Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

Post by lpln3452 » Tue, May 13, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #191

berkes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just showed the poster-child of gatekeeping that is harming Open Source. Every contributor is valuable, it's in the name, the definition of "contribute". Any bar to entry is bad, it certainly never is the solution to a different problem (not being able to manage all contributions). If anything, in the longer run, it will only make it worse. Now, to be clear, while I do think GitHub is currently the "solution" to…

This is just blatantly wrong on so many levels. Proposed contributions can in fact have negative value, if the contributor implements some feature or bug fix in a way that makes it more difficult to maintain in the long term or introduces bugs in other code. And even if such contribution is ultimately rejected, someone knowledgeable has to spend time and effort reviewing such code first - time and effort that could h…

Post by tempaccount420 » Tue, May 13, 2025, 9:37 AM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #199

arp242 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess it's the CI/CD infrastructure Your guess is wrong as Firefox doesn't use GitHub for any of that, and AFAIK there are no plans to either. The blog post linked in the top comment goes in to this in some detail, but in brief: git log, clone, diff, showing files, blame, etc. is CPU expensive. You can see this locally on large repo if you try something like "git log path/to/dir". Add to this all the standard req…

It was a guess and I never claimed it was 100% correct, and I'm happy to stand corrected. No hard feelings there.

Post by majewsky » Tue, May 13, 2025, 9:45 AM UTC

lpln3452 wrote: post #231

int_19h wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just blatantly wrong on so many levels. Proposed contributions can in fact have negative value, if the contributor implements some feature or bug fix in a way that makes it more difficult to maintain in the long term or introduces bugs in other code. And even if such contribution is ultimately rejected, someone knowledgeable has to spend time and effort reviewing such code first - time and effort that could h…

This isn't a platform issue — it's a problem with the PR system, and arguably with open source itself. If you're unwilling to spend time on anything beyond writing code, maybe keep the project closed-source.

Post by pornel » Tue, May 13, 2025, 9:52 AM UTC

fhd2 wrote: post #170

floriangosse wrote: post #83

I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower. I think you can dis…

In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.

Post by Aachen » Tue, May 13, 2025, 9:56 AM UTC

fhd2 wrote: post #170

floriangosse wrote: post #83

I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower. I think you can dis…

In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.