Why I contribute to Chromium | Hacker News Reader

Why I contribute to Chromium

opensource.googleblog.com

84 pointsingve36 comments

I think if you don't benefit greatly from it, you shouldn't contribute to Chrome (which you are doing by contributing to Chromium). It's a commercial product Google is making money with indirectly by pushing you to Google services and collecting data with it.

Open source shouldn't be about having people work for free or for a laughable amount of money on your commercial project. You shouldn't have to work for free to be able to get a job.

I've contributed to chromium devtools. Didn't any financial kudos. Would have been nice. $175 would go a long way for me. I would buy a RC plane and call it buggy.

Chromium being open has resulted in a lot of great projects. I just wished they developed on github. Their bug tracker and review tools really need an upgrade.

I feel that open source projects should at least have a mirror or issue repo on Github, I have a lot of issues with Firefox that I'd have reported in a jiffy on Github, but when I open firefox's issue manager, I get lost, plus I have to go, sign up and then report etc It is a hassle that we can avoid if we all use github/gitlab

I love GitHub and I use it for my own projects, however the increased reliance of the open-source community on GitHub worries me, because if this relationship goes sour it will be worse than what happened with SourceForge, because GitHub is much bigger with a much greater lock-in effect, because it also turned out to be a sort of social network for developers.

Many high profile projects don't even point at their own domain anymore, GitHub being their homepage, which is reckless for popular projects, given that a domain is only about $10 per year and given that hosting of static pages is essentially free.

Personally I hope that an alternative like GitLab takes off, because in the worst case scenario you can host it yourself.

Yes, it is dangerous to lock into Github as the home page for a popular project, but I feel that github is great as far as the community is concerned, gitlab still isn't as great looking as github.

Sourceforge story was different and I hope that it was an exception rather than the norm. Almost all of my repositories are on github and my machine, no where else. It is a big lock in

It's only a lock in you've created though to be fair. And still so far as github don't pull things the same hour your machine goes down you'll have all the code.

What's githubs issue and wiki export like? Half of a project is it's backlog of that information.

Yes, I am not aware of the wiki exports and yes, it is a lock in which we got ourselves into personally.

Wiki on GitHub is a git repo. You can clone it and play with it as you'd do with any other git repo.

We still have BitBucket. Cheers.

I used to root for BitBucket earlier because I too didn't like GitHub being treated as if it was 'The Way to Have Git On The Internet'.

However, after I started working at a place which uses Atlassian's wiki software and JIRA, I don't hold them in high regard anymore.

Now, I root for GitLab.

I got so tired with todo tools/ stuff like that, I wrote my own in Go. I don't have to worry about the changes they make to their products and it works offline!

http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks

I am currently working to make it run via ajax, it'll be fun :-)

Different name, same issues. Your comment doesn't provide anything of value regarding the issues he raised.

If you think he said "there is only GitHub", then I suggest you re-read his comment.

Those projects have a lot of history and often very specific needs and workflows. Github's bug tracker is really simplistic TBH, and lacks a lot of crucial yet basic functionality, such as custom fields, issue dependencies, etc that are really, really useful if you're working on a large project, and they're very useful to the maintainers in particular. You can sort of get around a small part of it with issue templates but it doesn't really fix the root problems (e.g. it can't offer this metadata as part of the API if you script against it), especially if you ever need to extend or integrate your issue tracker elsewhere.

Also, maybe I'm reading part of your suggestion incorrectly, but you really only want one canonical issue tracker. I've seen some people use GH repositories as issues-only repos for off-site code, which is OK for public accessibility, if it's the only one. But multiple places where bugs can be reported and multiple trackers, etc generally take a substantial amount of time and effort to maintain for the developers. It's already hard enough for most teams to keep on top of whatever issue tracker they have already, having to wedge two tools together just makes it worse...

And also... Personally, Github is nice and all, but saying "Everyone should always go out of their way to use it so my life of reporting bugs can be that much easier, think about it" seems a bit self centered and short sighted, to be honest.

Having a code mirror on GH is always pretty good practice though, IMO, and quite easy to configure at least.

It depends how you look at it, from a neutral point (but there is no such thing as neutral point IMO, everything/everyone is biased), it is self centered, but then why won't I be self centered, as much as I love FOSS, I have only 4hrs daily for myself, if you remove commute + office, out of the 4hrs I get, I'll be busy in things which I want to do, improving my skills/writing books etc, I don't have the luxury to sign up for 100 different bug trackers and then follow up with all of them. I want tools to be integrated so I don't have to check 100 of them, I find gitlab to be great at taking feedback, I wrote to the cofounder's comment here on HN, he asked me the feedback, I gave him four or five points and asked for a email ID where I can write, I got an emailID and I sent the email, the person I emailed then replied and issues are created on Gitlab.

With the Chromium project, when you use Chromium/chrome on Win/Linux, when you do a full screen mode, you can't see the address bar, when I raised an issue there, I was auto logged in via google since I had logged into gmail.

