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GitHub Seeks Feedback on 'Open Source Sustainability' (github.blog)
Devon Zuegel, "a developer with a passion for governance and economics," recently became GitHub's open source product manager to "support maintainers in cultivating vital, productive communities" -- specifically open source software (OSS).
Thursday they put out a call for feedback from open source developers about their contribution hours, their projects, and especially their issues: As the OSS community has grown in scale and importance, the way we think about working together has to evolve, too. What works in a village or a town needs to evolve to serve a metropolis. Open source has grown from a small, academic sharing network to a giant, global web of dependencies. It now forms the backbone of the internet and technology in general. Just like any growing city, we have to coordinate the knowledge, infrastructure, and tools for the good of the whole community. OSS is an essential and special part of software development.
OSS has also been the heart of GitHub since the beginning. However, there is so much more we could do to support the people behind it. I have many ideas, but first I want to hear from you.
The essay argues OSS maintainers and contributors "don't have all the tools, support, and environment they need to succeed," including analytics, communication resources, recognition and "proportionate incentive to contribute time and money to creating and maintaining projects." (As well as deficiencies in both governance and mentorship.) And at the bottom of the blog post, there's a contact form.
"I want you to be part of the conversation and our roadmap. These challenges are nuanced, and they are unique to each project and community, so it's crucial that we have an open dialogue as we focus on helping you address them."
Thursday they put out a call for feedback from open source developers about their contribution hours, their projects, and especially their issues: As the OSS community has grown in scale and importance, the way we think about working together has to evolve, too. What works in a village or a town needs to evolve to serve a metropolis. Open source has grown from a small, academic sharing network to a giant, global web of dependencies. It now forms the backbone of the internet and technology in general. Just like any growing city, we have to coordinate the knowledge, infrastructure, and tools for the good of the whole community. OSS is an essential and special part of software development.
OSS has also been the heart of GitHub since the beginning. However, there is so much more we could do to support the people behind it. I have many ideas, but first I want to hear from you.
The essay argues OSS maintainers and contributors "don't have all the tools, support, and environment they need to succeed," including analytics, communication resources, recognition and "proportionate incentive to contribute time and money to creating and maintaining projects." (As well as deficiencies in both governance and mentorship.) And at the bottom of the blog post, there's a contact form.
"I want you to be part of the conversation and our roadmap. These challenges are nuanced, and they are unique to each project and community, so it's crucial that we have an open dialogue as we focus on helping you address them."
1. Embrace
2. Extend
3. Extinguish
Wait, what was the question again?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Lets all just jump in there. Suckers.
[($)]
The more whining about SJW's the closer we get to the year of Linux on the desktop.
of FOSS, because it preferentially promotes creation of overly complex software artifacts / applications that require lots of support.
It also would tend to encourage crap / no / minimal documentation.
So some alternative to that model would be helpful.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Sorry ESR, Tim OReilly and the rest of you, the evidence is in. "Scratching your own itch" is NOT enough. Developers want and need to make money, which is why closed source is now and always will be a much much better way to develop software, period.
NAZI's rule!!!!
A man walks into the mayor's office and says, "What works in a village or a town needs to evolve to serve a metropolis. City management has grown from a small, academic sharing network to a giant, global web of dependencies. It now forms the backbone of the governance and economics in general. Just like any growing city, we have to coordinate the knowledge, infrastructure, and tools for the good of the whole community. So, hit the bricks as I remake NYC in my own image."
I think it funny, btw, that he's quick to spin "small, academic sharing network" and ignore that the "giant, global web" was also heavily supported by industry. What has made it work is heavily either (1) wide adoption of open standards and/or software or (2) monopoly position to create a de facto standard and/or software. Meanwhile, many foundations and organizations have arisen to address the many issues he has stated, with many such (Apache Foundation comes to mind) serving as an umbrella for critical software development when an author of an important project either asks for help or simply abandons it because they're no longer interested.
It's not that his concerns aren't warranted. It's that as best as reasonably possible they're currently being addressed as needed. He doesn't really bring new ideas to the table. His call for a conversation are at best naive because it implies that he actually can meaningfully provide support and guidance. His position, though, puts him in the same position as NYC mayor: deeply political with his or his handlers own vested interests making it impossible to ever really trust him.
There's simply little, to no point relying upon him until many years have passed and he's earned the trust of people just like many other foundations have done. That almost certainly means spinning Github off has a foundation separate from Microsoft with financial backing from multiple, potentially conflicted companies. That's the model that's so far shown to work. Everything else is too political and manipulative for most to get in bed with.
And if it all comes down to advice? Post it on all on a Github repository and let people clone and modify it to their hearts content. Instead of seeking our advice, give us yours so we know where you at least say you stand and leave us to choose how we shall carry out that advice.
M$ is the Lord of the Keys.
There is only one key that rules all! And this key is secretly guarded in M$.
