Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

nanomsg was an interesting successor to the bloated/C++/LGPL zmq, but it succumbed to old ways that don't work anymore.

It's 2016 and you can't run an (intended) global-scale open source project by just being "code nerd in chief." If you can't run an open feedback-driven community and if you can't be chief architect (also means communicating plans constantly, not just 'do whatever you want') and if you don't possess technical and professional excellence (also means being responsible with security issues and timely resolving of user issues), then you don't actually have an "open source project," you have a private uploaded code repository other people can see publicly.

Gone are the days of 1995 when you could live on an island and upload your new code once per year and everybody would leave you alone and praise you in computing magazines for being a genius. Now you'll have 1,000 issues on GitHub and requests for public appearances and proposals for changes and important security flaws to fix and requests for extensive communication about current designs and upcoming features.

The whole "i'm going to do this all on my own, everybody else go away it's my code" doesn't work anymore. Those projects are now destined to fail on their own without open and scalable community leadership. The good projects "get it" and the old guard are toppling as we speak. In another two years, nobody will trust open source projects without a stated scalable community model and codified successorship plan.

99.99% of open source project does not and cannot match these expectations and it is so out of touch with reality just to assume so. Most successful open source project (apart from the well known 0.1%) are run by 1-2 maintainers and contribution from the so called community amounts to a few percent of the total work at best - look at the contributors graph of popular github project.

Unless projects are able to bootstrap themselves into a business (wordpress) or are eventually supported by a commercial entity (llvm) they will be fireflies that shines for a short while until the creator/maintainer does a reality check and realise how much time and work he has put into this with nothing much in return eacept a mile long issue list on github, lots of unfriendly noise and arguments from the community and insane expectations from users like yourself.

a mile long issue list on github,

If you have enough users to have "too many issues to handle," then you're big enough that you need an official governance and contribution structure. You're also big enough where you'll have a pool of high quality contributors to promote to project-level-oversight status.

Nobody is saying "do all this work for free forever," but people are saying: "You have too much work you're avoiding. Why refuse to let other people help?" Once you reach a million users this isn't your private software anymore, it belongs to the community and you need to step up and allow faster development than one person can handle alone.

> If you have enough users to have "too many issues to handle," then you're big enough that you need an official governance and contribution structure

I'm sure e.g. Ruby on Rails and Bootstrap would like some pointers on how to setup "an official governance and contribution structure" to handle their the long issue and PR lists.

> Why refuse to let other people help?

Very few if any wants to use their free time to work through an issue list like that. Someone might do it once and write a blog post about it, but unless someone does it all the time it does not help much.

Open source might be perceived as a free commodity, but like a public toilet, no one likes to cleanup and especially for free. Likewise, help in the form of P.R.s doesn't much help either unless it is aligned with the overall vision of the project. It more often than not isn't.

Really? The whole thing used to be about fun. Like, "hey look at this!". Do you really need press secretary and events coordinator? If you were running a business, yes. That was the entire concept of enterprises like Red Hat and Canonical, even parts of Intel and IBM. That is, repackage and support semi-organized hackery.

Again, we don't want to devolve into the bureaucracies F/OSS usurped. (Ideas + fun + seeking prestige + curiosity) * tenacity = occasional glory.

It's a matter of scale.

Of course you can put anything you want up online (and you should!). But, if you have (or expect to have) millions of users, then one person sitting alone saying "ME ME ME" doesn't cut it.

It stops being less about fun when your company loses $10,000 per minute of downtime and you suffer an outage because you are operating "at-scale" (256 GB RAM to 1 TB RAM, thousands of clustered servers, multi-datacenter replication, etc) but your software is only tested on the primary developer's macbook air.

Rejecting the feedback of people with actual experience running large scale systems in favor of one person's unexperienced narrow viewpoints is just bananas. Large scale software can't operate under single minded "open source fascism" anymore because our computing world is too complicated these days.

With millions of users you'll have people using your software for critical systems needing things like uptime, reliability, timely security fixes, timely bug fixes, etc. When you start getting 50 requests a day for changes, you will seem inept just telling everyone "lol its my software i do whatever i want you should just go away and fork it you can't tell me what to do."

It's professionally irresponsible to run a project with millions of users without a scalable team of equal contributors.

The argument against companies running their systems on top of poorly maintained/developed/supported open source software (while still expecting free and immediate improvements/fixes) is an entirely different article though.

It doesn't seem wise to take a project run by volunteers with little/no funding and expect it to run at enterprise scale.

If it's that valuable, fork it and fix it yourself.

Expecting an implied commercial-level SLA from one person's hobby project makes no sense at all to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlMwc1c0HRQ

Not sure who keeps downvoting you, but your core observation is ultimately correct - public expectations of what comprises an "open source project" have changed substantially in recent years. Linux kernel is an open source project, but your Hanoi towers solver in Brainfuck is not. I mean technically it is, but you have to have balls to call it an open source project.

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