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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most bizarre logic fart I've ever seen on an online forum in ages ...
No, you're just not thinking about it. If something that currently doesn't cost you anything, and which does a job you need it to do, and which other people occasionally make better at no cost to you ... suddenly becomes something into which you have to invest a lot of the finite hours you have available in your short life, then the cost to you of being involved with that hunk of software suddenly goes way, way up. In many cases, you can't even contribute a useful suggestion without doing a lot of homework that - as a simple user - you'd otherwise not have to do. Don't know about you, but time is the single most precious thing I know.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
Bull. FOSS is about "the freedoms you have while using the software", including using the software as you see fit. It's not free if there's even an implicit "you should donate time" attached.
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*
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
This is SUCH a typical response. "You didn't have a problem, you're just too stupid. See?" THAT'S why I quit trying to contribute as a non-technical user.
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.
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...
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
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.