When M$ is destroyed itself, every PCs of the world will be malfunctioning as BSoD or unbootable because there is not a master key to check the signatures. This key was disappeared in the hell of M$.
And billions of euros will be lost due to these become trashes!
It's time we reuse old code. Backspacing incorrect code is unacceptable!
We must copy and move it even if it's only 1 character.
Every bit and byte is special and cannot he deleted!
Ironic because most coders just copy and paste code anyway!
"Hi, we're Microsoft.
We bought you, and now we need you to help us figure out how to make a profit off of you.
Because, we're like, a community or something."
I think a really good start would be to not have bloody Microsoft getting its fingers all over open-source ecosystems such as found on github.
Oh, wait...
What feedback should I leave to make this data as painfully wrong as possible?
Hmmm... I wonder who the "we" is? Does Microsoft plan to bring their amazing Windows 10 quality processes to Open Source?
the primary way that open source would support itself is through people giving money to people who work on open source. this is diametrically opposed to the fundamental business model of most big tech companies, especially microsoft, who have a world view based on the profitability of secrets.
if you told microsoft shareholders that it was spending huge amounts of money to run github, and explained what github was, they would probably sue microsoft for not providing enough shareholder value, demanding that it sell off github immediately or shut it down so that for-profit products based on proprietary model could be sold to customers who used to depend on github.
Holy fuck, how are you guys paying for all this!?
(LOL)
"News at 11, when we hang the sad little nazi tinymind INCEL GOP faggots of no value to America, starting with Drumpf"
We have collaboration tools up the wazoo, what's missing is a fair and obvious way to get paid for open source work. I propose a simple OS license to help actually put food on the table for open source developers. Let's call it the "Pay Me License" (PML for short.) It goes quite simply:
/*
* PAY ME LICENSE (PML)
*
* Product Name: [Project bundle goes here]
* Copyright (c): [list of owners]
*
* Public Key: [owner's base 64 RSA pub key]
* Purchase Link: mailto|https://whatever?subject=[ProjectName license me]
* Receipt File: [ProjectName].pml
*
* If a the above *.pml receipt file is not in the root of your source
* tree, then this code is not licensed and you are not allowed to use
* it. A license can be obtained from the purchase link above.
*/
That's it. Put it on every source file like any other OSS license. The contents of a *.pml obtained from the source code owner goes something like:
/*
* Example *.pml receipt:
*
* From: [Owner(s)] # Must match header
* To: [Your Company you@address.com]
* Product Name: [must match header]
* Receipt: [any text, transaction receipt number]
* Public Key: [base64] # Must match header
* RSA Signature: [base64] # RSA_SIG_OF_UTF8(LOWER_AND_REMOVE_WHITESPACE('From' + 'To' + 'Product Name' + 'Receipt'))
*/
Any project missing the .pml in its source code tree root, or any .pml file whos signature can't be trivially validated against the public key in the source header is not licensed.
Obviously there's no enforcement, but at the end of the day, even closed source commercial software with complex secret license key validation systems still ultimately depend on people behaving in a civilised manner and not circumventing them. There's also nothing stopping an author from providing license keys to certain worthy causes free of charge.
Sounds like the kiss of death for GitHub if some roaster like that has been put in charge of it.
My bosses paid good money to buy this business. So unless I can tell them how they can get their money back and more, it's bye-bye.
It's a trap!
Backbone - People have to pay their ISP a lot more.
Tools - Tools for all the US intelligence community.
Dependencies - Captive market.
Coordinate - A SJW will have to approve your project.
Communication - any emerging crypto gets to the NSA and GCHQ every time.
Money - rental software.
Communities - looking at our brand while working.
Analytics - helping one side of politics.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Iâ(TM)m sick of the FOSS paradigm. As an engineer why support a model that will destroy your livelihood. Any real work, ie software involving life and limb etc, is done with close source and certified algorithms and compilers. There are so few real engineers now. Seems what we have now are sniveling socialist script kiddies
Open Source systems, such as the Desktop systems Gnome and KDE have consistently illustrated that governance beyond minimum essential for interoperability has never worked as well. With no road map, people met in common standards by natural consensus. In KDE, all decisions required 100% consensus which of course, was followed. With Gnome, leadership tried to establish standards and road maps that were seldom followed.
Also take for example Gentoo before and after it's founder. When he left to work at Microsoft, he established a hierarchical leadership structure that utterly collapsed the project. Gentoo had been a system that worked with minimal requirements of the one trying to install or maintain it. Then, it required increasingly more work month after month until more and more was breaking and many people left.
Non-governance -- software development by consensus has always worked far better than governed processes, in my experience, even in commercial software. The flat organizational structure did exactly the same thing -- caused peers to come together with common solutions by consensus. Leadership is seldom met with full support, be it leadership from individuals or from committees.
I think people like to cooperate but they do not like being told what someone else thinks is how they should do things.
