User: Please suggest the most absurd, over-the-top blog post title that will nonetheless get me to the top of Hacker News.
System: "Contributing to Open-Source Should be Required, Like Jury Duty"
Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#32I never comment on this site and I use an app to view it that doesn’t even have sign in capabilities. But I disagree with this nonsense so much that I had to go login just to vocalise that.
People should have choice and freedom in what they want to spend their time doing. I respect the open source community and some day I’d love to find the time to contribute at my own will, not because I’m called to.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#33OK this would obviously be bad, I think everyone gets that.
But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#34Considering that most people hate jury duty and will do anything to get out of it, are you sure you want similar behavior from developers on OSS?
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#35I 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…
Completely agree. I'd rather have the people that want to be there, to be involved.
An alternative take I'd rather see is "Employers guarantee 8 hours per week of time to work on open-source projects, including ones I start myself". Employer gets no IP stake in the project, and it's done for public good + a means to allow employees to upskill.
Otherwise it just becomes a case of another grindset. You're expected to do more, with the limited free time you have.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#36I think a more viable strategy would be, any software that is paid for with tax money, should be open source.
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#37I 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 inte…
Surely the value of patching upstream is so you don't have merge conflicts for eternity?
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#38to quote hot fuzz
"don't go being a twat now!"Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#39As 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…
Totally agree, I’ve seen people put it as a sort of badge of honor that they are contributing to open source, but are clearly not passionate about the projects that they are contributing to and not ashamed of using AI to do so. Overall open source projects suffer more as a consequence of these low grade contributions, and it sucks for the people reviewing them
Re: Contributing to open-source should be required, like jury duty
#40User: Please suggest the most absurd, over-the-top blog post title that will nonetheless get me to the top of Hacker News. System: "Contributing to Open-Source Should be Required, Like Jury Duty"
Indeed, well said. This is like a spotlight to moths haha