Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Non-Coders, Why Aren't You Contributing To Open Source?
Jason Baker writes: Most everyone is using an open source tool somewhere in their workflow, but relatively few are contributing back their time to sustaining the projects they use. But these days, there are plenty of ways to contribute to an open source project without submitting code. Projects like OpenHatch will even help you match your skill set to a project in need. So what's holding you back? Time? Lack of interest? Difficulty getting started?
they don't make it easy
they don't have a good list of helper that have helped
there are not enough tools to quickly provide them all of my os/cpu/motherboard/hd/videocard information (yes sometimes this is needed for bugs)
and honestly not even the summary says how non-coders can help?????
if they want help they should put up giant buttons/links "WE NEED YOUR HELP NO MONEY OR SKILL REQUIRED!"
neoforts at gmail
I work with computers all day at work. When I get off work, I'm not going to work on them even more, and for free to boot.
Sure, I'll play on computers, and even web surf and make snarky comments on /., but work? Fuck you, pay me.
Between work, my SO, kids, things that need to be done around the house, and a dozen other random things that come up from week to week any free time I have isn't going to be donated away.
The free time I do have is going to be spent relaxing and de-stressing from all of the above.
Unless you are committing code the projects I have tried to get involved with have been a black hole in terms of response.
Documentation is a bitch because things are changing all the time and as a user you are often behind the 8 ball for where development is going. For bug tracking and reporting issues my experience has been either I get no response or I don't have the capabilities to supply the developer with the information they need to track the bug down.
As for artwork I am artistically dead....
The most positive experience with projects has actually been with a game, gnomoria, which is a closed source program with a single developer. I think knowing you are getting paid probably makes a difference.
The opposite end of the spectrum was trying to work with the development team for Evolution (mail client). There was a lot of "if you don't use it this way you are stupid" type responses.
If I start spending time contributing back to open source, then open source is no longer the cheapest and best option for the areas in which I use it.
Most open source projects are
999 header files
355 directories
2345 code files
3 intermixed build systems
A python script or so just because
AND (&&)
There will be not a single line of documentation on how the source tree is laid out, and where to start understanding the project.
2). The response when asking where do I begin. RTFSC ? I'd rather pay for the software than be involved with that crap.
Yes the leadership of any project gets to set the pace and groupthink sets in.
The creative people drift away and the personality traits revert to ensuring the project leaders are well cared for.
No forking, no new ideas, no changes. Just code compatibility with the distant past.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I keep telling my colleagues to at least put in copyright notices when using other people's work. I know so many developers who use nothing but open source products but never acknowledge it. The acknowledgement alone is enough for us. That ensures that the open source message is passed on to users.
Let's set aside the bulk of OSS users are by and large oblivious to what OSS even is and focus on those that do and are not programmers. A good portion of those see programmers as old fart *nix self proclaimed messiahs or fast and loose hothead control freaks because about the only time they actually get to see the programmers in nature is when they are fighting over VI and Emacs or Init and Systemd. Would you want to work with you?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Testing alpha/betas full of broken stuff is no fun. Writing detailed reports on what is broken is no fun. Writing documentation is no fun. Endless discussions is no fun. Being help desk for people with entitlement issues who can't be bothered to RTFM is no fun. Being someone else's side show is no fun, graphics artists probably have projects of their own. And I've yet to meet anyone in marketing who'd do that on their own time for fun. In fact, it's a strange breed who comes home from work after developing software all day to continue writing more software in their spare time instead of doing... well, anything else really. It's kind of of cool to make something though, so the coding part gets a pass. The rest is a different story...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Having watched some of my colleagues trying to submit changes to the linux kernel convinced me that the submission process is 80
Why aren't companies paying more people to work on Open Source projects.
I'm a downstream contributor. I work with two distributions reporting bugs and updating Packages. I have Cluster access to two Distributions. I find that if you are non-coder, Downstream is easier to work with than Upstream. I do this because I run these OSes, and I use them to get work done.
This. Open Source people tend to be fundamentalist in nature, which doesn't exactly make it easy to contribute. Compromise, agreement, pragmatism - these are all foreign concepts to them.
Non-Coders, Why Aren't You Contributing To Open Source?
Time.
Two kids, aged 4 and 6. Golden Retriever. House with a 'to do' list as long as my arm.
As a career technical writer, I once tried to help out a few open source projects by improving their universally bad documentation. In all cases, my contributions were belittled, and often far worse than that, eliciting scorn and disdain from the "l33t programmers" who thought I was just wasting repo storage and bandwidth. This was something I did on my own time, to improve projects for the benefits of others, for no money.
As a result, it didn't take me long to say "fuck it" and leave those open source projects to wallow in their own filth. They're little more than a cult, and if you don't conform to the leaders' idea of what a contrib should be and do, you're not welcome.
You're absolutely right. Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.
Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.
Gedit used to look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png
It had a clean, usable, consistent UI. The major functionality was easily available, and the UI was extremely intuitive and efficient to use.
The hipsters can't stand for usable software, of course. It needed to be "improved"!
This is what gedit looks like more recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png
I'm not joking. That's really what it looks like. Using it is even worse than it looks.
Gedit's UI today is fucking awful.
It's like they've taken the worst aspects of tablet UI design, and forced it into a text editor that's probably never used anywhere but on desktops and laptops.
The traditional menus and toolbars are gone, replaced with incomprehensibly bad icons and a shitty Chrome-style hamburger menu that's an unusable jumble of unrelated functionality.
It's absolutely fucking moronic what they've done to gedit. They've managed to completely destroy the UI of a text editor, for crying out loud!
Why the fuck would I want to contribute anything but a total and complete reversion back to the old UI? Getting rid of this shit-for-brains UI is the best possible bugfix that gedit could undergo right now. But will it be accepted? Of course not! The hipsters can't possibly be wrong about the UI.
But, how is that specific to open source?
It sounds like the problem with people in general... You find these flaws emerge everywhere on the commercial software spectrum from mass-market consumer applications to meat and potatoes business applications, enterprise verticals, bespoke consulting and in-house development. There can often be a cult of the lead developer, architect, product manager, VP, primary customer, next customer, or last customer.
It seems to me that the only difference with open source, as with any labor-based market, is that your contributions are not as fungible as with cash purchases of software? It is not as trivial to change your mind and send your money elsewhere, both as an individual participant and as a customer base. It's a bit more like society and politics in that regard...
I've offered my services, found no takers.
