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Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

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Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#61

Post by snowwrestler »

SwellJoe wrote: post #38
geerlingguy wrote: post #15

Drupal's community is what got me into OSS, even though the language (PHP) community seems to be at a strange crossroads currently. I've also been somewhat involved in Ansible's community, and it's been nothing but a positive experience so far. It's interesting to compare some of the different communities; some seem to value technical competence over diversity, some UX over architecture, etc. It's probably easiest to…

As a counter-point: I've found it impossible to penetrate the Drupal community. I have filed several tickets over the years, including patches, which have often gone entirely without comment for sometimes months. Including a bug report and patch against a core include file. IRC is sometimes helpful, but usually not. In my experience, it's just really hard to get any questions answered or bugs fixed in Drupal.

How recently was that? They made a big public effort during the Drupal 8 project to become more open, welcoming, and responsive, and it would interesting to know if that made a difference.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#62

Post by lazyjones »

gmac wrote: post #9

PostgreSQL (I've always been hugely impressed by the team, though not myself a contributor).

This. I actually joined HN years ago just to praise Tom Lane for his outstanding support (I hope I remember this correctly).

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#63

Post by [deleted] »

tossaway99999 wrote: post #42
walrus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. The Rust community is excellent.

In my experience the Rust community exhibits a cloaked form of tyranny. On the surface they are very vocal about supporting 'inclusiveness' and 'non-discrimination' and 'tolerance'. Yet they use a rather harsh and subjective code of conduct to control and police the members of their community. Last I knew they even had a moderation team who doled out punishment without any due process nor any oversight of significanc…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#64

Post by tym0 »

scrollaway wrote: post #33

I'm the lead for LXQt, the Qt-based desktop environment: http://lxqt.org/ I'm very happy to say that everyone on our team is kind and supportive. I'm also happy to say this is not a unique trait of our team, it's something you'll see in a lot of open source projects. Feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile) if you're interested in LXQt.

Hey nice, a new release, I was getting worried that the project was going down.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#67

Post by jlarocco »

The reasoning behind that question doesn't make any sense. The idea of contributing to a project that you're not personally interested in, solely based on an external reason seems wrong to me. That's true for-pay software development, but is even more true when it comes to open source development.

I think you'd be a lot better off looking at projects you are currently using, or in areas that are interesting to you, and hanging out in their IRC channels, reading their mailing lists for a while, checking their bug tracker, and tinkering with their code.

At the very least, you should clarify how you want to help out, what you're interested in doing, and what your skill set is.

The way it's phrased right now, you'd get more meaningful answers just randomly clicking projects on GitHub.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#69

Post by espeed »

Apache Tinkerpop: https://tinkerpop.incubator.apache.org

The TinkerPop project is thoroughly documented, questions in the user groups are answered fast, and the R&D keeps pushing the space forward. For example, check out this new paper by Marko Rodriguez (TinkerPop founder and creator of the Gremlin graph programming language):

"Quantum Walks with Gremlin" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06278v1.pdf

Here's a quote from a community member:

  Something like 13 yrs ago, I was trying to do server-side Java.  It
  was a nightmare, until I discovered a thing called Apache JServ.

  It was simple, elegant and the developer group was wonderfully
  supportive and well organized.

  Just as with JServ, way back then, Tinkerpop has all the same
  characteristics, and gives me the same feeling of having hit on
  something really valuable that will take me a long way.

  Well ...  JServ morphed into TomCat, and I've used it consistently
  ever since.  I'm confident Tinkerpop is going the same way, so I'm
  only too pleased to help where I can.

  Sincerest regards,
  Hasan
Source: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/gremlin-users/pF577035UpY/M7...

Disclaimer: I am a TinkerPop contributor.

Re: Ask HN: Which open source projects have kind, supportive, talented teams?

#70

Post by pcwalton »

tossaway99999 wrote: post #42
walrus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. The Rust community is excellent.

In my experience the Rust community exhibits a cloaked form of tyranny. On the surface they are very vocal about supporting 'inclusiveness' and 'non-discrimination' and 'tolerance'. Yet they use a rather harsh and subjective code of conduct to control and police the members of their community. Last I knew they even had a moderation team who doled out punishment without any due process nor any oversight of significanc…

Disclaimer: I am on the Rust core team, although less active nowadays.

> Last I knew they even had a moderation team who doled out punishment without any due process nor any oversight of significance.

The oversight for the moderation team is documented here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/blob/master/text/1068-rust...

> It's also quite common to see any comment here (and at certain other discussion forums) that doesn't paint Rust in a glowing light to get modded down, even when the observations made are completely correct, valid and legitimate.

The moderation team isn't responsible for downvotes, so we should be careful to separate the issue of community moderation from downvotes on hacker forums. With that said, I should note:

• I rarely see comments critical of Rust downvoted on HN. I do reply to them if I disagree, but I never downvote them.

• On Reddit /r/rust, I rarely see comments downvoted ever—there's even a prominent warning not to use the downvote button for disagreements.

• I'm rarely ever on Reddit /r/programming at all, but my impression is that the moderation is all over the place no matter what the topic, so I don't see Rust as particularly special one way or another.

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