never was a democracy, but when they lay out roadmaps and miss ideas by months, years, over a decade with no end or compromise in site you start to wonder if this is something you should rely on....
never was a democracy, but when they lay out roadmaps and miss ideas by months, years, over a decade with no end or compromise in site you start to wonder if this is something you should rely on.
But the reason this doesn't resolve the tension is that it still relies on showing up and doing the work. And there just so happens to be far fewer individuals willing and capable of doing that than there are individuals who wish they had a say on the direction of their favorite software.
Likewise, it can be weird that some FOSS repos are run like a dictatorship. So you put off the 'few willing and capable of doing work". Nothing worse than trying to contribute and it feels like you're talking to a brick wall for weeks over some trivial l10 line bug fix that was marked as "good first contribution". Like, do you want contributors or not? I can only imagine the bureaucracy for a meaningful feature introduction at that rate.
I completetly understand the entitlement issue. I've seen it for myself at work which has parts of the product as FOSS. But you can't let those bad apples burn you off anyone who wants to sincerely try to help in their free time.
Community is tricky. If you get more than a few people together under a common goal, community will surely form. That's just the nature of spending so much time with another human (that isn't instantly repulsive, and online forums help with that) . The dictionary definition supports this:
A group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
I believe Dave is in the EU, so their interpretation makes sense but also completely clashes with my own societal conditioning:
community implies that we're all participating on some degree of equal footing in the work required to further the welfare of the group
I sort of yearn for that, but community in the US society never implies this. In fact a leader of some sort doing much of the work always seems to arise in communities in my experience.
In more holistic sense, I also don't think a new contributor would ever think they have as much sway as a founder or core contributor. But they still want to try to help, not be shut down at the door with little explanation.
Maybe ecosystem is in fact a better term, but also feels a bit dehumanizing in a way. As if I must do battle and devour in order to rise to the ranks of core contributor, instead of working together, gaining appreciation for the subtleties, and increasing my knowledge base to do more.
Yea generally if you don't see contributions in over 4 years you can assume the project is either finished or dead. Finished being a very rare state anymore, but you occasionally come across one...
compromise in site you start to wonder if this is something you should rely on
Yea generally if you don't see contributions in over 4 years you can assume the project is either finished or dead. Finished being a very rare state anymore, but you occasionally come across one that could be considered as such. Like a system-deps-only python or bash script...unless there's a breakage with a major version update, it could be left as-is for 20 years.
Timelines and milestones I wouldn't trust even from big tech players, let alone somebody's hobby project.
yeah. I'm very patient with this stuff because I understand that this is run for many on the side. But outdated roadmaps and seemingly minimal progress doesn't encourage me as a repo that wants...
Timelines and milestones I wouldn't trust even from big tech players, let alone somebody's hobby project.
yeah. I'm very patient with this stuff because I understand that this is run for many on the side. But outdated roadmaps and seemingly minimal progress doesn't encourage me as a repo that wants contributions, let alone expectations of being actively maintained and updated.
I think you’re getting at another tension, which is how do you judge an open source project as a user, and what is the relationship between users and maintainers? I have decidedly mixed feelings...
I think you’re getting at another tension, which is how do you judge an open source project as a user, and what is the relationship between users and maintainers?
I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. As a user, I look for libraries that are popular, well documented, and actively maintained. I don’t think that’s any different from anyone else.
As an author, my somewhat facetious motto is “more users, more problems.” It’s not entirely serious because my current project has zero users and I wouldn’t mind hearing from people who tried it out. But it’s nice to make changes without worrying about users.
If you pick projects based on popularity, is it any wonder that your feedback doesn’t get much response? The maintainers are likely overwhelmed with suggestions from strangers.
Often an open source project’s website is pretty misleading about whether it’s ready for users, what sort of users they would want feedback from, and so on. A reader gets the impression that they want users and want feedback, but often it’s not entirely true.
To clarify, I don't expect prompt responses like I do from work. If there was at least some github equivalent of 'seen' status and the contributions.txt would say "expect to wait X time for a...
If you pick projects based on popularity, is it any wonder that your feedback doesn’t get much response? The maintainers are likely overwhelmed with suggestions from strangers.
To clarify, I don't expect prompt responses like I do from work. If there was at least some github equivalent of 'seen' status and the contributions.txt would say "expect to wait X time for a review", that'd be perfectly fine. But instead it's maybe 2-4 weeks of nothing and then a response pops up questioning what this is. It just seems chaotic at worst and overwhelmed at best. I wouldn't want to further burden them in that case.
