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burningChromeHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

Years ago, I built what I thought was a pretty basic static site generator using HapiJS

Years ago, I built what I thought was a pretty basic static site generator using HapiJS. I was using it for personal projects and after some convincing by friends, put it up on Github. My friends went on Reddit and posted it and then told me about it afterwards. It initially got some decent traction and then all of a sudden, all the pull requests came, all the feature requests and then all the bug reports. I kept telling people this was a side project, if they want to fork it go ahead, but this is not something I'm going to spend a ton of time on. Then all the hate started about how I put something out into the OSS community with no desire to support it. I was bad person, my code was shit and I should stop being a developer. That was my first and last OSS project. I applaud and respect the people who are committed to getting OSS out there, but for me, it was a horrible experience.

Original discussionWe will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports617 source comments · at import
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MI
mixedbitHN

Long time ago Sourceforge and then GitHub promoted into the current default the model of open source distribution which is not sustainable and I doubt it is something that the founding fathers of Free Software/Open Source had in mind. Open source licenses are about freedom of using and modifying software. The movement grew out of frustration that commercial software cannot be freely improved and fixed by the user to better fit the user's needs. To create Free software, you ship sources together with your binaries and one of the OSI-approved licenses, that is all. The currently default model of having an open issue tracker, accepting third party pull requests, doing code reviews, providing support by email or chat, timely security patches etc, has nothing to do with open source and is not sustainable. This is OK if it is done for a hobby project as long as the author is having fun doing t…

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CJ
cjblomqvistHN

Far from all OSS projects are like this. Eg. https://www.viblo.se/talks/

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CA
calentiHN

Bitching is free and easier than making pull requests. And I bet it was 1 or 2 choads plus a variable pack of minions, not everyone. And Megacorp X can file all the bug reports they want, their lack of investment is not my urgency.

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HY
hypferHN

Been there, done that, built walls. If you allow me to go on a meandering tangent/exploration: ___ I mean if you think about it, this outcome is more or less inevitable, given the environment we've created. The foundational building block being that people will always optimize for their own benefit and personal gain. They fundamentally have to, because no one else will. So that gives us a natural source of conflict, because not everyone is a builder (or at least not everyone believes that they would), meaning that they need to get someone else to do what they want to get done. You as a builder of course operate no different to that. You also want to optimize for your own personal gain. Where it is different though is that you do not rely that much on external resources to do that, given that you can create by your own. So these are our building blocks. To have a functioning societal syst…

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NE
necovekHN

In general, there is a difference of ethos and culture between Free Software and Open Source movements. GitHub is the latter: strewn with expectations from low-effort requests. With free software, many projects have their own code hosting with separate accounts, sometimes even separate bug trackers with another set of accounts (think Bugzilla + GitLab). Any submission is by definition bigger effort, and thus the culture is significantly different. As an example, just try submitting a patch to GNU libc (if it hasn't switched to GitHub in the intervening years, though I'd be surprised as it's a GNU project, but it's also largely supported by Red Hat), and see where you get to. Or join the GNOME community and submit a fix. Or FreeDesktop. Or KDE. Or...

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