I'm a Mac user, and I've rarely had to read a manual to know how to use Mac software or hardware. But that stuff you geeks turn out needs a lot of explaining before ordinary people will benefit from it.
I've offered my services in software design such that software will be so friendly that no manual will be needed. No takers. As a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication I was respected in the commercial world but snubbed by Open Source.
I'm reminded of when my associates programmed in dBase. At the time I designed Apple & Mac databases that anyone could understand and use to good effect. They could even safely modify parts of it. My associates preferred to create systems that users could NOT understand or use easily. Even another dBase programmer would have difficulty. Their strategy was to keep the client dependent on them. I tend to believe that many open source programmers retain that mentality.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Maybe not cult, but I don't like the open source culture and don't feel the need to feed it.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
This. Open Source people tend to be fundamentalist in nature, which doesn't exactly make it easy to contribute. Compromise, agreement, pragmatism - these are all foreign concepts to them.
Exactly. I have tried almost all of the methods of contributing listed in the article and have either been ignored or rejected.
I'm geeky for a non-programmer, but, for example, rarely managed to get Linux to run on one of my PCs, and never managed to get it to run *satisfactorily* (with my dual monitors set up as I want them, smoothly playing video, running what I want at startup...). Stuff such as "recompiling the kernel (which someone had to do for me on my last attempt) stumps me.
I could contribute: translations, feedback on the UI ("could your mom understand *that* ?), testing... I've tried twice, and found the atmosphere utterly unfriendly. Mostly, especially in big projects, devs are out for peer recognition and hacker glory, not to take care of the thorn-in-your-side user for which things are either not working or not understandable. And that's too bad.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
It sounds like the problem with people in general... You find these flaws emerge everywhere on the commercial software spectrum from mass-market consumer applications to meat and potatoes business applications, enterprise verticals, bespoke consulting and in-house development. There can often be a cult of the lead developer, architect, product manager, VP, primary customer, next customer, or last customer.
But people are less inclined to deal with that when they are just volunteering their spare time.
My neighboorhood has an armed negiboorhod watch, a bike patrol and a parents foot patrol. They all do great stuff keeping me and my kids safe. I keep thinking about volunteering to one of them but never do.
I get invited almost every week by a local charity to help distribute food packages to needy families, haven't gone in years.
I was very politically active in college, since I have a family the most I do is vote.
Asside from giving some money to various causes I don't do anything.
Contributing to open source is just one of many good things I don't do enough.
@bloodhawk: "If I start spending time contributing back to open source, then open source is no longer the cheapest and best option for the areas in which I use it."
...
Most bizarre logic fart I've ever seen on an online forum in ages
Could I contribute while mountain-biking? Could I contribute by ballroom dancing? Could I contribute while driving miniature steam engines in the park on Sundays? Could I contribute while acting in local Shakespeare plays? Could I contribute while woodworking? Could I contribute by going to the movies?
It is simple, most people have hobbies that they enjoy spending their spare time on.
Just because some people have a passion for Open Source and others find utility in it doesn't impart any sort of onus to assist development. Isn't that the ethos of Open Source - you can use it with no strings attached?
You might as well ask the opposite - Why are there so few FOSS coders just dropping in at rest homes to talk to the elderly? Why are no FOSS coders painting murals in public spaces? Why are no FOSS coders picking up rubbish in the park? Why are no FOSS coders building mountain bike trails in the weekend?
The parent isn't "trolling", for crying out loud. Anyone who has tried to deal with GNOME, Mozilla, or even Debian any time recently will know exactly what the parent is talking about.
They've all become rotten hipster cults, in my opinion. Mozilla is particularly bad. They've trashed the UI of their most popular product, to an extent that only hipsters can manage. They've employed a strict "we know better than you" hipster attitude toward user complaints about these changes. They've forced out at least one long-time, high-ranking leader merely because his views on an unrelated political matter didn't match their hipster ultra-politically correct beliefs. They waste resources on fucking idiotic projects like Firefox OS, just because they want to me-too the hipsters at Google and Apple.
These sorts of hipsters have now invaded Debian, and are in the process of trashing the entire project using systemd. They completely trashed GNOME a few years ago, during the GNOME 3 tragedy.
Why the heck would any sane, normal, non-hipster person want anything to do with those people and those projects?
Do you not get that the vast majority of people don't want to volunteer their time and effort only to be belittled and berated by the "Coding Gods"? Hell, even this debate over "systemd" has a lot of us wondering if you all have any respect for each other.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
@obarthelemy: "rarely managed to get Linux to run on one of my PCs .. such as "recompiling the kernel"
..
All I can say is, your experience is not my experience and I've never had to recompile the kernel to get something working. See these people who managed to get dual screen working
Oct 2004: "Nvidia dual screen setup Ubuntu 14.04"
Nov 2009: "How to use Dual monitors in Ubuntu (Nvidia)"
Seriously, that is the major reason many who could contribute don't. Oh, and of course there is also GPL3 versus BSD, object oriented versus procedural, point and click versus command line, and another myriad of thousands of omnipotent issues that most be decided before one should even consider contributing to open source.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I have better shit to do with my time. When I'm off work, it's my time. I have other things I want to do rather than work. I enjoy my job, but it isn't fun as a hobby. I value a life-work balance.
The "Coding Gods" will be quick to punish you is you share your strange thoughts.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I just don't give a shit enough to contribute. I already have hobbies. I get paid to administer, consult, develop, and test at work. Most of my hobbies do not involve computers (sports, reading, music, good ole fashioned napping). The few that do relate fairly closely to my line of work, which is largely closed source.
tl;dr - neither the time nor the willingness to contribute to something that only affects me tangentially
Once in a while, I will volunteer to help briefly like reporting and testing an issue since that's my paid job.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I think part of the reason people don't contribute is that, whether it's deserved or not, there's a perception that open source projects aren't friendly and aren't welcoming of input from "normal people". I can say that I've been in situations where I submitted a bug and had it ignored or else told that it wasn't a priority and the developer didn't care. I've offered feedback on ways that I thought the software could be improved, and was essentially told, "If you want that done, write it yourself. I'm just here to scratch my own itch." In a number of situations when I've participated in forum discussions, I've encountered the attitude that if you're not a programmer that can contribute code, you should butt out of the conversation.
There was one instance where I actually paid programmers to fix something in an open source project that my company needed to have fixed, and the project would not accept the fix for some reason they wouldn't explain. To be clear, this wasn't a new feature or some kind of redesign, but there was an open source project that wasn't working, we paid a couple of programmers to fix it and make it work, they were successful, and even those programmers (who had experience contributing to FOSS) were surprised when the fix was rejected without explanation. That's fine, since my company got what we needed out of the software once it was fixed, but I doubt anyone else ever got to benefit from the fix.
