Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

armanckeser.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 53 posts

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#41

Post by saulpw »

erikerikson wrote: post #31

Have you paid? I too have been frustrated by the way open source works. Maintainers are frequently people in high demand and open source rarely pays commensurate. So too have I given my work away and been met with entitled demands for service and time. I enjoyed writing the code and making something useful. I enjoyed the validation of that belief based on use but that doesn't feed the family or further my actual goal…

I agree that open source needs to find ways to engage with the economy, for multiple reasons. But the project needs to create the system/process/structure; individual contributors paying money won't affect these systemic problems even if the money they're paying is substantial. At best they create a temporary system of privilege.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#42

Post by nemomarx »

armanckeser wrote: post #33
PaulKeeble wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately if the new contributor brings in others to the project to also review and progress the project then it will quickly outpace the development on jellyfin and become the successful fork. No maintainer can cope with the workload of something like jellyfin and if they wont assign maintainers there isn't much else to be done. The key to the success is dealing with the outstanding merges by bringing maintainers o…

So this is exactly what's unintuitive about queues, an analogy would be car lanes. Intuition might lead you to conclude that if a 2 lane road has traffic constantly going to 4 lanes will solve the traffic. But this is not true. Many people that would have used the road might have been using public transport or just decided not to commute or stay inside normally will join the traffic until it once again equilibriates.…

Does induced demand apply to open source maintaining? What would be the mechanism for that?

For traffic, more users note that the highway is easier to drive on and come over. Would people notice development speeding up and start adding more issues?

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#43

Post by saulpw »

armanckeser wrote: post #33
PaulKeeble wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately if the new contributor brings in others to the project to also review and progress the project then it will quickly outpace the development on jellyfin and become the successful fork. No maintainer can cope with the workload of something like jellyfin and if they wont assign maintainers there isn't much else to be done. The key to the success is dealing with the outstanding merges by bringing maintainers o…

So this is exactly what's unintuitive about queues, an analogy would be car lanes. Intuition might lead you to conclude that if a 2 lane road has traffic constantly going to 4 lanes will solve the traffic. But this is not true. Many people that would have used the road might have been using public transport or just decided not to commute or stay inside normally will join the traffic until it once again equilibriates.…

If you only focus on "solving the traffic" then you're right, adding more lanes ultimately just leads to more lanes being full. But the overall throughput is much higher! We need more holistic solutions, to be sure, but I hope no one thinks that means I-5 around LA could just be 2 lanes of traffic because they'll be full of traffic either way.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#44

Post by shimman »

erikerikson wrote: post #31

Have you paid? I too have been frustrated by the way open source works. Maintainers are frequently people in high demand and open source rarely pays commensurate. So too have I given my work away and been met with entitled demands for service and time. I enjoyed writing the code and making something useful. I enjoyed the validation of that belief based on use but that doesn't feed the family or further my actual goal…

Why should I pay, why can't we tax big tech and VC firms so the public can fund this stuff instead? They have all the money, they have all the power; why can't we take it away from them?

The world of software would be a vastly better place if the public had options to invest in software as well.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#45

Post by erikerikson »

saulpw wrote: post #41
erikerikson wrote: post #31

Have you paid? I too have been frustrated by the way open source works. Maintainers are frequently people in high demand and open source rarely pays commensurate. So too have I given my work away and been met with entitled demands for service and time. I enjoyed writing the code and making something useful. I enjoyed the validation of that belief based on use but that doesn't feed the family or further my actual goal…

I agree that open source needs to find ways to engage with the economy, for multiple reasons. But the project needs to create the system/process/structure; individual contributors paying money won't affect these systemic problems even if the money they're paying is substantial . At best they create a temporary system of privilege.

I agree with what most of you've written. A temporary system of privilege is a great descriptor of what I've seen to date. I'm not sure this should be each individual project's responsibility, the scaling attributes of that design seems to intend failure.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#46

Post by erikerikson »

shimman wrote: post #44
erikerikson wrote: post #31

Have you paid? I too have been frustrated by the way open source works. Maintainers are frequently people in high demand and open source rarely pays commensurate. So too have I given my work away and been met with entitled demands for service and time. I enjoyed writing the code and making something useful. I enjoyed the validation of that belief based on use but that doesn't feed the family or further my actual goal…

Why should I pay, why can't we tax big tech and VC firms so the public can fund this stuff instead? They have all the money, they have all the power; why can't we take it away from them? The world of software would be a vastly better place if the public had options to invest in software as well.

