Michael Rogers, open source developer and community leader, discusses the growth and contributor dynamics of Node.js during its governance restructuring.
Insight
Rogers: Unwelcoming popular open source projects fail to attract contributors
“The issue is that the competition for people's attention is really high, and so unless you're a nice place to come and contribute, people don't care. A lot of established contributors that are used to just people showing up because they're a popular project, T…”
Assertion Supported
Rogers: Node.js expanded core committers from 7 to 90 in 18 months
“And so, I mean, at the point that we, you know, that we had this disagreement, we were down to, you know, maybe a high of seven committers. Today, about a year and a half later, we have 90 committers.”
Assertion Supported
Rogers: 95% of Node.js core commits land without governance body approval
“95% of the commits that we get into core do just land without ever having to go to the CTC, which is the governance body.”
Insight
Rogers: Forking projects is too costly to replace healthy community governance
“Just the practical reality of forking a project is such a huge overhaul, and you don't necessarily have the right people to do it at any particular time. And what you actually want are the healthy communities that have healthy practices.”
Opinion
Rogers: Eric S. Raymond's open source developer incentive model is outdated
“Yeah, yeah, so, so the cathedral and the bazaar is, is a very, very old Ericus Raymond essay on, like, basically describing open source, especially early open source, and at one point he does get into, like, the incentives that people have, and the incentives …”
Opinion
Rogers: Oracle vs. Google Java lawsuit benefited Node.js
“That's been great for Node.js, though. It's just another reason not to use Java, I guess.”