Now, I'm not claiming that these handful of experiences represent every open source project out there. I'm sure there are projects that are very welcoming, but I haven't really experienced that. You ask why I don't contribute? It'd because nobody has asked, and my attempts to help have not been welcomed. And then when I've explained this on Slashdot before, people respond saying something like, "Well you need to approach the community in the right way. They have their own way of doing things, and you should spend time to learn about the community and do things the way they want things done, and then I'm sure they'll welcome your contributions."
Which... you know... fine. Maybe that's true. But honestly, I don't care that much. My motivation to contribute my time and effort for free is pretty limited to begin with, and if people are going to make it even harder and less pleasant, then I'm not going to bother.
Or just go get the battery replaced?
I'm the person who modded the parent troll. Perhaps I should have used "flamebait" but I rarely bother with the distinction. It was modded down because all it does is make the inciting claim without any backup explanation. If he'd posted that sentence followed by one of your paragraphs, for example, he wouldn't have earned the mod.
This is no different than a few other comments on the thread, and how I modded them. Both of the following posts tell the article submitter and the open source community to fuck off, but they do it in very different ways. I hope you can see why they earned different mods, and why the parent you care so deeply about is more like the first than the second.
Subject: What?
Body: Here's your answer: why don't you go fuck yourself.
Mod: -1 Troll
Subject: I don't care /., but work? Fuck you, pay me.
Body: I work with computers all day at work. When I get off work, I'm not going to work on them even more, and for free to boot. Sure, I'll play on computers, and even web surf and make snarky comments on
Mod: +1 Insightful
The point of FOSS is not to get something for cheap (or free). It's about the freedoms you have while using the software and the benefits of a diverse range of people contributing to production. Your employer pays you to install and administer the software. Why can't they pay you to make contributions as well? This is how we end up with awesome software that everyone benefits from.
But, how is that specific to open source?
Because of money.
With commercial code, programmers are paid, and people will put up with a lot of crap to keep their jobs.
More importantly, paying customers are much harder to ignore than freeloading users.
If you don't give customers what they want, they go elsewhere, and you go out of business.
When you have to meet payroll in a week, and you don't have enough money in the bank account to cover it, you will find a way to refocus your priorities away from petty power games.
What kind of place needs an armed neighbourhood watch and a parents foot patrol? Rather than tackling the symptoms, maybe going after the root causes would be more productive.
I work at an software company, in the enterprise tech support department. I'm the tech support liaison to engineering. I use JIRA all-day everyday. I even fix minor bugs on my own dev box.
I've offered my help on several open source project. No response or even worse, dickhead response. They are not interested. So please stop running articles about how non-coders(and I do code, I'm just not an "engineer") can help with open source projects. They don't care.
And FYI: It's not much better in the commercial world. Engineers do not get promoted for fixing bugs. That's just reality. In fact, the engineers assigned to fix bugs are doing it because they are on the VP of engineering's shit list that week/month/year. So they are really thrilled to be working on these things. It makes my job so much easier! (i.e. extremely frustrating)
When I find open source programs that I use on a daily basis, I will usually donate money instead of time. I spend enough time on the computer at work as it is.
I used to contribute, 7 or 8 years ago, to a program called jalbum by building a couple of different skins. Jalbum is a java based program that lets you build customized photo albums for your web site. However, the program got picked up as an internal engine for a couple of applications and then there was a rapid growth spurt in features and capabilities. I just didn't have the time to keep the skins up to date and have a life away from the computer, so I stopped contributing.
I did learn a lot about Java, photo manipulation, HTML, etc.
In that case it's the opposite, they tried to fix something that isn't broken and have now divided entire sections of the OS community.
Oh and a special mention to systemd for wrecking Debian and starting a thousand flamewars because they just had to have Debian running their anti-unix init system.
Yeah, those are some great software projects there...
That and I think Poettering is a megalomaniacal douche.
not a maker.
That may perhaps be state specific, but it's been taken to court and won't hold in most places. Even if you sign. It's called duress.
"Projects like OpenHatch will even help you match your skill set to a project in need. So what's holding you back? Time? Lack of interest? Difficulty getting started?"
Not knowing about OpenHatch until just now may be a part of it.
As an artist, I've contributed a fair amount of material to the creative commons ecosystem, and I've posted some tutorials for open source projects that have a small user base, but other than that, I have no way of knowing what skills of mine could be useful to anyone working on a project, or what holes they need filled.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Sometimes I can only financially help with $20 here and there. Atm Im helping out an OS FPS game (Xonotic) by running several servers which costs me around $110CDN per month for two servers (North American and European based with a NA based VPS for hosting maps which will become a public map repo shortly)
Also atm I'm fund raising 550EU to have custom monster models built for the game which will be used for single player mode and will be open source so others can use them. I'm at 440 EU but that mostly between 7 users.
I also just restarted my internet radio station which I ran pretty succesfully from 2001-2004. ATM I'm using Icecast2 and MPD for the software and promote them when I can.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I contribute bug reports and questions to several forums. This is something all users can do. All users should understand this is a valuable contribution. Next is answering them. I have found all forums I use moderately responsive and I have no complaints about that side of things. In a conventional software production cycle you have a team of specialists collating and prioritizing that information from a user point of view. This is almost always absent in open source. The feedback is direct to developer.
Commercial software houses have achieved a closer relationship between developers and customers using online forums and similar forms of communication. Moving closer to open source communication style in this regard. Open source needs to consider how best to collate and prioritize user feedback and bug reports in a way that is not developer centric.
Open source interface to business requirements is good, development is good, but users are not yet so well represented. We will have to solve this.
Many years ago I was a programmer. Then, I found myself doing tech support and got a big surprise: not only was I good at it, I liked doing it. Yes, I had my share of ID10T callers, but at the end of the day there was the great satisfaction of knowing that there were people out there who's days were better because they'd talked to me.
