Which Open Source Projects Are -Really- Collaborative?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm a highly competent and occasionally respected software engineer, who has worked on several Open Source/Free Software projects; some of my code is in the Linux kernel. Within the OSS community, we maintain that the main point of publicly announcing OSS projects is to invite programmers to join the project and collaborate to make better software. But in about 90% of cases, I've found that publicly announced projects in development are not actually open to new members - the project leaders will ignore unsolicited code, won't respond to emailed queries or suggestions, and in many cases the projects in question remain in an early stage of development forever." What projects do you know of that don't make an issue out of incorporating user submitted patches and design changes, and what projects put forth huge restrictions on such submissions, even to the point of not accepting them at all? "This happens even when the project has explicitly asked for collaboration, and it happens when the project leaders are big names in the OSS community as well as when they're relative unknowns. So my question is, who actually collaborates? Which projects make unsolicited development effort worthwhile by making it part of something bigger?"

Comments

VERY good discussion topic.

[Thomas Charron]

I've found that, while a great many projects are considered 'Open Source', making the source available does NOT make an open source project. To be a truely open project, you also have to have an effort to do things such as merge and include changes that have been provided BACK into the project.

Many the project has a list of 'contributed' changes, with many things that NEVER actually make it back into the source tree. Why? I'm unsure, beyond the fact that many individuals who do these things, do so for themselves, and are nice enough to make the source available. They are NOT, however, interested in fostering a community around the further development of their code. The blokes who wish to step up and take on these reins are few and far between, and it is really a different 'role' then many of the developers out there WANT to have.

In order for a project to do this, it requires 'evangualists' that wish to take on these roles. Some people serve both roles, indipendent developer AND evangualist. These people serve as the best 'Project' leaders. They posess skills that many people dont have, only ONE of them being good developers or engineers.

I dont think this is a BAD thing, really, it just determines which projects will be wildly successfull, and which ones will simply be pet projects, used little, possibly important, but very often, eventually abandonded.

Perhaps a way to say this would be an 'Open Source' project, versus an 'Open Development' project.