I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on what principles open source projects should adhere to in order to promote transparency, inclusiveness, and effective development. Are there any specific projects you feel do a great job following certain principles in how they operate? I’m interested in how projects organize decision making, manage donations, incorporate community feedback, communicate updates, and more. Please share projects you appreciate for how they approach open source development!
Just to be clear, it seems you apparently deleted the much downvoted posts you made here and on [email protected] where you called for forking Lemmy because you claimed the maintainers were acting akin to tyrants. You said they were closing issues and rejecting PRs that users wanted to see because the maintainers themselves didn’t want them. When asked for examples, the only examples you came up with were:
Do you still think Lemmy is run by tyrants? I find this post a bit jarring given the context of your previous one.
The only thing that I’ve seen the developers say in GitHub comments is things like we are busy and don’t have time for that. And that is after saying this:
I don’t think they are tyrants but they are a bunch of hypocrites.
I don’t care that much about those examples, what I really care about is them not following what I consider to be some important principles when it comes to open source projects.
Clear Decision-Making Process for Future Releases: Open-source projects should have a well-defined process for deciding what features and improvements make it into each release. This process should be documented and accessible to the community. (For example, you can read about how Discourse decides what goes into each release here). Discourse, for example, follows Complaint-Driven Development.
Transparent Donation Management: Be open about how donation money is allocated. Implementing a bounty system can further enhance transparency, enabling contributors to work on specific tasks for financial rewards.
Inclusive Community Involvement: Encourage active participation from the community in brainstorming and voting on potential features before finalizing the project roadmap. Community input can be invaluable in shaping the project’s direction.
Beginner friendly: Make the project welcoming to new contributors with clear documentation and mentorship.
Public Roadmap: Maintain a publicly accessible roadmap that outlines what is planned for upcoming releases. This roadmap should include the status of each feature or enhancement to keep users informed.
User-Friendly Feature Request Process: Provide a public feature request forum where users can submit their ideas. Clearly outline the process for how these requests will be reviewed and prioritized, ensuring transparency in the decision-making.
Effective Communication Channels: Avoid using disorganized or private communication platforms for project-related discussions. Instead, opt for well-structured, publicly accessible channels that don’t require users to log in to access information.
Document with a Blog: Utilize a blog or similar documentation platform to keep users and contributors informed about important project updates, changes, and developments.
It is their project, their code, their processes. They do what they want. I hate when people tell me what to do on my own projects.
GitHub (and the others) are more inclusive than ever: free to fork, free to work.
You’re describing and demanding additional work that takes time, and that they may not want to do at the time. If you want it, fork it and do it since it’s free for you.
Was this bit meant to illustrate hypocrisy?
There are 217 people who have contributed to LemmyNet/lemmy. The people in charge are the original authors and maintainers, but they are not the only developers by a long shot.
As you seem to be aware of in the rest of your comment, open source projects like lemmy are sustained because when issues are raised, community members contribute to the project to solve those issues. It’s entirely reasonable and often expected that project maintainers are picky about which issues they personally take on. That doesn’t mean they are rejecting the issue, it just means they won’t personally be writing the PR for the fix anytime soon. I see no issue there.
Do I really need to explain to you what the hypocrisy there is? Rules for thee but not for me.
If they are busy they shouldn’t say anything, let other people contribute something actually useful to the issue at hand.
Maybe they could be a bit more explicit, but I don’t see hypocrisy.
Accepting your description of their comments:
is roughly equivalent to
which is good information to get from a maintainer.
I will say, however, the times they said something along those lines in the examples you gave in your last post, they also said why they didn’t consider it a high priority, which gives more important context as well.
It’s normal that there are different rules for authors and bug reporters.
It’s like you’re complaining that there are different rules for guests and the owner of a house.