Now I'm retired, and instead of using Windows I use Linux. I belong to several tech support forums and mailing lists for Linux and for various FOSS programs I use and I spend part of every day trying to help others, both to keep my hand in and because I still find it satisfying to be of help. And, when needed, I report issues to my distro's Bugzilla and respond, as best I can, to requests for information because if I'm having this issue, others are too and even minor bugs need swatting. I may not have (and maybe never had) the coding skills to contribute code, but I can still give back to the FOSS community by helping others.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Most likely because ways to contribute are overly complex and difficult to use for non coders... They need to first try figure out how your complex project management system actually works. Do they need signup account for it first, then find right place to submit report, etc... I remember years ago.. when i was new and run into project that had problem with my local charset (some characters were handled wrong) went throw projects website and there was no easy way to send bug report... Ended up mailing one of the developers outside their main project system and asked if he could forward this to right place since i cant figure it out... Looking at most open source projects, that has not been getting any easier for non coders..
Not sure I can really claim to be a non-coder, since I was a professional database programmer for some years, but I can definitely say that I would like to contribute to Open Source and the reason I mostly don't is basically the same as why I dropped off of /. some years ago: Bad financial models. (Today's visit is too long a story.)
Let me try to clarify the problem. Microsoft produces gawdawful software. Apple is against freedom of choice. Google is blossoming as an EVIL tyrant under the new motto "All your attentions is belonging to us." However, they all have viable financial models and they are kicking the hiney of little OSS.
Constructive suggestion for you to ignore (of course): Charity share brokerage (AKA reverse auction charity shares). Sort of like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, but with project management and clear SUCCESS criteria. If the slashdot people wanted to act as the charity brokerage, the donors would trust them to hold the money and provide lists of possible OSS projects to be implemented. If enough donors buy the shares to fund a project, then the funds would be released. (By the way, the same basic mechanism could be used for funding solution projects for problems that don't call for software solutions.)
The broker would earn a percentage mostly by making sure the project proposals are clear and complete. How many people are required and how much will they be paid? How much testing will be adequate? How will non-core contributors be rewarded? What is the schedule? What are the most likely problems and how can they be dealt with? That's to help potential donors assess the real risks. And, to my way of thinking, most important: What will success look like?
The donors (possibly even including yours truly) would basically get nothing but recognition for their donations on a project funder page. However, as minor doggie treats they should be the first people invited to use the completed software and their reviews might receive extra weight in evaluating the success (or even failure) of the project.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
But I got so fed up with the big egos that I quit. Linus Torvalds himself once trashed the project I was working on because of a few lines of debug code that were checked in, refusing to listen to our arguments. Later, similar projects -invented by others- made it to core functionality in the linux kernel. I'm talking about the old Kernel Graphics Interface project, which did the same as DRI and KMS, except that it also worked on other platforms. I tried again with Scribus. Their response: Welcome, but don't touch our code. I was involved in Mandrake, but quit when the core developers refused to listen to the community. We all know what happened to Mandrake...
They designed it the way they liked. If they want to take instructions on what and how to code they will find a job where someone pays them for the priviledge of telling them what to do.
Then they need to stop bitching about people not contributing back to projects.
Additionally, everywhere that I've worked has been fine about changing the agreement to state that only stuff I work on during work hours belongs to them. Anything I do on my own time is my own. If they want you bad enough, they'll change the agreement. If they're not willing to do that, are you sure it's a place you really want to work?
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Please choose to contribute to localization only for programs you fully understand and use.
You can't be too careful these days. The media has been working nonstop to forment hate and there's no telling where it will spread.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I have many reasons why I do / don't contribute, but mostly it's time. You don't realise what an investment of personal time means to the person giving it. When I was young and a student, I could code for hours into the early hours and not have to worry and could churn out twice as much code in languages that I had been unfamiliar with the week before. As I get older, giving up my time produces less results but also costs more. To do so for a small software project, or a game even, is something to be applauded - time is precious.
However, when I have time, I don't have the time to argue with people. I won't get into a discussion about whether or not X should exist if it's what *I* want, and I could start coding in the time it takes to argue it. Open source is an inherently selfish (and selfless!) prospect - I write a feature because I need it. If someone else benefits, great, but that's not the prime intention for me. Also, if someone else has coded a feature I need, whether or not it gets upstream, that's what I want and I'll use it. I might not even tell anyone about doing that.
The larger projects do attract an attitude of kinds. I used to contribute to a large open-source game but when all my feature-patches (actual working patches, with code, that I'd be playing the game with for months) were pushed, there were disparaged to oblivion. Why would anyone want that? Put full translations for every language for this string you have. Why would you use THAT piece of free MIT-licenced code to help you when you could have used this other, almost identical MIT-licenced code that has less correlation and a worse API?
So instead I put my patches on my website and let people pull them as required. Over time, all those same features made it into the game proper, but years later, and with much more complex code. I wasn't bitter because by that time I didn't care and had stopped coding for the project. I'm not easily put off, but it was more than my investment in time was not rewarded (rightly so if my code was crap, but I don't think it was) and thus the patches I was making for me were only ever going to seen by me, so why bother to push them?
Even as a teenager, I was cleaning up the English documentation for open-source emulators, pushing bug reports and trying to hunt down the lines of code that were the cause, and handling questions on the forums. That kind of time is what I still give to the projects I enjoy, want to see propagate, and that I see in need of help. My answering a question on the forum could (I like to think) save a programmer ten minutes of having to interpret a bug report written inexpertly by that user.
I also wrote a port of a game once after seeing that there wasn't one for the GP2X - a handheld open-source video games console. I questioned on a forum whether there was a port, and got told no. I was then encouraged by a handful of people to start porting it myself because they thought I was as good as they were and they'd ported games.
It was probably one of the larger things I've ended up doing and cost many months of time for me. And I got a lot of good feedback, and I know thousands of people used the end product. And I had great fun, and I feel quite proud of it, even though the actual code isn't great. People took it and ported my code because all the hard work was done and they could easily port what I'd written than the original project. But that was about it. You don't get recognition for what you do (and I wasn't expecting any - OS is selfish too, remember?) so you have to enjoy doing it.
I actually get more good feedback, and more enjoyment, out of putting up a couple of game servers out of my own wallet, being admin on them in my own time, and chatting with the regulars. That's a sad state of affairs, but I suppose in a large OS project you do get that kind of thing too - the game project above certainly ended up with a huge compile farm that one guy managed - no doubt they had fun on the IRC channels and felt appreciated.
The real question should be:
Why aren't companies paying more people to work on Open Source projects.
Does their purchase of a programmer's coding time give them any editorial control on the project? If it doesn't, then it's got little value to them to contribute patches to a project, if there's no chance that they're going to be accepted. This is frequently true when you want to make changes that go across area boundaries in Linux, and you aren't an area maintainer, like Alan Cox or Ingo Molnar.
