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!

  • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Open source isn’t some special ordinance that makes a software project subject to any principles other than the ones outlined in its software license. The most basic principle being that someone wrote something which they thought could be useful for others and therefore published it under an open source license. If by releasing a piece of software I were strongly expected to adhere to any other principles like some of the ones you’ve suggested elsewhere, I wouldn’t have released half of the stuff I have because I simply can’t uphold these principles. Upholding them isn’t free. It requires work which I don’t have time for. I’ve already shared the work I was able to do by releasing as open source.

    Edit:

    I see a lot of confusion among what I assume is younger people who are relatively new to open source. Confusion as to open source being about freedom of choice, inclusion, democracy or what have you. It isn’t. Some open source projects may be about one or more of those things. Many, even possibly most aren’t. For example the Linux kernel is a hard dictatorship with Linus as top executioner. Convincing people of varying software engineering proficiency of why their favorite feature shouldn’t happen or why their PR is garbage and will decrease the quality of the project in various ways takes way longer than closing the respective item. GNOME is famous for “Closed/Won’t fix” with no explanation. Perhaps if open source developers were handsomely paid to spend the extra time to be nice, things could be different. Of course that implies that more developers must be paid to do the work since everything takes longer, or the pace of the project would be slower. Pick your priorities and pay for them appropriately.

    • CoderSupreme@programming.devOP
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      1 year ago

      I believe that building a community around the software is more important than building the software itself. I know of a project that, despite not being used by 48k monthly active users, has more than 217 contributors, which is what Lemmy has. I believe this is because they implement some of the principles I mentioned. If you don’t need software to be maintained then you don’t need a community either, so you can just disregard all those principles.