The problem being that as a maintainer, I refuse most contributions. Not only because they are low-quality (it happens), but also because they are often out of scope, or I just disagree with the direction. It's my project, I maintain it, I choose what goes in it. But you're free to fork it with your changes, that's exactly why I made it open source. If you make an interesting fork, I may totally import some or all of your changes! And if you first ask in an issue, I may offer you to open a PR directly.
I almost always use copyleft licences: it makes it mandatory to share the modified sources with the user, who can then upstream them.
Many times in companies, if I need to patch a permissive dependency, my company will not allow me to spend time upstreaming my patch. Whereas if it is a copyleft licence, I can tell my manager that I am obligated to open source my changes (which is not correct, but managers usually don't know that, don't care so much about the nuance, and anyway it's a win if we follow the copyleft conditions to the letter).
I'd argue all merge requests matter, not only those that were accepted upstream. Sure, only those accepted generate value upstream, but there is a lot of byproduct from a rejected MR that still has value, either as a reference for further discussions or as resource for forks.
I don't think dropping a random software developer into a random project to do their open source duty would end well
It takes a _lot_ of time for someone to meaningfully contribute to a project, and would just result in maintainers having the overhead of training that many new people on a project
I'd much rather figure out a way to finance those open source projects in a sustainable way where those projects can decide to hire full time employees.
Completely agree. I'd rather have the people that want to be there, to be involved.
An alternative take I'd rather see is "Employers guarantee 8 hours per week of time to work on open-source projects, including ones I start myself". Employer gets no IP stake in the project, and it's done for public good + a means to allow employees to upskill.
Otherwise it just becomes a case of another grindset. You're expected to do more, with the limited free time you have.
I get that the author is making a "modest proposal" here, but even so it's kind of antithetical to at least my own feelings about open source. If I release something as open source, the whole point is my users owe me nothing. They have limited obligations that are explicitly spelled out in the license and that's it.
Sure but the real problem are the companies that consume, not just the developers. A lot of developers would love to contribute back, but companies put schedule pressures and have limited interest in contributing back.
Companies actually want a kind of vendor relationship, but they don’t want to pay any money.
Devs want something dev focused, and open source is usually code for being dev focused.
I don’t think either truly wants actual “open source”
I think most of the comments here miss that contributions is not equal to code.
Contributions to the documentation, translations, or helping managing the community are also extremely valuable and do not require the same technical skills.
That's true, but even those non-technical roles are in a totally different league of scope than jury duty.
A jurist has an extremely narrow role: deciding whether the defendant is guilty. The jurist has zero input on the laws or court procedure or sentencing or anything else. The judge is supposed to explain how all those things work to the jury, and hold their hands pretty much the whole time up until the part at the very end, where the jury go off to deliberate and deliver the verdict. The jury is completely passive even when it comes to examining the case itself, which is the job of the lawyers. It's a pretty good system because essentially the whole process is handled by seasoned professionals, except that one crucial part of saying guilty or not guilty.
That's fundamentally different from contributing to open source. Nobody's holding your hand from start to finish, because that would kinda defeat the point of contributing.
I remember a few open source projects struggling with hundreds of merge request of people simply adding their name to the README because they want to add "open-source" contributor to their resume as part of some bootcamp.
Any mandatory service will result in at worst malicious compliance and at best in low quality work. And I'd rather take quality over quantity.
So, like compulsory jury duty and the draft, this would be directly against the 13th Amendment.
Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok.
> In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has inherent power to require every able-bodied man within its jurisdiction to labor for a reasonable time on public roads near his residence without direct compensation.
(spoiler alert: according to the ruling, the US Constitution, including Amendments, does not limit this power; and this is in fact cited as justification for upholding the draft)
Do you have any reason to believe that amendment was ever intended to cover things like mandatory jury duty? Or are you advocating for reading the text verbatim with zero consideration of the context or history? That kind of reading impacts a lot more than this, and not entirely in a good way.
I don't know about "required" but I do know that people who depend on any piece of open source software (or would like to) should be encouraged at every turn to contribute somehow — put a tutorial video on youtube, hang out in a user group and answer questions, work on translations, confirm bug reports, do test builds, whatever.
I have written a small open source package that became hugely widely deployed without my knowledge — a really very pleasant surprise — but hadn't done an awful lot more in terms of open source contribution for a long period of time until two or three years back when I began to contribute in various ways to a project that has really changed my life for the better.