So the company is willing to hire people who already have commit bits and/or a high enough position in the project that they aren't going to be stuck maintaining local patches for the rest of eternity, and applying them to every new revision that comes out. Google was this way; the Google server team has literally years worth of patches that aren't being accepted back into mainline Linux at this point (example: the TSC resynchronization code for AMD processors that puts the TSCs on all the CPUs back where they would have been, before the platform went into a C2 or greater state, and stopped the CPU clocks. Google carries these forward every time the update the server OS.
If the software is strategic: you don't want it to be Open Source.
If the software is tactical: you want it back into the project so that it reduces your ongoing maintenance burden.
If you can't have both those things, then it makes sense to just internally fork the project, and then ignore anything major that causes divergence with the original project, unless it's a bug fix. Which you then merge back into your private source base.
NB: This is largely how Android works; most of the development is not in public, and is only published post, or simultaneous to, a hardware release. That's also how Apple works, too, when they figured out that developing in public had no commercial benefit, and leaked a lot of information. Apple didn't want to preannounce their hardware, any more than an Android using company like Samsung wants Huawei or Apple knowing ahead of time what hardware they're going to be releasing in 6 months.
So I guess if you want more companies hiring people to work on Open Source, you need to turn the question around a bit, and ask why editorial control is centralized in so few people, and why is their kingdom building that reinforces that centralization, such that there are not more prominent developers with some say in the project direct that are available for companies to hire?
It's hard enough to get software developers to fix a problem in a product for which one is paying. Nearly every issue I have run into with open source is a driver or compatibility issue which was previously documented years prior to my own stumbling upon it. The developers weren't interested enough back at that time to fix it, and it leaves me with little faith that it is worth my time to chime in with a "me too", not to mention the hate for resurrecting old threads or bug reports.
Part of the problem with open source is freedom. Not enough people sat down at their desk and told to fix it instead of working on what interests them.
The day open source is forgotten and core sharing depends merely on developer's goodwill, without clear reuse licenses, we will face all the Unix wars all over again.
There are clear signs of that already happening in the mobile OS area, where big corps are busy using patents to invalidate the benefits that their FLOSS code base provide.
The advantage of open source is that it allows developers to advance the industry fast through collaboration on common infrastructure while competing on quality and features, rather than competing on who owns the largest amount of intellectual property. Next generation developers would be wise to learn that lesson from history or they will have to re-learn it from experience.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
My theory is that these days the codebases are too large to be maintained by the grassroots people, the "loosely-knit team of hackers" as we used to say. Instead, a lot of the work is done by highly organized teams of paid developers in companies. Thus, those companies also get the vote to say what goes in.
s/core sharing / code sharing/
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Because of money.
With commercial code, programmers are paid, and people will put up with a lot of crap to keep their jobs.
More importantly, paying customers are much harder to ignore than freeloading users.
If you don't give customers what they want, they go elsewhere, and you go out of business.
When you have to meet payroll in a week, and you don't have enough money in the bank account to cover it, you will find a way to refocus your priorities away from petty power games.
^ This is the truth, and it is a shame that it is so buried on this story...
But people are less inclined to deal with that when they are just volunteering their spare time.
Amen...
Pay me a quarter of a million dollars a year and I'll play the office politic game, I'll work with the management that I am dealt and the staff that I have, and get the project done because that is my job and I'm paid well to do it.
Ask me to do ALL THAT FOR FREE?
Yea, no thanks...
Part of the problem with open source is freedom. Not enough people sat down at their desk and told to fix it instead of working on what interests them.
This...
The thing is, a bunch of programmers donating their time are likely to work on whatever interests them, rather than what the project really needs...
The ability to sit the programmers down and say "this week is bug fixing week, nothing new gets done, just fix bugs", usually requires that you PAY those programmers.
If they are getting paid, then it is a job, and it likely isn't really free open source software, since the company wants a return on investment.
I do not support cults. Nuff said.
But are you a member of the cult of people who do not support cults?
---
Apologies to Bertrand Russell
It is sad to see gedit, Firefox and way too many other projects desperately trying to look as cool as Apple or Chrome but of course hopelessly falling short, instead of focusing on things that actually matter. It has been almost 6 months or so, I am sure Firefox is working on a new UI as we speak...
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
No, at best there's a forum and direct email contact and the bugs do get fixed, and many suggestions are implemented.
I give my (very niche, very complicated, very feature-full, high performance, real-time, multi-platform) app away, with the extremely rare exception of those who donate via paypal (over thirteen thousand current users, and to date, 12 (twelve) paypal donations.)
I support it very well, in terms of fixes and updates and through extensive documentation, docs that I update more or less live as people make suggestions; but I keep the source for the app closed. I write the code because I am highly entertained the area the app addresses, and I use the app myself each and every day. Beyond that, I am delighted my users get to share my work product. I am not, however, interested in either sharing my actual coding skills or teaching anyone to code.
Open source is a choice. Closed source is choice. Neither one is good or bad intrinsically. Bad support is bad support no matter if you've got some fancy bug tracking system (I'm looking at Apple, the QT people, and the Wine people in particular) or if you do it all in your head. Likewise good support is good support no matter how it is achieved. If the product starts out as reasonably reliable and as-advertised, then you have a chance to keep up with the bugs as they come in. Not that such an attempt is commonly made, but it does happen.
I think it boils down to just a few things: Does it do what you told people it would do? If it does, good. If not, users are about to measure you by your support. Will you fix it at all? If you do, how long will it take? Did you leave a bunch of people behind because you "had" to use some new OS features? Well, for about 99.99% of "had" claims, that's utter nonsense. You're almost certainly just a lazy twerp (or a bunch of them) who wanted to play with the new toys, and you kicked over your users to get there (looking *again* at Apple*: Aperture... PPC... busted broadcast networking... busted console message handling... busted browsers... oh, but I did notice Apple keeps iTunes up to date, funny exception, that one, eh? Can't imagine why...)
But hey. What do I know? I've only been writing large, well supported applications with excellent compatibility back to the original release environment for what, I guess it's about thirty years now. I'm sure I'm missing something, and the RIGHT way to go about this is do whatever you want and never mind the end user, right? Right?