A reader gets the impression that they want users and want feedback, but often it’s not entirely true.
Indeed. I guess it's just another naive interpretation when I heard in college "you should try to contribute to open source, it looks great for your resume!". When the reality of getting your contributions looked at may as well be as much a task as a portfolio piece. I guess at the end of the day I just wish for proper transparency of "we're only looking for very specific, experienced help and not much else" rather than a syrupy "of course we want help! we love contributions!"
Using open source software does not entitle you to a vote on the direction of the project. The gift you've received is the software itself and the freedom of use granted by the license. That's it, and this ought to be straight forward, but I repeatedly see that it is not (no matter how often it is repeated). And I think the problem stems from the word "community", which implies a democratic decision-making process that never actually existed in the open source world.
…
[W]e usually skirt around the truth. That not all participants in an open source project contribute equally in neither volume nor value, and this discrepancy is the basis of the hierarchical nature of most projects. It is not, and never will be, one user, one vote. That is, it will never be democratic. And this is good!
The democratic ideals are fulfilled by the fact that open source is free and full of alternatives. Don't like how they're running a given project? Use one of the usual countless alternatives. Or start your own! Here, you can even use the work of a million projects that came before you as a base for doing new work.
But the reason this doesn't resolve the tension is that it still relies on showing up and doing the work. And there just so happens to be far fewer individuals willing and capable of doing that than there are individuals who wish they had a say on the direction of their favorite software.
…
I frequently argue that open source is best seen as a gift exchange, since that puts the emphasis on how to react as receiver of gifts. But if you're going to use another word as an alternative to community, I suggest you look at "ecosystem". Ecosystems aren't egalitarian. There are big fish and little fish. Sometimes the relationships are symbiotic, but they're also potentially parasitic.
(I'm an arts-and-humanities person that uses lots of open-source programs) I don't recall ever harboring the notion that I can or should somehow control how an open-source project that I use must...
(I'm an arts-and-humanities person that uses lots of open-source programs)
I don't recall ever harboring the notion that I can or should somehow control how an open-source project that I use must be developed and maintained. I am amazed by the efficiency and sophistication of projects that I use, such as Tildes, Emacs, Doom Emacs, Org Roam, etc.
I can appreciate that voluntary developers are not constrained by my schedule. However, sometimes, I see myself in situations where my severe ADHD leads to awful interactions. For example, sometimes I'll obsessively check and recheck a document and convince myself that the information I need is not there. But in reality, it is, and developers may mistake my neurodiversity for laziness and entitlement.
This and other communication mishaps are frequent enough to make those interactions inherently stressful for me. Although I am sympathetic to those who gift me such wonderful tools, there is also the other side of the issue in the case of a few developers who will employ a How to ask smart questions mentality to bully unsuspecting users.
It could be the result of a cumulative aggravation that only now got to a point in which he felt compelled to write. I say this because people get this wrong about me. To give a compelling...
It could be the result of a cumulative aggravation that only now got to a point in which he felt compelled to write. I say this because people get this wrong about me. To give a compelling example, I often have extremely sinister ideas in my head. Sometimes, when I write about them or say them out loud, people wanna know "who" or "what" caused it. In reality, those things are just not that sinister to me. For example, I often come up with elaborate scenarios on how I would react to the death of people close to me, or how they would react to my death. That doesn't mean that I am experiencing any emotional distress, nor does it mean that I will do something stupid. There are thousands of thoughts and emotions circulating in me at any given time, and every now and then one of them will surface unprompted by any discernible event.
never was a democracy, but when they lay out roadmaps and miss ideas by months, years, over a decade with no end or compromise in site you start to wonder if this is something you should rely on.
Likewise, it can be weird that some FOSS repos are run like a dictatorship. So you put off the 'few willing and capable of doing work". Nothing worse than trying to contribute and it feels like you're talking to a brick wall for weeks over some trivial l10 line bug fix that was marked as "good first contribution". Like, do you want contributors or not? I can only imagine the bureaucracy for a meaningful feature introduction at that rate.
I completetly understand the entitlement issue. I've seen it for myself at work which has parts of the product as FOSS. But you can't let those bad apples burn you off anyone who wants to sincerely try to help in their free time.
