It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort. Projects are maintained by their maintainers and get very little from the community. Commercial open source gets even less from the community. The only real value generated is corporate supported projects sharing with corporate supported projects. The average person is happy because they can also use these projects but ultimately they do nothing with it. The only people benefiting is the corporations that use this to build their products.
I dont know if this is a good thing or not. On paper it seems fine but there is something that feels wrong about it and I dont know exactly what.
> It seems to me as someone who wasn't paying attention to open source 10 or 20 years ago that its no longer a real community effort.
I would disagree with this, it's the same amount of community effort as it's always been. Big projects have big governance, and receive lots of patches. Smaller projects receive fewer patches. The community generally happens in Discord or IRC or on mailing lists, but it definitely exists.
The real threat to "community effort" are drive-by low-effort LLM-generated Pull requests that decrease the signal-to-noise ratio by a lot and make managing open source projects such a slog
I fully understand that I may be completely wrong but I just dont see that a lot of effort comes from outside a projects core maintainers. Its always a core maintainer group usually paid by some company doing 95% of the work and the patches contributed are localizations, small bug fixes and weird edge cases.
I'm not an open source maintainer so I could be completely off base here.
This perception comes from a high amount of trust required to take big submissions; If I know and trust the submitter, I'm more willing to accept a bigger patch. If you really want to contribute big changes to a project, it usually involves communicating with the core maintainers a lot, and essentially becoming one of them. Pion/webrtc is my favorite example of a project with a maintainer group who are employed by many different companies. Sean Dubois is the primary maintainer of that project, and does a good job of welcoming people into the fold.
Thanks Woodrow :)
Accepting 'Big Changes' from people is VERY frustrating. These thoughts run through my head.
* Idea is usually good! Even if I don't understand it could help lots of others users.
* The contributor is very focused on just getting their feature in. The impact on the larger project isn't as much a concern.
* New contributors often don't have the grit to see it out. They will disappear before things are done. So I am left picking up the pieces (which is harder then doing it all myself)
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What I try and remember is that their happiness/experience matters more then any code. I try to help the contributor learn/grow as much as possible and even see some career benefits out of it. Pion will cease to matter eventually, so I hope to help as many programmers with it as possible.
There never was "a community". The vast majority of all open source software is written by people paid by some corporation to do so.
Just because people are paid to participate doesn't mean there's not a community; those paid contributors still generally have to build trust and maintain etiquette among people outside of their organizational structure.
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