We are blessed. This Open Source stuff is free. But it's free like a puppy. It takes years of care and feeding. You don't get to criticise a free puppy that you bring in to your home.
My favorite Secret Fourth Option to the "Free as in beer /speech / puppy" trifecta is "free as in mattress": look, it's all yours if you really want it, but I'd prefer a little more assurance of where it came from before I sleep on it.
I'm very curious to see how this goes. There's always been a continuum of requirements for accepting patches. To completely block them means there's no shared ownership, so the community will never be engaged, hurting adoption. Most open source projects are successful because the community has a direct say in the direction, or they're funded by a big corporation. I'm not convinced the project will ever be very popular as a result.
I've also always thought ladybird was overly ambitious, and would never have the resources to build a competitive browser. So I'm likely biased.
I think a pull model makes sense. If a version of a project wants work someone else published, they can take it. But no reason for a push based model where they are expected to review every possible change they probably don't want
Ignores pull requests as a way of cultivating a talent pool to take over maintainership of a project if you step away. But maybe that transition is so rarely successful that it is fine to ignore it. You can look at it as order of effects of merging a PR:
First-order effect: a feature is added or a bug is fixed
Second-order effect: maintenance burden is increased on the maintainer following some kind of exponential decay function as bugs in the new code decrease over time
Third-order effect: the submitter gains confidence & experience contributing to the codebase
The demise of GitHub's pull request model under the weight of LLM generated, unvetted slop has been quite unfortunate, and I've personally had to ban many people for slinging over just absolutely abysmal stuff. However I do still choose to believe that the contributor to maintainer pipeline should be allowed and encouraged to exist, despite it becoming much more work on the maintainer end.
I've both become a maintainer by contributing, and then also had a contributor take over for me when I stepped off. This actively maintained fork of Android Password Store is by someone who contributed for a few months before I archived it. That's extremely awesome to me, and I hope we continue to see more of this and don't all fall into closed contribution models.
I do agree with the premise, but I'd say open development is what makes open source great. I hated the transition when large corporations started adopting open source, and suddenly we had more and more projects, where you have access to the source code, you can freely use it under the licensing terms, but good luck landing a bug fix. For me, a project that has sources available, but closed development, is the same as any other proprietary software.
typesanitizer | 10 days ago
I believe the first person to come up with this metaphor was Scott Hanselman in 2006.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/sandcastle-microsoft-ctp-of-a-help-chm-file-generator-on-the-tails-of-the-death-of-ndoc
jrandomhacker | 9 days ago
My favorite Secret Fourth Option to the "Free as in beer /speech / puppy" trifecta is "free as in mattress": look, it's all yours if you really want it, but I'd prefer a little more assurance of where it came from before I sleep on it.
jrandomhacker | 9 days ago
sumner | 9 days ago
PRs often feel more like "pull requirements" than "pull requests"
This "open source, closed contribution" model is going to continue gaining in popularity. Ladybird just did this: https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/
markwatson | 9 days ago
I'm very curious to see how this goes. There's always been a continuum of requirements for accepting patches. To completely block them means there's no shared ownership, so the community will never be engaged, hurting adoption. Most open source projects are successful because the community has a direct say in the direction, or they're funded by a big corporation. I'm not convinced the project will ever be very popular as a result.
I've also always thought ladybird was overly ambitious, and would never have the resources to build a competitive browser. So I'm likely biased.
sloane | 9 days ago
sqlite seems to do ok!
singpolyma | 9 days ago
I think a pull model makes sense. If a version of a project wants work someone else published, they can take it. But no reason for a push based model where they are expected to review every possible change they probably don't want
ahelwer | 9 days ago
Ignores pull requests as a way of cultivating a talent pool to take over maintainership of a project if you step away. But maybe that transition is so rarely successful that it is fine to ignore it. You can look at it as order of effects of merging a PR:
hoistbypetard | 9 days ago
The zig project's notion of "contributor poker" speaks nicely to this, IMO.
msfjarvis | 9 days ago
The demise of GitHub's pull request model under the weight of LLM generated, unvetted slop has been quite unfortunate, and I've personally had to ban many people for slinging over just absolutely abysmal stuff. However I do still choose to believe that the contributor to maintainer pipeline should be allowed and encouraged to exist, despite it becoming much more work on the maintainer end.
I've both become a maintainer by contributing, and then also had a contributor take over for me when I stepped off. This actively maintained fork of Android Password Store is by someone who contributed for a few months before I archived it. That's extremely awesome to me, and I hope we continue to see more of this and don't all fall into closed contribution models.
akavel | 9 days ago
Big thanks for the transcript quote! I don't have time to view a vid now, and it seems to explain the gist of the title to me.
lukasl | 9 days ago
I do agree with the premise, but I'd say open development is what makes open source great. I hated the transition when large corporations started adopting open source, and suddenly we had more and more projects, where you have access to the source code, you can freely use it under the licensing terms, but good luck landing a bug fix. For me, a project that has sources available, but closed development, is the same as any other proprietary software.
tbodt | 10 days ago
but concurrent writes...