Community or inclusion aspect is a red herring imho. I use opensource software all day every day and barely ever even communicate with its authors.

I'm willing to bet that majority of open source code is just some dude banging it out in his free time with maybe an occasional question or a patch if he's really lucky. No community at all, just a repo, a package, and a few stars on GitHub.

That requires people the original maintainer can trust. They have to be competent enough, honest enough, easy enough to work with, and the maintainer has to know that.

Moreover, many project shouldn't grow big to begin with. Sometimes much of their value comes from their small size: they're easier to learn, easier to deploy, easier to port, and most of all easier to maintain.

What I'm saying is that the product being open source allows you to study it, let's say you want to do something as fast as Redis, you have all that previous work open. I don't imagine a single person in a room going line by line studying it, what usually happen is that many people study particular aspects and write about it the problems they had, improvements and so on.

> I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.

Well it depends a "bunch" of open source contributors can organise themselves and grow into organizations, there are many examples.

Hope that companies can adopt this, it's pretty tedious setting up open source review committees and making it simple/keeping the friction low for developers to contribute/make their projects useful to others. Its usually death by a thousand cuts getting a lot of projects open sourced at companies.

How can any open-source project compete if it doesn't lean on other open-source projects? Am I missing something?

This approach seems to guarantee that they can do a handful of things better than anyone else (because they control the whole stack), but not enough things to ever be truly complete OS for any given market segment.

Unless 1000 developers fall in love and choose to participate and compensate for the absence of other OS code, I don't see how this can grow sustainably. I'd love to be wrong, though.

So a few years ago I created an open source community in gaming (which coincidentally, the author of this blog post was a part of early on). We had a Github organization, an IRC channel, etc. It was fun.

At some point I grew part of the community into a company, which today is growing and thriving. We're rooted in open source. I'm rooted in open source (Nearly all my work has been public and on Github for the past decade).

Today we still have nearly all our work up and public on Github but get next to zero external contributions. Because contributing as someone external to the company is hard.

Unless your actual goal as the company is to produce free & open source software, it's going to be really, really hard to make it possible for external actors to contribute to the core products as smoothly as for the company's employees. There's loads of things that pile up, like reusing internal CI systems for testing, requiring API keys and passwords for access to resources that are required or highly useful for development (eg. testing a redshift environment), and so on. All those things are fixable, but take a huge amount of time to fix, and why would you fix it if nearly nobody external to the company is contributing anyway? It's not like making the experience easy is a guaranteed win either.

Things like product design, project management, etc... it's not obvious how to make those open processes. It's not like you can do part time project management contributions to any random open source project out there. And when the processes aren't open, the barrier of entry to contribution is that much higher.

And quite frankly, certain people (who will recognize themselves) make it extremely unappealing to spend a lot of efforts on keeping the entire project open. The kind of people who will complain about every little detail of how you're trying to open up the project, until its name is prefixed with GNU/. "All or nothing" is an atrocious approach to open source and actively harms the ecosystem.

Point is, don't blame Google for making Android and Chromium hard to contribute to. It's not like it's on purpose, it just takes a huge investment for it to be possible. I mean fuck, Firefox isn't exactly easy to contribute to, and Mozilla is one of the most open companies out there, and in many ways a role model of how an open source company should be run.

https://github.com/lodash/lodash/issues/5719

Frankly I commend the author. If you’re maintaining one of the most used open source packages, I think it must be overwhelming to get so much feedback. Realistically a team of 4 people probably working full time could manage a package like that and it seems like it’s just one guys side project.

A thriving OSS project is more than just the software, it's a community. People contribute features and bug fixes upstream so that everyone else can benefit, because in return they also get the benefit of others contributions. It's a body of collective endeavour. There's a social contract.

Taking an established, OSS project and closing it destroys that community. Sure, it's legal, and everyone can continue to use the version they're currently on, but something dies, and trust is broken.

I am the author of a handful of OSS libs, one of which is very popular. Of the 500k+ downloads; not including repo clones, package manager installs, etc I can count the number of contributors other than myself on one hand.

Considering the relatively recent migration over from Google Code the number of stars it has is under 100. From the users I've interacted with, I would be shocked to find that even a small fraction of them understand how it works.

From the 4 contributors, except for one useful bugfix (that introduced another bug), their impact has been mostly insignificant.

At one point, one impatient dev requesting a fix forked and atrempted to assume ownership of the project. But that dev disappeared soon after and just left more work for me to clean up after.

So, do tell. Aside from marketing the hell out of it on blogs and referencing it on SO by answering relevant questions, where do I go to find other passionate OSS devs to help support my project.

It's easy to find contributors on projects that require only general knowledge, such as building a website or creating collections of links.

For anything that requires even a little specialized knowledge, it's difficult borderlining on impossible to find help.

I don't need contributors with specialized knowledge. I need contributors who can provide more working examples, better documentation, and can improve the tests.

In the case of this chap sounds like it never got to that point, he was doing all the work. Seems like his impression of open source is a trade where you have a developer who displays his wares and offers them for free, and praise and donations roll in. Rather than a powerful operating model allowing software to develop that you could never hope to develop alone. Time/effort ratio is much reduced for everyone involved.

Question its viability by all means. It's a progressive and generous idea. Sad that it's not even considered in the article.

“It’s too hard, trust us” doesn’t really make sense in that context. If it is indeed too hard for small orgs to self host then they won’t. Hiding behind the guise of protecting these people by not open sourcing it seems a bit disingenuous.

Almost never. You need core contributors with an understanding of your problem-space if you want software to start materializing in a git repo.

In the rare few scenarios where people do make software like that, it's arranged by a formal group that sponsors contributors. If you don't have a strong central base of developers, it's incredibly difficult to review or coordinate the changes you want.

However, you might get somewhere writing a small proof-of-concept for your idea. If enough people like what you're doing, you might attract like-minded developers who are willing to help you out. Very little gets done without direct contribution, though.

Like, I know it's a lot of work to jump into a codebase and make a change and that some projects are a pain to work with, etc etc, but still. This is what OSS is supposed to fix, and we're exactly the demographic who is supposed to be able to contribute.

Obviously, the above is even a bigger lift, but at the same time -- if a community of online hackers, many skilled, many experienced, many damn near independently wealthy from decades at FAAMGs, can't build an Internet 3.0 to fix the Internet 2.0 we all got rich building on top of Internet 1.0, who is supposed to?

But of course, OSS ought to be, as I mentioned, a contribution to the greater good. If there are enough people interested in keeping something alive, they should be allowed to do so.

Checked out the N++ repo, and saw it's got 2.1k open issues and 7.2k closed ones, and this is from an org that seems to be just one or two devs. How's that even sustainable?

I've got zero experience in maintaining big open-source projects, but those numbers would freak me out, to say the least. Way past what I'd call manageable.

Is it, really? At "the large-scale level" of the project, perhaps -- but what do we know about how "sustained" individual contributors even to those projects feel they are being?