Would go a long way to improving OSS engagement.
Nazi nazi. Nazi nazi republican. Incel nazi nazi nazi incel GOP. Republican nazi nazi nazi!
I'm really starting to get the hang of this SJW language. It will come in handy if I ever find myself at a loss for a valid argument.
If you see the phrase send us a link to your GitHub project on a job posting you can be sure GitHub made a back room deal with the job poster
Have you asked these employers if they'll consider repositories on GitLab, Gitea on your VPS, or Gitea on your shared hosting?
"News at 11, when we hang the sad little nazi tinymind INCEL GOP faggots of no value to America, starting with Drumpf"
You have no personal mind. You have no personal identity. I'd have to guess that life shit on you and you blame everyone else for your lot.. Instead of rising to the challenge you throw a temper tantrum... like every other SJW asshole.
The problem with your philosophy is that you'll never achieve your goals.. SJW's will continue to divide themselves into smaller and smaller groups....
It's like the racists.. They aren't happy when there are no blacks in an area... No blacks means nobody to complain about.. So they start to pick on the Irish or the Jews or the Catholics or the....... No matter how white you make an area the racists will find someone who isn't white enough or is too white (Irish).
Racism and SJW are two halves of the same coin. Unsustainable goals that revolve around race, creed, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.. The goal is never achieved because then you would have to stop.. And the only thing that gives an SJW cunt any reason at all to live is the potential to complain about some injustice somewhere being done to somebody...
Pay Me License violates point 1 of OSI's Open Source Definition.
I have many ideas, but first I want to hear from you.
Step One: Don't sell out to Microsoft.
There is no step two since you failed step one. Free Software is based on trust. Yes, there's GPL and all, but there is a lot of trust necessary to get a Free Software project running and working. Since the team is not held together by organisational structure, salaries or chain of command, trust is the glue. It's one of the reasons people fork or walk away: When they don't trust each other anymore, for personal reasons or because they believe the others are taking the project in the wrong direction.
Nobody, literally nobody who is not a complete imbecile, trusts Microsoft. With the history that company has, you would have to be brain-dead and insane to do.
Inertia will keep Github around for a long time. Moving is too much effort for many especially small projects, and it is a name with a lot of hyperlinks going in. But I'm not the only one who already moved all the project he cares about away from github and won't be starting new ones there.
You can play bait&switch with consumers. Not so much with developers.
So, for you personally there is actually a step two: Find a new job elsewhere.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Exclude top level projects like the kernel, no one wants to take over and maintain a hacked up c/c++ code base for free without recognition or pay.
Look at the total number of GNU projects and then look at the bottom 20% which appear to have no forward movement in actual new features in the last few years. A nightly build is meaningless if no really new significant features have been added in 2 years.
Users having money to spend developing FOSS are unlikely to spends limited funds on dead open source projects.
Think if IBM open sourced the 30+ year old assembly language mainframe kernel, would there actually be forward movement after the 1 year 'novelty' phase wears off?
1. This reeks of suggesting that GitHub needs the same kind of bloat that people on /. claim LinkedIn became infested with for "communication".
2. It also sounds like: "Forget that you wanted to write the OS/program that served you best in the first place, just ask for money and make it your full-time closed-source job instead. You're OWED it."
Many people working on significant open source projects already have proper jobs doing so (see the Linux kernel contributor commit list, loads of tech companies there) and those that aren't making their projects their full-time jobs are probably not doing it for money anyways.
It's quietly suggesting that you're owed MORE than an open source program you can control and easily vet for security purposes. Closed source programs may seem more secure, but who's to say who has actually looked at those security holes and actually put anyone to task for solving them? Recently, the most well-known security bugs affected open protocols for browsers. Do you think that it would have been easier to patch those protocols if people were NOT free to examine the code bases themselves?
I agree, we should treat developers better and find a decent way to compensate them more with money, but that's the danger of trying to make a hobbyist's work into a full-time job. No guarantees that crowd-funding your work when it's already freely available will work.
Most developers of open source software seem to do it because they want the program to exist for their own enjoyment/use. If no one else will make that program, why not do it yourself and offer it up to others?
This is a statement that just poisons the well in general. If being properly compensated with money was the reason Linus Torvalds made the first kernel, it wouldn't have existed today. The real compensation is having that control, security vetting power, and the ability to pass the code down to anyone else who could improve it further.
cap: jackpot
If we don't develop systems to allow corporations to pay single developers easily, this will not end well.
Tidelift might be start, but we need more systems to allow payment. There are tons of business that would throw money at a developer if they could invoice it. Could github, and thus microsoft, provide means for doing that kind of billing?
You can distribute your computer program under any license you want. That doesn't mean others have to put their resources toward helping you package your software for various distributions. And if your license doesn't meet FSF's four-point definition of free software or OSI's 10-point definition of open source software, you're not going to see nearly as many people willing to spend such resources.