I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on what principles open source projects should adhere to in order to promote transparency, inclusiveness, and effective development. Are there any specific projects you feel do a great job following certain principles in how they operate? I'm interested in how projects organize decision making, manage donations, incorporate community feedback, communicate updates, and more. Please share projects you appreciate for how they approach open source development!

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[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just to be clear, it seems you apparently deleted the much downvoted posts you made here and on !foss@beehaw.org where you called for forking Lemmy because you claimed the maintainers were acting akin to tyrants. You said they were closing issues and rejecting PRs that users wanted to see because the maintainers themselves didn't want them. When asked for examples, the only examples you came up with were:

A weirdly annoyed contributor closing his own PR, followed by the maintainers of Lemmy fixing the PR themselves and merging it within days.
An issue open since 2020, where a maintainer commented that he didn't think it was a priority or a necessity, and when pinged about it again this year, made it very clear that he was open to a PR to add the requested functionality.

Do you still think Lemmy is run by tyrants? I find this post a bit jarring given the context of your previous one.

[+] CoderSupreme@programming.dev -7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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[–] glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 1 year ago

It is their project, their code, their processes. They do what they want. I hate when people tell me what to do on my own projects.

GitHub (and the others) are more inclusive than ever: free to fork, free to work.

You’re describing and demanding additional work that takes time, and that they may not want to do at the time. If you want it, fork it and do it since it’s free for you.

[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don’t think they are tyrant but they are a bunch of hypocrites.

Was this bit meant to illustrate hypocrisy?

The only thing that I’ve seen the developers say in GitHub comments is things like we are busy and don’t have time for that. And that is after saying this:

Before opening an issue, make sure that it hasn’t been reported before. And when writing comments, make sure that they actually contribute to solving the issue at hand. Generally it is better to move discussions to Lemmy if possible. We are very thankful to everyone who contributes by writing code, hosting instances, moderating communities, and answering questions.

Originally posted by @dessalines@lemmy.ml in https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout

There are 217 people who have contributed to LemmyNet/lemmy. The people in charge are the original authors and maintainers, but they are not the only developers by a long shot.

As you seem to be aware of in the rest of your comment, open source projects like lemmy are sustained because when issues are raised, community members contribute to the project to solve those issues. It's entirely reasonable and often expected that project maintainers are picky about which issues they personally take on. That doesn't mean they are rejecting the issue, it just means they won't personally be writing the PR for the fix anytime soon. I see no issue there.

[+] CoderSupreme@programming.dev -8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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[–] thejevans@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

Maybe they could be a bit more explicit, but I don't see hypocrisy.

Accepting your description of their comments:

I'm busy and don't have time for this

is roughly equivalent to

I will not be personally taking on this issue, so if someone wants to contribute, this is a reasonable candidate.

which is good information to get from a maintainer.

I will say, however, the times they said something along those lines in the examples you gave in your last post, they also said why they didn't consider it a high priority, which gives more important context as well.

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do I really need to explain to you what the hypocrisy there is? Rules for thee but not for me.

If they are busy they shouldn’t say anything, let other people contribute something actually useful to the issue at hand.

So people can come up with "the maintainer do not answer to the community" drama ?

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 2 points 1 year ago

I don’t care that much about those examples, what I really care about is them not following what I consider to be some important principles when it comes to open source projects.

Did you realize that nobody is stopping you from forking any opensource project you want and then to follow whatever rules you want, right ?