I now feel a whole lot more ethical about the amount I get out of it personally, because I am putting in about ten hours a week of my own time.
It's not exactly the same, but my reasoning for generally not donating money to FLOSS projects is that I kind of see it as a zero-sum game.
I maintain some stuff, I report bugs and contribute to several projects (with a varying degree of activity), you maintain some stuff and in the end we all benefit from it. And yes, of course some people do a lot more, but even more people do a lot less. And if you like donating money to people who like to accept money, sure, go ahead. (I think I received something from an Amazon wish list once, and we ordered some swag for some collective donation money once - which is overall not a lot for over 20 years of occasional open source work. Not complaining here, just for reference - I prefer not to be paid for doing my hobby stuff in my free time.)
As an open-source developer... no. No, no, no, no.
The toil of dealing with low-quality, half-assed first-time contributions is often higher than the effort of implementing the same features or bug fixes from scratch. And that's if you agree the features or fixes are useful in the first place.
I've already seen college students forced by their teachers to contribute to open-source projects and it's almost always just sad. The patches don't follow your project's practices, they usually have an array of subtle bugs to diagnose... and on top of that, you're dealing with a person who probably doesn't want constructive feedback in the first place. They just want a good grade on their assignment (or, in this proposal, want you to sign off the completion of their "OSS duty").
If you compel 100x as many people to submit half-assed contributions, you'll just drown in noise. Nothing good will be accomplished this way.
Totally agree, I’ve seen people put it as a sort of badge of honor that they are contributing to open source, but are clearly not passionate about the projects that they are contributing to and not ashamed of using AI to do so. Overall open source projects suffer more as a consequence of these low grade contributions, and it sucks for the people reviewing them
Hard disagree! Making open source contributions mandatory for those who lack genuine interest or motivation would lead to lower quality contributions ultimately increasing the workload for maintainers. Many maintainers already face burnout. This will only make it worse.
On another note: There's very little substance in this post. It comes across as a lazy, shallow, "hot" take! Which is fine. It's your blog and you should write however you like on your blog. But is this really a good fit for HN? It's frustrating to see shallow posts with no substance like this rise to the top but higher-effort go unnoticed.
Governments should set aside some pool of money for distributing to people maintaining critical projects. We have so much surplus and some portion of it should be allocated to such projects as digital infrastructure. Google did that with Summer of Code. Shareholder value can go and take a jump into a nearest lake.
The vast majority of my open-source contributions have been for completely selfish reason, namely: I want X feature/fix, and don't want to maintain a fork (or, if applicable, do wild monkey-patching). It just happens organically, no social pressure required.
OK this would obviously be bad, I think everyone gets that.
But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
Off topic but: Jury trials are one of the weirdest things about America: If I’m ever on trial for some crime I want my case decided by professional judges not a team of random idiots.
On the other hand, there’s a good argument to be made that if you think the judiciary can be captured for political ends, a trial and verdict by your peers at least gives you the opportunity to get a fair(er) shot. And in many (most?) US jurisdictions you can waive your right to a jury trial and ask for a bench trial instead.
I never comment on this site and I use an app to view it that doesn’t even have sign in capabilities. But I disagree with this nonsense so much that I had to go login just to vocalise that.
People should have choice and freedom in what they want to spend their time doing. I respect the open source community and some day I’d love to find the time to contribute at my own will, not because I’m called to.
While I do agree that every dev should contribute to open source at least once in their lives, I fear more and more will try to push poorly generated AI slop and make everyone’s jobs harder
So you think that, for example, every single person who uses LibreOffice is morally obligated to contribute code to the project? Even though the vast majority of them don't even know how to code?
palata|3 months ago
The problem being that as a maintainer, I refuse most contributions. Not only because they are low-quality (it happens), but also because they are often out of scope, or I just disagree with the direction. It's my project, I maintain it, I choose what goes in it. But you're free to fork it with your changes, that's exactly why I made it open source. If you make an interesting fork, I may totally import some or all of your changes! And if you first ask in an issue, I may offer you to open a PR directly.
I almost always use copyleft licences: it makes it mandatory to share the modified sources with the user, who can then upstream them.
Many times in companies, if I need to patch a permissive dependency, my company will not allow me to spend time upstreaming my patch. Whereas if it is a copyleft licence, I can tell my manager that I am obligated to open source my changes (which is not correct, but managers usually don't know that, don't care so much about the nuance, and anyway it's a win if we follow the copyleft conditions to the letter).
gchamonlive|3 months ago
lowbloodsugar|3 months ago
frde_me|3 months ago
It takes a _lot_ of time for someone to meaningfully contribute to a project, and would just result in maintainers having the overhead of training that many new people on a project
I'd much rather figure out a way to finance those open source projects in a sustainable way where those projects can decide to hire full time employees.
