from Hacker News

Ask HN: What makes a good OSS community?

by drygh on 10/19/14, 11:43 PM with 1 comments

What makes one OSS project's community better than the next? What are the things the biggest OSS projects do well, or not so well (think top 20 on GitHub).

  • by sarciszewski on 10/20/14, 6:39 PM

    In a word: Humility.

    The maintainers of LogStash, for example, have a philosophy that "If our users are confused, it is a bug. It is not that they are stupid."

    Another good example is PHPUnit, whose maintainer unarguably has a much higher prestige in the PHP developer community than I do, yet responded to trolling by implementing the change I suggested and taking the time to hash and PGP sign all of the past releases.

    https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1334

    The CodeIgniter maintainers responded to my gripes about their CI_Encrypt library by researching and writing a brand new library to fulfill that role.

    And of course, we have some good bad examples.

    OpenCart:

    https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1534

    https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1594

    Mojolicious:

    https://github.com/kraih/mojo/issues/656

    Etcetera. Humble lead developers are less caustic and create less barriers for entry. This encourages people to contribute and allows a community to flourish.