Look at what happened when they were giving free t shirts based on open source contributions (hacktoberfest) to see how well this idea would go.
Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
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Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#22So, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment. Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok. > In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has in…
Do you have any reason to believe that amendment was ever intended to cover things like mandatory jury duty? Or are you advocating for reading the text verbatim with zero consideration of the context or history? That kind of reading impacts a lot more than this, and not entirely in a good way.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#23Congratulations, you just reinvented slavery.
But if you take the government out of the equation, and instead mandate contribution via project licenses, that might be worth a try.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#24I don't think dropping a random software developer into a random project to do their open source duty would end well It takes a _lot_ of time for someone to meaningfully contribute to a project, and would just result in maintainers having the overhead of training that many new people on a project I'd much rather figure out a way to finance those open source projects in a sustainable way where those projects can decid…
Dead on. Financing is the most urgent need, not contributors.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#25I get that the author is making a "modest proposal" here, but even so it's kind of antithetical to at least my own feelings about open source. If I release something as open source, the whole point is my users owe me nothing. They have limited obligations that are explicitly spelled out in the license and that's it.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#26No, it should not.
SHOULD a person do it? Yes.
SHOULD they be forced to do it or go to the Gulag? No.
Save jail for violent criminals, not this white collar BS.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#27As an open-source developer... no. No, no, no, no.
The toil of dealing with low-quality, half-assed first-time contributions is often higher than the effort of implementing the same features or bug fixes from scratch. And that's if you agree the features or fixes are useful in the first place.
I've already seen college students forced by their teachers to contribute to open-source projects and it's almost always just sad. The patches don't follow your project's practices, they usually have an array of subtle bugs to diagnose... and on top of that, you're dealing with a person who probably doesn't want constructive feedback in the first place. They just want a good grade on their assignment (or, in this proposal, want you to sign off the completion of their "OSS duty").
If you compel 100x as many people to submit half-assed contributions, you'll just drown in noise. Nothing good will be accomplished this way.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#28Governments should set aside some pool of money for distributing to people maintaining critical projects. We have so much surplus and some portion of it should be allocated to such projects as digital infrastructure. Google did that with Summer of Code. Shareholder value can go and take a jump into a nearest lake.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#29I have done a lot of open source and I disagree.
The problem being that as a maintainer, I refuse most contributions. Not only because they are low-quality (it happens), but also because they are often out of scope, or I just disagree with the direction. It's my project, I maintain it, I choose what goes in it. But you're free to fork it with your changes, that's exactly why I made it open source. If you make an interesting fork, I may totally import some or all of your changes! And if you first ask in an issue, I may offer you to open a PR directly.
I almost always use copyleft licences: it makes it mandatory to share the modified sources with the user, who can then upstream them.
Many times in companies, if I need to patch a permissive dependency, my company will not allow me to spend time upstreaming my patch. Whereas if it is a copyleft licence, I can tell my manager that I am obligated to open source my changes (which is not correct, but managers usually don't know that, don't care so much about the nuance, and anyway it's a win if we follow the copyleft conditions to the letter).
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#30Many would love to be able to get an LLM to do their jury duty.