* FYI: Not picking on Apple in order to make Microsoft or anyone else look good. Back in the day, I well remember submitting obvious, horrific bugs to MS and seeing them never get fixes. It's just that Apple has been biting me personally in a continuous, really, really annoying manner with extremely poor support for years now, while MS is just a(nother) bad memory.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Since the 90s my main reason to not contribute to FOSS is that I do not ever want to be thrown in the same drawer with ESR.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
Because it's fun? An opportunity to develop skills? Peer recognition? Because you need the software/bugfix/feature yourself and can't or won't make money out of it for some reason anyway so there's nothing to lose? Need a reference to further your career? These are the kinds of reasons I believe in. Do these apply to non-coders?
Yes, that is why counter-assholes like RMS are indispensable. Emacs is going strong - no UI idiot is getting closer than 100 miles to emacs UI.
With web browsers, IDEs, email clients all going to shit, I'll have to look at Emacs as the oasis.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I estimate I have reported over 3000 bugs over the years across maybe 80 different open source projects. I would say that 5% of the bugs I have reported have ever been fixed intentionally by the developers. Some of the bugs have become obsolete or "accidentally fixed" with subsequent code changes; some have been marked WONTFIX with a range of justifications; but the vast majority have been ignored, and are still sitting open in a bugtracker somewhere. Some projects like Fedora close most of my bug reports after the bugs expire a couple of releases into the future. I'm not quite sure why I bother, except that some projects like Eclipse are fast to respond and always fix the bug -- this sort of proactive and responsive attitude keeps me going.
I get it, there's no reason I can ever justifiably expect a developer to fix my pet bug, given that they choose what they work on -- except that if they fix the bug, the software will be better, which should really be the goal. My bug-reports are objective, carefully researched, and properly written, with minimal test cases / repro instructions, required logs, etc. etc. -- and I'm a developer myself, so I understand what's needed.
No, I don't have time to figure out how to build, test and isolate bugs in every product I find a bug in -- the developers can do that much faster than me, they are already set up to build and run the code, and they know the code better than I could hope to. So reporting bugs is my contribution. I would love to see a bit more responsiveness to contributions across all open source projects, even if fixing bugs feels like laborious busy-work.
I did not criticize large project teams being unmanageable.
I am a programmer, but only because I have been forced to become one. When I was much younger I started working on a game project with a friend with similar goals. However he would not create some of the tools I have asked for. As a result I have been pushed into writing my own 3d modelling software and my own functional equivalent to FRED2 from FreeSpace 2. This is a large reason why open source games have sucked until now. At least in space games there are no tools. If you look at FreeSpace2, it survives because some absolute hero programmers on Windows got together and made tools to edit every aspect of the game, from ship hardpoint editors, to archive extractor/viewers. The original game designers also opened the source code and released the level editor to the game. Without these tools the game would have been abandoned and dead long ago. This is a critical area where Linux/Open Source games are failing. No Tools = No Love. I expect that OpenMW is going to do ridiculously well because of the campaign editing tools they are making. Similarly GTKRadiant on the Quake engine allows anyone to edit Quake/Doom levels. Unfortunately though, they will be the few engines for the forseeable future to solve this problem.
I'm a free rider because when the bus breaks down and I come out to see if I can do anything to help, I'm told to get back on the bus and to keep my arms inside of the windows.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But is there really a reason that proprietary software cannot be trusted, just because every line of source cannot be inspected?
Yes.
Is there some reason software companies cannot be trusted in a similar way?
Yes.
I should end the comment here, since your questions have been anwered. But the truth is that complex software cannot be proven, and software companies are unwilling to indemnify us for losses accrued by using their software, and those reasons together make closed-source software completely untrustworthy. It is untrustworthy for all applications and purposes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
He wasn't talking about the Mac itself but the software applications that run on it.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Because I'm made to feel I shouldn't burden a project with bug reports when I don't write code to fix them. No, I'm not the whiney, petty bug reporter that this post makes me out to be! You did ask!
There are a number of people on this thread who are saying "I don't contribute because I don't have time". Well, why don't you contribute money instead then? If a piece of software has value to you, either because it helps you do your job, entertains you or saves you some time, then it surely has monetary value.
The advantage of contributing money apart from it taking only about five minutes is that you don't have to deal with the arrogant arseholes that all successful open source projects are staffed by (if many of the anecdotes above are correct).
Full disclosure: I am in this group of people, unless you count the very occasional bug report.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Exactly.
Unless you are rich by birth you have to work to pay bills.
In the FOSS world you have five kinds of developers.
1. The company they work for pays them to work on the project.
2. They make money customizing and supporting a FOSS project.
3. They are working on a project for school or college and decide to make it FOSS.
4. They love to right code and they are doing it for fun.
If you are category 4 and it stops being fun you move on to playing board games, riding motorcycles, or backpacking.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
systemd wasn't fixing something that wasn't broken; sysvinit is archaic and has a lot of problems, and it's amazing it's worked as well as it has. Every other UNIX out there has switched to something resembling systemd already. Solaris has SMF, for instance.
The problem with systemd is likely that it tried to do too much, too fast, and attracted a lot of negative attention because of this (also, by enlarging its scope so fast, it's not possible to do as much in-the-field testing, so there's a higher potential for bugs). The overall idea is sound, but the execution could have been done differently.
The next generation is too stupid to learn that lesson in time. We are doomed.
Non-Coders are the drug user equivalent. Non-Coders create demand. IF no one used Open Source, where would it be now?
I'm an assistant professor. In my job, it's publish or perish. If I don't get enough funding and publications before the ene of my 5th year, I'm FIRED. And this doesn't just affect me. My family and I would be SOL, and we live in Binghamton, so it's not exactly easy to find other tech jobs. So I really don't have time to contribute to FOSS projects.
Except that I do:
https://sourceforge.net/p/vortexman/
https://sourceforge.net/p/visualcpu/
https://sourceforge.net/p/openshader/
https://sourceforge.net/p/minuteman/
https://sourceforge.net/p/lsann/
https://sourceforge.net/p/gterm/
https://sourceforge.net/p/ftllm/
https://sourceforge.net/p/educpu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project (founder, but it's dormant)
https://github.com/jbush001/NyuziProcessor (some minor contributions)
For me, it's mostky the attitudes of the asshats in charge.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
You make it sound like every proprietary software house is an evil bastard who can hide any kind of shit in the product they want to. I claim that instead, they have an interest to deliver good software to maintain customer satisfaction and to stay in business.
Most non-coders have the same attention spam as a Linux distro.
Soon enough, their free time forks off into another party. And we're not invited.
I'm a New Yorker. I don't work for free.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I was interested in a couple of projects. I did not have much time for coding and did not feel qualified as others had a better knowledge of the "nuts and bolts" so I inquired on what I had to do for testing and documentation[1]. No one responded. So I no longer ask.
