I'll create an org, fork to the org, find people in the issues lists that have things that haven't been resolved, and reach out to see if I can get a community group started for new maintenance. This seems to work out well.

shahjigar 13y ago

I think github is moving there... Currently it has graph on individual's profile that tells what he has contributed. - Something like OpenBadges can be added to "top contributor to repo" etc. One can compare fork and see age of the same. So say original contributor is no longer maintaining it, one can check fork. Visually. - A good value addition could be showing it somehow on front page. Issue voting - Yes, number of people watching could be good. My addition would be - Explicit mention of license mention on landing page. like google-code - tags like google-code

incompatible 13y ago

Voting seems unattractive to me. If I trusted somebody and had enough respect for their work to give them commit access to a repo of mine, then I'd also trust them to merge whatever 3rd party patches they wanted. No point in tying things up with a slow layer of democracy. I can imagine having problems getting people to bother to vote at all on work they have no interest in. Actually I don't have my own repos these days, but it's irritating to me how large the barriers to contribution really are in the free software world. We have complicated software, often more complicated that it should be, written in all kinds of different languages and frameworks, to the point that just finding the latest sources, getting the dependencies, figuring out how to build it is hard enough, then also understanding it well enough to make your changes, and then also dealing with the idiosyncrasies of whatever person or group is maintaining the thing, to actually get a patch accepted. It's not easy even for a decent programmer.