Growing Open Source Seeds

Exploring the subtle decisions of open source.

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

1. Growing Open Source Seeds Kenneth Reitz
2. Hi.
3. @kennethreitz
4. github.com/kennethreitz • ~18 serious projects. • 100+ experiments. • OSX-GCC-Installer: 56TB of downloads. • Requests: 3+ million downloads.
5. Other Interests... • Street Photography • Synthesizers and Music Production • World Travel (~140,000 miles last year) • Public Speaker (29 events last year) • Classic Video Games!
7. Python Software Foundation
8. Once upon a time...
9. Facebook SDK
10. 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.
11. Facebook’s response was... Disabling the Issue Tracker
12. That’s not open source. It’s public source.
13. 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.
14. Gittip
15. 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”.
16. 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.
17. — Chad Whitacre I’m not building Gittip, I’m building the community that’s building Gittip.
18. Projects like Gittip are... Shared Investment Projects
19. 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)
20. Requests
21. Requests HTTP for Humans
22. 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.
23. • 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.
24. Between public source and shared investment: Dictatorship Project
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. Lessons Learned
29. OR BE ON YOUR WAY BE CORDIAL
30. 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.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. Avoiding Burnout.
34. 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.
35. — 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.
36. @lukasaoz @sigmavirus24 Meet My Minions These guys are amazing.
37. 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.
38. — 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.
39. Just Say No
40. 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.
41. — Pieter Hintjens Simplicity is always better than functionality.
42. 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.
43. 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.
44. Complex Code is Bad • Tight coupling, monolithic codebases. • Lurking, growing technical debt. • Maintenance burden is high. • Self-serving instead of problem-solving.
45. Say ‘No’ to All The Things!
46. Open source makes the world a better place.
47. Don’t make it complicated.
48. github.com/kennethreitz Questions?