[1] OK, here's my rant. Programmers do not understand the value of good documentation. If you look at really good projects they have great documentation. If I can not find documentation for a software package or it is in poor shape I simply do not use the software. Esp. in this short term sprint oriented era I do not have time to waste fumbling around trying to get something to work. If it isn't function OOTB in less than I day I do not have time for it. End of story.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I, for one, moved from Thunderbird to Apple Mail several years ago - and never looked back. I get my 3-column view and I can turn off threading. I'm happy.
Plug in a 2-button mouse with a scroll wheel. Macs have USB now (and Bluetooth).
Wouldn't that line of thought make you part of the problem?
I do music, 2d art, 3d art, textures, pixel art, you name it. Gigabytes. All released under opensource licenses from the begining.
But since I said some things against feminism and women's rights, none of my contributions "exist"
Fuck these free software faggots. (like Erich Schubert)
"He has not contributed anything to the open source community."
This is a complete lie. I've contributed gigabytes of media alone.
I've done years and years of programming work.
I have done far more than you ever will.
"His songs and "games" are not worth looking at,"
Your subjective view. Coloured by your social views and your
disdain for those who oppose you in that.
"and I'm not aware of any project that has accepted any of his "contributions"."
The only objectively true thing you've said: you're not aware.
I'm glad you're unaware, I hope that trend continues.
My experience trying to contribute in open-source projects is 'patch or you don't exist'. I suggest a simple UI change to cover a particular scenario where-in the UI is really unusable. The response I get :
Me: The tabs become invisible without bordering if the UI theme is black
Core Developer (CD) : I like it this way, we chose this after deliberation.
Me: But this OS is the dominant OS and it's not uncommon to have a dark theme on Windows...
CD: Choose a light theme. Wontfix.
Me: I guess that's the end of it for me then. I'll move to another program.
CD: You could always change the options and compile it. Submit a patch and it may get approved.
Me: If I knew how to do that, would I be talking to you? Would I have not simple compiled the damn thing myself and used it...never to talk about it again?
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
One model which would work functionally but massively reduce the headcount most FOSS projects like to tout would be the Habitat for Humanity setup.
Tell people that to contribute, these are the days and times for which they can sign up. Tell them what scope knowledgeable leader they will be reporting to. Let the group leaders track down who showed up (physically or virtually) and hand out assignments.
Are you replying to my post with a different subject line or is this slashdot failing the comment system?
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
NVM. Slasdot failing the comment system it is.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
...and I don't think more "managers" will fix the problem.
I couldn't find anything about how non-coders can help out on OpenHatch. Am I missing something? It looks like they only want people who code: https://openhatch.org/search/
The OP implied that open source projects are looking for non-coders to do non-coding things, but I can't imagine what that would be, as 99% of OSS is the code, is it not? (Let's face it, Google searches of forums is a better way to find out how software works than documentation, which is often obtuse, patchy, or outdated). What use does OSS have for a psychology PhD student with skills in analytical thinking, statistics, and scientific computing (but no real coding experience)?
I'm with the other here who pointed out that, after spending 8-12 hours a day using a computer, I don't want to come home and sit down in front of a computer to work on a project for free, especially a project that might never make it. I want to chill out. Coding, for me, is the exact opposite of relaxing. I'd rather listen to music and close my eyes. That's relaxing.
Ok, fine. Please prove that Solaris is using sysvinit.
The word is "foment".
Considering that the negative response came mostly from the *user* community, I'd say it was appropriate. Users know what they want and "change for change's sake" is not on that list. There's nothing inherently better about Gnome 3 over Gnome 2, Unity is a piece of crap, the the most usable of the "user friendly" desktops, and systemd had the potential to be great, but rather than just try to replace sysvinit and maybe add additional functionality once that had been done properly, it came out of the gate with a load of half-baked functionality, including its core functionality as a sysvinit replacement. As a result, setting up LDAP on Debian or Ubuntu has become a pain in the ass, and setting it up *properly* has become impossible.
There was a time when there were KDE zealots who could still use Gnome when necessary, Gnome zealots who could still use KDE when necessary, and people like me who liked both. I know I left out a few dozen other WMs; if I left out your favorite, oh well, use what you like, I'm not judging; I'm only covering the big ones here, though. Honestly, I blame KDE for starting us down the road to our current desktop mess, they really fucked the market with KDE4. But I can't foist all the blame upon them; they didn't force Gnome to follow suit some years later, and Unity is Ubuntu's answer to the Gnome/KDE shitstorm, it just isn't the right answer. It's what I use because it's, sadly, the best of the lot, unless I want to put in the time to get everything working with KDE3, but honestly, I'd rather just use my damn desktop at this point.
New ideas are plenty welcomed. However, contrary to popular belief, the Open Source community isn't chock full of whores who love having things shoved down their throats. If your solution works better than what we currently have, we'll embrace it; if it's crap, don't expect us to respond positively when our working solution is ripped out to make way for the new shitpile. Like systemd.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
You make it sound like every proprietary software house is an evil bastard who can hide any kind of shit in the product they want to.
That is not my claim. One claim is that many of them are, and you cannot differentiate between them without access to the executives. Another claim is that many corporations are actually filled with incompetence, and you cannot differentiate between them without access to the codebase and the issue tracker.
I claim that instead, they have an interest to deliver good software to maintain customer satisfaction and to stay in business.
There are many roads to success. You can attack your competitors, for example. Or if your competition is crap, you only need to do a little bit better than they to be more successful. You can also buy a company which was once great, and to which the customers are locked in, and then milk it for profit while destroying it from the inside. There are many reasons why an Open development model is safer for the customer, these are just a few of them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
lets see 1 having convoluted compile instructions (oh you need toolchain 45.35d.friday.afternoon which is not downloadable from Toolchains website unless you can do a CVS pull and a fresh compile) 2 going DARK and nearly completely changing the setup 3 breaking features and taking weeks to fix 4 general arrogance (i couldn't have made that error it must be something on your end) 5 code that is written to confuse folks (why shouldn't you spread the code for a feature across 19 different files??) 6 platform arrogance (oh you are running WindBlows well then the fix is low priority)
Another possibility is event support for smaller conferences that aren't run by corporate sponsors. Much of it is just generic event assistance, and people can always use extra help and a car to pick up equipment or people, or get food and the like for people who can't leave their station at the venue.