Maybe this is very evil of me to not raise an issue related to feature requests/performance of Firefox, but then again, it is an issue of integration + ease of use.

Just having a code mirror is not of much use unless someone wants to read the code.

Github issue system is lacking many features that Mozilla needs to track bugs (eg. proper dependencies).

It's true that bugzilla is not as welcoming as github, but things are improving. For instance you can now login using your github account - that removes some friction.

And wven if you file your bug in the "general" category of the Firefox product, it should be triaged in a few days at most.

> I get lost, plus I have to go, sign up and then report etc

That's the exact experience I had trying to report an issue for duckduckgo. Using Github (which I've never really used). It's not that github is flawless - you're just used to it.

Yes, I know. This is a painful process and it isn't just painful because of the UI, there is a reason why Github became so popular, the founders started working to create a webapp to democratize FOSS. Because they said that earlier when you contributed to FOSS you'd have to send the diff and the merge person would not be able to merge everything so only those who knew them would get their PRs merged, when we add in a nice "merge pull request" button in a nice UI, it becomes simple.

Yes, I am used to Github, but that's not the total point, I never log out of github, it is the only webapp which I am 24x7 logged into (in my browser of course). Every other webapp I logout. That's why it is no hassle to report issues on Github. Also I have very very limited amount of personal time if you remove office and commute, in one year, I have learned how to write webapps in Go and written a tutorial on it, I did this while handling my <1yr nephew and having only 2hrs daily and 6-7hrs on weekends (https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo...).

There are many constraints & I have very limited time, thus github is a convenience, not that I like github's issue tracker, I wrote a todo manager for myself and I rarely use Github's tools for tracking things which I build.

> There are many constraints & I have very limited time, thus github is a convenience

It's a convenience for you - for me it's as inconvenient if nor more so than Firefox's homerolled issue tracker. Now, I suspect that the people filing bugreports fit your profile more than mine and so maybe you're right? But it's worth acknowledging that they may not be optimising for you.

of course it is a convenience for me, I was talking about myself and not about anyone else! My point wasn't in pointing out if someone is right or wrong, it was just explaining why I haven't raised issues on Firefox ever. It seems they now support github login, so now, if I encounter an issue, I will raise it. I do allow telemetry stuff to contribute my share :)

I've also contributed to chromium devtools. I did it because I liked the idea of contributing to something that big, also having my code reach that many people is a nice feeling.

I agree that their tracker and review tools are a bit outdated but their code search is top notch. It was really easy to find my way around that codebase.

> After review by a team of volunteer engineers, the recipients receive our heartfelt thanks and a small token of our appreciation.

I hadn't heard about this, good for Google. Just how small is the token?

From http://blog.bonus.ly/a-look-at-googles-peer-to-peer-bonus-sy...:

> A typical example would be one employee giving $175 to a peer that “coded an SQL query for me and saved me a lot of time.” ... the sums involved might be considered “insulting”.

It makes me a little sad that 175 bucks for a relatively minor task is considered an insult. Maybe it's not enough to drive the behaviour the company is looking for, and sure it's not a huge amount in the scheme of an top quality software dev's paycheck, but it's still a couple of days' pay for a lot of the US.

That's the internal peer bonus. Once you factor in taxes (bonuses incur a higher rate), depending on your base salary, you are left with about $100. It's definitely more valuable than a thank you card, but the main point is about acknowledging someone that went beyond duty. It's not for e.g. substantial projects -- that's what spot bonuses and yearly performance bonuses are for. Your snide remark borders more on "insulting".

As for open source contributors, there's definitely schwag involved. I'm not sure if any sums are involved, since there might be legal and financial implications for both sides.

No need to bite at the person you're responding to. That's a direct quote from the article.

> A typical example would be one employee giving $175 to a peer

Don Knuth only gives $2.56 for his bugs! I guess bug hunting for google is more lucrative than bug hunting for Knuth.

They'd probably be better suited to giving nothing except thanks. Once you put a dollar figure on it, people naturally compare it to how much profit their time would get in other places.

Might be something nice to put on your CV or resume. I would not consider doing this sort of thing for free a habit though.

sort of reminds me of this post from a few years back: http://aaronboodman-com-v1.blogspot.ca/2010/10/wherein-i-hel...

Something about giving away all of my browsing information to Google in total puts a bad taste in my mouth.

I'd rather stick with Firefox and use DuckDuckGo when I want to run an unfiltered(ish) search.

Just a friendly reminder that HN considers comments that don't contribute to the article "off-topic" and you are likely to be downvoted as such. If you want to turn around your negative karma, please try and follow the community guidelines. Additionally this week there is a political embargo, so comments like this are even more likely to be penalised.

>Additionally this week there is a political embargo, so comments like this are even more likely to be penalised.

How is the comment "political"?

> Additionally this week there is a political embargo

there is? is there some sort of announcement for this?

They're referring to this [0] post, which was kinda controversial.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404

How are you giving away all your browsing information to Google?

I am not aware of this; could you explain?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com