Rogers: Unwelcoming popular open source projects fail to attract contributors
Michael Rogers · a16z Podcast | The Changing Culture of Open Source · Jan 2, 2019 · at 10:53
Michael Rogers explains why legacy open source projects struggle to retain and recruit new maintainers in an era of high competition for developer time.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, They're not getting any people because they're actually not a very nice place to contribute.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Michael Rogers
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.”
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.”
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.”
Rogers: Eric S. Raymond's open source developer incentive model is outdated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 …”