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Growing Open Source Seeds

Growing Open Source Seeds

Exploring the subtle decisions of open source.

http://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/growing-open-source-seeds

Kenneth Reitz

May 16, 2013
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  1. Hi.

  2. Other Interests... • Street Photography • Synthesizers and Music Production

    • World Travel (~140,000 miles last year) • Public Speaker (29 events last year) • Classic Video Games!
  3. The Facebook SDK • The Facebook SDK was rarely updated.

    • One day, the library fully stopped working. • Issues were opened, people o ering to help. • HN got wind, one issue had 50+ comments.
  4. Public Source Project • Organization takes a chunk of code

    and slaps an open source license on it, hoping it’ll be useful to someone else. • Clearly better than keeping it closed source... • Often abandoned due to lack of interest, burnout, or change of focus. • Motivations are unclear.
  5. What is Gittip? • Platform for sustainable crowd funding. •

    It takes open source to the extreme. • Striving to be the world’s rst truly “open company”.
  6. Extreme Open Source • There’s a GitHub issue for everything.

    • Major decisions are voted for on GitHub. • Interviews with journalists are live-streamed. • All formal discussions with other groups are publicly documented and shared.
  7. Shared Investments • Shared ownership, extreme transparency. • New contributors

    can get involved by following a documented process. • Low risk. High bus-factor. • See also: Python, Django, Firefox, jQuery... (projects that aim to change the world)
  8. HTTP for Humans • One of the most installed PyPi

    packages. • Downloaded over 3,300,000 times. • Comprised of contributions by 100+ developers. • Considered by many to be an example of great open source.
  9. • There’s a key di erence between Requests and Gittip/Django...

    • Zero of the project’s decisions are made by the community — they are made by me.
  10. Dictatorship Projects • A totalitarian BDFL that owns everything. •

    Dictator is responsible for all decisions. • Community feedback is encouraged, but users with feedback should have no expectation of change.
  11. Requests’ Dictatorship • Requests’ value lies in its extreme opinions.

    • Few people involved allows for quick, precise iteration. • Those opinions could be diluted if more people were involved with the decision making process. • Tragedy of the commons.
  12. There are downsides... • The bus factor is extremely low.

    • The risk of burnout is extremely high. • If the BDFL loses sight of his goals, the project is ruined.
  13. Contributors: Be Cordial • Keep all interactions with a maintainer

    as respectful as possible. • They have likely donated a signi cant amount of time and energy into their project. • They don’t owe you a moment of their time.
  14. Maintainers: Be Cordial • You have the crucial responsibility of

    being immensely thankful to all contributors. • They are the lifeblood of your project. • Ignore non-constructive feedback. • Some people just take things too seriously.
  15. Maintainers: Be Cordial • Be careful with the words you

    chose. Contributors sometimes take what you say very personally. • Take the opportunity to educate the user. • This could be their rst ever interaction with an open source project. • A little bit of kindness goes a long way.
  16. Sustainability • Sustainability is one of the biggest challenges of

    open source. • Everyone has a limited amount of time. • It’s easy to become the bottleneck of your own projects.
  17. — Wes Beary Open source provides a unique opportunity for

    the trifecta of purpose, mastery and autonomy. By recognizing the power of these factors, we can keep ourselves motivated and continue to increase our impact.
  18. Learn to Do Less • When an issue or pull

    request comes into the repo, these guys usually triage it. • This saves an immense amount of time. • I can focus my time on larger issues, while they help contributors make the best of their time and e orts.
  19. — Cory Benfield As I fork another of his projects,

    it occurs to me that I don’t program in the Python ecosystem: I program in the @kennethreitz ecosystem.
  20. Learn to Say No • Saying ‘No’ is extremely di

    cult. • People ask for crazy features. They send seemingly practical pull requests. They are trying to help. • If you say yes often, your project will be ruined. Tragedy of the Commons.
  21. Learn to Say No • Saying ‘No’ is extremely important.

    • If a new pull request adds some nice features, but adds complexity, say no. • I want as few lines of code in my projects as possible.
  22. Simple Code is Good • Code solves problems created by

    humans. • The less code, the less to maintain. • Negative di s are the best di s. • Small, sharp, distributed services.
  23. Complex Code is Bad • Tight coupling, monolithic codebases. •

    Lurking, growing technical debt. • Maintenance burden is high. • Self-serving instead of problem-solving.