It puts you in touch with many people and can be a time-limited task -- for some support roles, once your shift/one day/the conference is over, your involvement is complete for that event.
Mozilla is particularly bad. They've trashed the UI of their most popular product, to an extent that only hipsters can manage. They've employed a strict "we know better than you" hipster attitude toward user complaints about these changes.
I know its fashionable lately to bash Firefox, but since I know a few Firefox employees watch these forums, I want them to know: THANK YOU for your work.
The UI is about the same as it was before, just instead of a button at the top left, now its on the right. You can still hit Alt to get menus if you like them. But honestly I almost never find myself looking at settings or menus or whatever. I just want to browse, and you know what, Firefox stays out of my damn way and lets me browse. All that config crap is hidden in that button on the right - easy to find if I want it, but normally I just want it out of my way. Isn't that normally what people say? "Stop wasting screen real estate, I just want to do my thing". That's pretty much what Firefox gives you. You get a URL bar and the whole rest of the interface is web page. Awesome.
Plus, Firefox has been super fast for me lately. It's snappy, and since the change to the UI, it looks and feels the same (nice and snappy!) on Windows and Linux. I appreciate that. It loads up fast, switches tabs fast, and the memory leaks of the past seem to have been patched up perfectly many releases ago.
I tried to use Chrome just a couple weeks ago, and honestly, that browser felt down right sluggish to me compared to modern Firefox. Plus, it's always harassing me to log in with a Google account. Damnit I just want to browse, not constantly check Google+ or whatever they want. Again, Firefox wins hands down.
They waste resources on fucking idiotic projects like Firefox OS, just because they want to me-too the hipsters at Google and Apple.
My understanding is they want to provide a phone OS that isn't going to lock you into the Google/Apple walled garden, and that is important to me. I have an Android phone currently, and the Google Play updates drive me nuts. I just want a phone like my browser -- do its job well and stay out of my way. I don't feel I get that with Google at least. No experience with Apple but I bet it is the same.
And even if it ends up not working (which I would be disappointed!), I appreciate that they tried something. Do you see anyone else trying? The thing about research is you never know how it will turn out -- but it absolutely won't work if you don't try! So some times you have to commit resources to something that looks like a failure, because you don't know until you try. Since all of their research projects are about freedoms, I respect that and say more power to them. Keep it up. For example, I'm itching to try the feature in the newest Firefox to do a WebRTC video chat straight through the browser. It is peer-to-peer meaning it doesn't go thru Google Hangouts servers or whatever where it can be recorded etc, and it is encrypted. Hell yeah. Awesome. Again, freedom. Will it work out long run and gain traction? I hope so, but no idea, but we won't know unless someone tries. So thank you Firefox for trying. I donated $50 to Mozilla not long ago because I appreciate their work. Everyone that agrees, help me let them know we appreciate their work and to keep it up -- keep focusing on the important things, even if not everyone agrees they are important.
I'm not going to spend time working on something that'll be rejected out of hand by the deletionist admins / basement-dwellers / other powers-that-be.
Life is short. No point in wasting it.
So true. Years ago I attempted to be an active participant in the Gnome UI group -- it turns out unless we agreed with the leaders, our opinions were invalid anyway.
The problem with Open Source is frequently also its detriment -- pretty good software written by a handful of brilliant people who have the social aptitude of a small snail. When others then try to join and change the project, they have absolutely no way or willingness to assimilate those comments and suggestions into the actual software.
I say this as a programmer myself who really hates having to deal with users some days, but without their input, most all software would suck.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Alternately, how about evaluating the problem? People have this weird perception that crime is prevalent and getting worse, and the fact is that we're in a frippin' golden age of wealth and low crime. If they have no special need for their own militia, I'm just going to figure they're paranoid cowards.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I believe in open source in certain areas and not in others and not even from a coding point of view.
NINE times in the past 3 years I've offered my services to various open source projects.
I was completely ignored 6 of those times, and the other 3 times was discouraged from participating at all and treated rudely.
Sorry, but the Open Source culture is the issue, not lack of people eager to participate in projects. It's kind of like the situation with Birkenstocks - useful, but at the same time also very good birth control.
But, how is that specific to open source?
It sounds like the problem with people in general... You find these flaws emerge everywhere on the commercial software spectrum from mass-market consumer applications to meat and potatoes business applications, enterprise verticals, bespoke consulting and in-house development. There can often be a cult of the lead developer, architect, product manager, VP, primary customer, next customer, or last customer.
It seems to me that the only difference with open source, as with any labor-based market, is that your contributions are not as fungible as with cash purchases of software? It is not as trivial to change your mind and send your money elsewhere, both as an individual participant and as a customer base. It's a bit more like society and politics in that regard...
Some of the biggest flaws that I come across are in the documentation. The documentation is published, without it being vetted, and the grammar errors and facts therein are, well, just crap. I took a sample document, and used opensource (libreoffice) to vet the writing, to correct the grammar, and to follow a consistent writing style. The organization would not accept libreoffice output, but wanted the documentation written with some pre-historic application. That application was chosen because one could create a pdf file and html output. Little did the organization realize that libreoffice does both exceedingly well. I can't see myself writing in command line with the vim editor. So, give a person today's gui tools, and you will have volunteers. That organization could write a python extractor that would take the libreoffice output and convert it to the format the old back-end required. WYSIWYG tools are required.
They're USING and giving you FEEDBACK.
Casteism
Tried to work with the Mozilla folks, but their developers are the most arrogant and meanest people I ever came across. A simple factual discussion is not possible, any contributions are downed, any proposal is met with obnoxious remarks, and overall they spend an excessive amount of effort to tell people to "go away!" Would be nice if they spent just 1% of that effort on fixing bugs like memory leaks that are common since v1.0. No wonder why their browser sucks! That project is run by a bunch of self-centered egomaniacs with an abrasive temper who ignore any alternatives or suggestions unless they are their own - and I bet even then they find the time to bash them. Tried to work with OpenOffice and found that they are generally unresponsive. Suggestion, inquiries, bug reports...they all go into a system and maybe two or three years later someone sets them to abandoned/removed/won't fix although the exact same issue still exists and plenty of others over the years chimed in. Contrary, the folks who run the PaleMoon browser project. Even when I have an opposing opinion they are all nice, responsive, explain their point of view - even when I object three times in a row. Additionally, any suggestions or bugs are quickly vetted and processed and often enough either fixed or a workaround is suggested. They are a prime example on how to interact with an audience (customers) that is even far beyond what commercial business provide.