Ask HN: What makes a good OSS community?

5 pointsdrygh11y ago1 comments

What makes one OSS project's community better than the next? What are the things the biggest OSS projects do well, or not so well (think top 20 on GitHub).

1 comments

sarciszewski11y ago

In a word: Humility.

The maintainers of LogStash, for example, have a philosophy that "If our users are confused, it is a bug. It is not that they are stupid."

Another good example is PHPUnit, whose maintainer unarguably has a much higher prestige in the PHP developer community than I do, yet responded to trolling by implementing the change I suggested and taking the time to hash and PGP sign all of the past releases.

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1334

The CodeIgniter maintainers responded to my gripes about their CI_Encrypt library by researching and writing a brand new library to fulfill that role.

And of course, we have some good bad examples.

OpenCart:

https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1534

https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1594

Mojolicious:

https://github.com/kraih/mojo/issues/656

Etcetera. Humble lead developers are less caustic and create less barriers for entry. This encourages people to contribute and allows a community to flourish.

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