Strictly speaking that question was for the author. Less strictly for anyone who wants to demand the resources of contributors, even if contributing themselves. The question is about balance and consideration, recognizing that even if someone is giving away their work they live in a financialized world that doesn't respond to their generosity by giving them free access to resources (most of the time).

The distributive justice matters you reference are big problems. To answer your question: we can because they don't actually have all the power, we just don't find the will and not entirely without reason. If we used taxes to extract those funds they would likely be priced in so that the population is left funding them still. It would risk a privileging as suggested by a peer statement and the real solution has to be pretty systemic.

The problem is broad and something like we live in a society where the most privileged amongst us are happy to have a smaller pie so long as they get a larger proportion of it. Even if it's caused by ignorance, that doesn't keep it from being the case. It's also true that we have societal behaviors which reduce our productivity due to the injustice of things. We punish the sincere and well-behaved for the benefit of those creating asymmetric information and abusing others.

I don't think we should be surprised that this leads to bad results and things functioning less capably than they could.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#47

Post by pwdisswordfishs »

armanckeser wrote: post #7
spenrose wrote: post #4

Fantastic piece: shows how fundamental dynamics (queuing) generate practical problems AND what to do about them. This essay is better than 95% of tech blog posts I read via HN. Kudos! An original sin of Free Software which carried through to Open Source and infects HN via its many Open Source believers is a reluctance to take project management seriously. OP shows that Jellyfin’s dictat... er, maintainer is not effec…

Thanks a lot! I appreciate the kind words. I do want to clarify that I think in Jellyfin-web's case, the maintainer does mean well and doesn't really have the "benevolent dictat... er, maintainer" approach. But there seems to be this defeatist argument of: we have one maintainer which means 6 months per PR and features not being merged, that I think Open Source projects could do a better job at

Git is a DVCS, created to help manage Linux, which uses a distributed cabal of individuals, each of varying "authority" who choose whether something gets in or not.

The problem is that despite using the same DVCS for source code management, other projects insist on a hub-and-spokes development model, which does not scale.

Projects would be a lot more productive (and a lot more resilient) if they also followed a model where "The maintainer hasn't accepted my pull request" just wasn't a big deal.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#48

Post by HappMacDonald »

Orygin wrote: post #18
twp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI reviews are flaky - maybe correct 80% of the time - and everyone hates flakiness. AI code reviews easily double the work in reviewing: you have to both review the original code and the AI code review. The AI code review can be 80% correct, but you never know which 80% is correct and which 20% is garbage, so you have to review all the AI's comments.

Maybe but I'll take a 80% correct review over no review at all. If it alleviates a good chunk of back and forth between the reviewer and the committer, it's still overall a time save for the maintainer.

If you value 80% correct, then how about 50% correct?

Because I have a nickel I can sell you, and you can flip it an impressive number of times.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#49

Post by armanckeser »

nemomarx wrote: post #42
armanckeser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this is exactly what's unintuitive about queues, an analogy would be car lanes. Intuition might lead you to conclude that if a 2 lane road has traffic constantly going to 4 lanes will solve the traffic. But this is not true. Many people that would have used the road might have been using public transport or just decided not to commute or stay inside normally will join the traffic until it once again equilibriates.…

Does induced demand apply to open source maintaining? What would be the mechanism for that? For traffic, more users note that the highway is easier to drive on and come over. Would people notice development speeding up and start adding more issues?

I think even just seeing the number of open PRs might be a deterrence to contributors thinking of opening PRs.

Re: The exponential curve behind open source backlogs

#50

Post by theturtlemoves »

shimman wrote: post #44
erikerikson wrote: post #31

Have you paid? I too have been frustrated by the way open source works. Maintainers are frequently people in high demand and open source rarely pays commensurate. So too have I given my work away and been met with entitled demands for service and time. I enjoyed writing the code and making something useful. I enjoyed the validation of that belief based on use but that doesn't feed the family or further my actual goal…

Why should I pay, why can't we tax big tech and VC firms so the public can fund this stuff instead? They have all the money, they have all the power; why can't we take it away from them? The world of software would be a vastly better place if the public had options to invest in software as well.

"Why can't we just demand to spend someone else's money on this because they ought to agree that this is important. Meanwhile, I myself can't be arsed to spend a dime on it, but yeah still important..."

No. If you think it's important, you pay for it.

Post reply on HN