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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?

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Unreal Engine really open source? Doesn't look like it to me. https://www.unrealengine.com/eula

Yes it is open source, but not libre / free. i.e: not GPL / BSD / MIT style etc... If you want to view and modify the code you can. So it is open in that sense.

I think the pithy phrase you were looking for was "It's open source, but not Free Software.". :)

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

#183
PlatformIO: https://github.com/platformio/platformio

The author has gotten involved personally to help me with issues I was seeing. He provided advice on architecture and use case, and he does an extremely good job of keeping the product current.

https://github.com/platformio/platformio/issues/330

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

#184
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A litmus test of a great community is how they deal with people who are technically useful but socially reprehensible.

Curious what you think the response should be.

If the person is toxic, and nothing will change that, get rid of them before any more damage is done.

I could argue that even if they're 10x more productive, they will drive off far more than 10 contributors.

But really you do it because it's the right thing to do.

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

#185

Find the projects that speak to you then check in on the communities. Contributing to open source is first and foremost _work_. A community can turn you off from participating, but the motivation to contribute only comes from the product. And you might be surprised at the difference between what it's like to contribute to any random project compared to what a "news" blogger that needs to generate hits wants you to th…

This is really the correct answer: Why do you want to participate in an open-source project in the first place? If it's to gain brownie points for your CV, it's quite likely that you'll get nowhere, because that's a motivation right along with "earn money". The difference to just getting a random software development job for earning money is that at the random job, you will be in a team where tasks will naturally flo…

This, so much this.

Working on Open Source absolutely requires individual contributors to be self-starting. New contributors who lack drive require constant direction and/or hand-holding, undermining the time/effort commitment of existing contributors.

Most Open Source projects invest a lot of time/effort coaching new contributors. If a new contributor receives the coaching but doesn't produce anything useful; it's a net loss for the project, users, and community.

I always tell people who want to start contributing to OSS to start with simple/easy tasks like documentation updates. It minimizes the negative impact of poor quality contributions and allows existing devs to identify and correct workflow inconsistencies during peer review.

The other growing pain is new contributors who bring their 'ideas' but put zero effort toward contributing. 'Ideas' are like assholes, meaning everybody has one. They're not particularly useful unless there's a person ready/willing to implement them. Even then, a new idea may not follow the intent of the project and/or its culture.

Endlessly discussing the 'future possibilities' of a project is extremely counterproductive and distracting to existing developers.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is open source, but not libre / free. i.e: not GPL / BSD / MIT style etc... If you want to view and modify the code you can. So it is open in that sense.

I think the pithy phrase you were looking for was "It's open source, but not Free Software.". :)

Bingo, that is the concise version of what I was trying to say.

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

#189
Right now ReactOS is doing better because they used Indiegogo funding to hire better developers: http://community.reactos.org/index.php/news/years-progress-t...

I tried to post a link to ReactOS via submit to find out I got the "Whoa you're submitting too fast" message, so I lost submit privileges somehow. I apologize if I submitted anything wrong.

Creating a free and open source alternative to Windows that uses Windows apps and Drivers, one that isn't based on Linux is really hard and need really talented people to keep compatibility with Windows.

I think when their 0.4 release is available, it will do better than the 0.3 releases. With Windows 10 giving people privacy concerns there needs to be an alternative that runs Windows apps to compete with Windows that uses Windows drivers.

They just got Steam to work with it and if they get some of the Dotnet libraries and DirectX to run some of the video games, they can put a dent into Microsoft Windows usage.

https://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=114980#p114980

Yeah I know can run WINE with Linux, but ReactOS is targeted at people who can't figure out Linux but want a Windows type OS.

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

#190

Have you heard of Mozilla? http://mozilla.org I'm a Mozillian myself and I can tell you I wouldn't have been one if the community wouldn't have showed me such a great and kind support since the first minute I decided to step in a introduce myself. Plus we breathe OSS and have multiple talents of every kind. Mozilla works serving, promoting and protecting the Open Web, and provides the tools to do so by ourselves. Fir…

>Mozilla works serving, promoting and protecting the Open Web.

I used to believe this until they started including proprietary/non-open services (Hello & Pocket) by default and that too in an update. Not sure what they were thinking as it clearly goes against their motto. It wasn't even a requested feature of the community! Regardless, that ruined Firefox for me. :(

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