this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Okay, so how is it possible to make quality open source software, if you don't expect the programmer to do a good job, and instead you praise them for doing whatever?
Well, the first step is to not be an elitist gatekeeper who scares away any beginner who tries to develop open source stuff. Because even if their first few repositories were not exactly good, they may eventually get better, and if their experience with FOSS community was a pleasant one, there is a pretty high chance they will publish their later work too.
If, on the other hand, you publicly shame every mistake a beginner makes in hist first repository, they will probably never publish anything.
It's important to praise anyone who's self-less enough to write FOSS. Even if they aren't exactly good yet, just the fact that they have decided to publish it is really important. I'm not saying that we shouldn't offer any negative feedback - quite the contrary - but the feedback definitely shouldn't be public shaming in a meme post on random social network.
Yeah for sure don't shame them. But also, don't merge code that is bad. Opensource needs standards too because at the end of the day it's competing with closed source. Even if it's a first contribution, you probably shouldn't merge things without tests, without commit messages, etc
Just don't use it if you don't like it. And you may not believe it, but there are also OS devs out there that - as a hobby - leave the park behind sparkling clean. It's not like everyone would produce low-quality open source projects, but no one is entitled to judge a low-quality project.
Pay. Them.
Yeah, exactly. Which is a completely different beast when the open source project is made by 3 dudes in a basement. So either you get support from a huge foundation like Apache, spend your own money for little gain, or your project is shitty quality-wise
The only way you can start expecting quality is if you start paying for it. Otherwise you are just judging people for how badly they built their hobby project in their free time.
It might currently be complicated to do that but that just means we need infrastructure. Start complaining about that or do something about it if you want more quality open source software.
market capitalism will prioritize putting most resources into spyware and adware that turns the consumer into a product. Along with that constant reinventing of the wheel in proprietary software in the name of "competition", even though index/hedging funds oligopoly leads us into stagnation in terms of innovation these days with one 'next great thing' after another turning out to be mostly an overspeculated fad. I'd say vote for pirate parties but that's actually BS as is all parliamentary politics in this quasi-aristocratic system, even if they launch large scale grant programmes they'll very likely back down on them whenever an economic slump happens.
It's not even the "quality of the project" like suggested in this thread. It's the quality of the commit messages (meta-data, documentation)
That's like someone who paints for a hobby, and shows their paints off on the internet, and people would post stuff like "Well cool painting, but you didn't really explain what kind of paint you've used, who your inspirations were" etc etc
When I'm building Open Source stuff as a hobby for things that are useful to me, and also dump them on Github - because it's a good backup system - I don't really care whether people might go through the commit history as means to figure out how I've build it
I'd say that good documentation is also a part of quality of a software project, more so than in other fields, but I do agree that it is one of the things you can just forget about for personal projects.