Comment by iamstef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamstef | Hacker News Reader

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I believe you are reading into this incorrectly. The title of this post is "How to discourage open source contributions" not "The responsibility of open source project owners".

If you are not interested in contributions to you project, then you are not the intended audience.

Some thoughts supporting the post:

As a contributor I view my contributions as an investment, if my contribution is likely to help others I will be more motivated to contribute. If unfortunately it looks like my contribution will merely idle, I will consider alternatives. Quick-patch my fork and move on, switch to another project that is well maintained or if the project is critical to my work, I may offer to maintain it.

In addition, I will more likely to go above and beyond in my contribution if the project is well maintained and the likelihood of my work landing in the mainline is high. As a maintainer, a positive correlation exists between active maintenance and community contributions.

> If you are not interested in contributions to you project, then you are not the intended audience.

I presume it's obvious that if you're not looking at pull requests, you don't particularly care about contributions.

But this article isn't arguing that these maintainers are hypocritical for expecting contributions while being hostile to them. The article is effectively arguing that these maintainers should be doing more free work for the author, because by releasing open source they have signed up for the moral obligation of maintaining it in order to make the community less "hostile".

I agree. The author has released something into the world in the hopes that it will further progress for someone else or themselves. That's awesome. And the OSS community on GitHub has some great tools to fork the project if the author disengages.

But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors, and can be a real detriment to convincing developers that open source is worth their time.

It would be great to point less-experienced developers to a list of open source projects that are very responsive and supportive in their pull request management for their first contibutions. Does a list like that exist?

It would be awesome if Github exposed a metric for contribution responsiveness.

- The average time it takes for a member to reply to a pull request.

- The average time it takes to merge a pull request.

- The percentage of pull requests that get merged.

These metrics will vary pretty widely even between repos that are trying to be responsive. Maybe just comparing these metrics to the their historical values within the same repo would shed some light on whether or not the members are becoming unresponsive. Maybe there are better metrics.

pulse typically gives a good indication. https://github.com/stefanpenner/ember-cli/pulse

Check out Issue Stats[0]: http://issuestats.com/

The project won the "Annual Data Challenge" on GitHub this year.[1]

[0]: https://github.com/hstove/issue_stats [1]: https://github.com/blog/1892-third-annual-data-challenge-win...

"But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors"

You HAVE to fork the project to even submit a pull request. That's the exact opposite of "not obvious". If you're viewing the source on Github, clicking the "Edit" icon will even do that for you...

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