Community is tricky. If you get more than a few people together under a common goal, community will surely form. That's just the nature of spending so much time with another human (that isn't instantly repulsive, and online forums help with that) . The dictionary definition supports this:
I believe Dave is in the EU, so their interpretation makes sense but also completely clashes with my own societal conditioning:
I sort of yearn for that, but community in the US society never implies this. In fact a leader of some sort doing much of the work always seems to arise in communities in my experience.
In more holistic sense, I also don't think a new contributor would ever think they have as much sway as a founder or core contributor. But they still want to try to help, not be shut down at the door with little explanation.
Maybe ecosystem is in fact a better term, but also feels a bit dehumanizing in a way. As if I must do battle and devour in order to rise to the ranks of core contributor, instead of working together, gaining appreciation for the subtleties, and increasing my knowledge base to do more.
Yea generally if you don't see contributions in over 4 years you can assume the project is either finished or dead. Finished being a very rare state anymore, but you occasionally come across one that could be considered as such. Like a system-deps-only python or bash script...unless there's a breakage with a major version update, it could be left as-is for 20 years.
Timelines and milestones I wouldn't trust even from big tech players, let alone somebody's hobby project.
yeah. I'm very patient with this stuff because I understand that this is run for many on the side. But outdated roadmaps and seemingly minimal progress doesn't encourage me as a repo that wants contributions, let alone expectations of being actively maintained and updated.
I think you’re getting at another tension, which is how do you judge an open source project as a user, and what is the relationship between users and maintainers?
I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. As a user, I look for libraries that are popular, well documented, and actively maintained. I don’t think that’s any different from anyone else.
As an author, my somewhat facetious motto is “more users, more problems.” It’s not entirely serious because my current project has zero users and I wouldn’t mind hearing from people who tried it out. But it’s nice to make changes without worrying about users.
If you pick projects based on popularity, is it any wonder that your feedback doesn’t get much response? The maintainers are likely overwhelmed with suggestions from strangers.
Often an open source project’s website is pretty misleading about whether it’s ready for users, what sort of users they would want feedback from, and so on. A reader gets the impression that they want users and want feedback, but often it’s not entirely true.
To clarify, I don't expect prompt responses like I do from work. If there was at least some github equivalent of 'seen' status and the contributions.txt would say "expect to wait X time for a review", that'd be perfectly fine. But instead it's maybe 2-4 weeks of nothing and then a response pops up questioning what this is. It just seems chaotic at worst and overwhelmed at best. I wouldn't want to further burden them in that case.
Indeed. I guess it's just another naive interpretation when I heard in college "you should try to contribute to open source, it looks great for your resume!". When the reality of getting your contributions looked at may as well be as much a task as a portfolio piece. I guess at the end of the day I just wish for proper transparency of "we're only looking for very specific, experienced help and not much else" rather than a syrupy "of course we want help! we love contributions!"
And it also explains this classic comic
From the article:
…
…
(I'm an arts-and-humanities person that uses lots of open-source programs)
I don't recall ever harboring the notion that I can or should somehow control how an open-source project that I use must be developed and maintained. I am amazed by the efficiency and sophistication of projects that I use, such as Tildes, Emacs, Doom Emacs, Org Roam, etc.
I can appreciate that voluntary developers are not constrained by my schedule. However, sometimes, I see myself in situations where my severe ADHD leads to awful interactions. For example, sometimes I'll obsessively check and recheck a document and convince myself that the information I need is not there. But in reality, it is, and developers may mistake my neurodiversity for laziness and entitlement.
This and other communication mishaps are frequent enough to make those interactions inherently stressful for me. Although I am sympathetic to those who gift me such wonderful tools, there is also the other side of the issue in the case of a few developers who will employ a How to ask smart questions mentality to bully unsuspecting users.
I don’t disagree with DHH’s points, but I would like to know what prompted him to write this piece. It seems like a reaction to something specific.
It could be the result of a cumulative aggravation that only now got to a point in which he felt compelled to write. I say this because people get this wrong about me. To give a compelling example, I often have extremely sinister ideas in my head. Sometimes, when I write about them or say them out loud, people wanna know "who" or "what" caused it. In reality, those things are just not that sinister to me. For example, I often come up with elaborate scenarios on how I would react to the death of people close to me, or how they would react to my death. That doesn't mean that I am experiencing any emotional distress, nor does it mean that I will do something stupid. There are thousands of thoughts and emotions circulating in me at any given time, and every now and then one of them will surface unprompted by any discernible event.