InexSquirrel|3 months ago
An alternative take I'd rather see is "Employers guarantee 8 hours per week of time to work on open-source projects, including ones I start myself". Employer gets no IP stake in the project, and it's done for public good + a means to allow employees to upskill.
Otherwise it just becomes a case of another grindset. You're expected to do more, with the limited free time you have.
nzeid|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
munchler|3 months ago
System: "Contributing to Open-Source Should be Required, Like Jury Duty"
jama211|3 months ago
olivia-banks|3 months ago
> No One Understands Software Because No One Understands Time
> All Programming Languages Converge to English Eventually
> The Best Database Is Just Two People Talking
> Stop Writing Code. Start Legislating Software
And my personal favorite:
> AI Safety Is Just the New Gluten-Free
Iolaum|3 months ago
handyandy82828|3 months ago
[deleted]
12_throw_away|3 months ago
hughes|3 months ago
analog31|3 months ago
softwaredoug|3 months ago
Companies actually want a kind of vendor relationship, but they don’t want to pay any money.
Devs want something dev focused, and open source is usually code for being dev focused.
I don’t think either truly wants actual “open source”
juvoly|3 months ago
Cameri|3 months ago
darkamaul|3 months ago
Contributions to the documentation, translations, or helping managing the community are also extremely valuable and do not require the same technical skills.
bloppe|3 months ago
A jurist has an extremely narrow role: deciding whether the defendant is guilty. The jurist has zero input on the laws or court procedure or sentencing or anything else. The judge is supposed to explain how all those things work to the jury, and hold their hands pretty much the whole time up until the part at the very end, where the jury go off to deliberate and deliver the verdict. The jury is completely passive even when it comes to examining the case itself, which is the job of the lawyers. It's a pretty good system because essentially the whole process is handled by seasoned professionals, except that one crucial part of saying guilty or not guilty.
That's fundamentally different from contributing to open source. Nobody's holding your hand from start to finish, because that would kinda defeat the point of contributing.
evantbyrne|3 months ago
But if you take the government out of the equation, and instead mandate contribution via project licenses, that might be worth a try.
jqpabc123|3 months ago
Forced labor is typically a last ditch effort to prop up a system that is inherently unsustainable.
leothetechguy|3 months ago
Any mandatory service will result in at worst malicious compliance and at best in low quality work. And I'd rather take quality over quantity.
ozb|3 months ago
Then again, according to the Supreme Court, even forced, unpaid road duty (chain gangs anyone?) is an inherent power of the government, so maybe this is ok.
> In view of ancient usage and the unanimity of judicial opinion, it must be taken as settled that, unless restrained by some constitutional limitation, a state has inherent power to require every able-bodied man within its jurisdiction to labor for a reasonable time on public roads near his residence without direct compensation.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/240/328/
(spoiler alert: according to the ruling, the US Constitution, including Amendments, does not limit this power; and this is in fact cited as justification for upholding the draft)
dataflow|3 months ago
John23832|3 months ago
I'm pretty sure my Federal grand jury duty was compelled.
exasperaited|3 months ago
I have written a small open source package that became hugely widely deployed without my knowledge — a really very pleasant surprise — but hadn't done an awful lot more in terms of open source contribution for a long period of time until two or three years back when I began to contribute in various ways to a project that has really changed my life for the better.
I now feel a whole lot more ethical about the amount I get out of it personally, because I am putting in about ten hours a week of my own time.
wink|3 months ago
I maintain some stuff, I report bugs and contribute to several projects (with a varying degree of activity), you maintain some stuff and in the end we all benefit from it. And yes, of course some people do a lot more, but even more people do a lot less. And if you like donating money to people who like to accept money, sure, go ahead. (I think I received something from an Amazon wish list once, and we ordered some swag for some collective donation money once - which is overall not a lot for over 20 years of occasional open source work. Not complaining here, just for reference - I prefer not to be paid for doing my hobby stuff in my free time.)
vkou|3 months ago
I constantly use FOSS for the commercial gain... Of someone who isn't me.
chemotaxis|3 months ago
The toil of dealing with low-quality, half-assed first-time contributions is often higher than the effort of implementing the same features or bug fixes from scratch. And that's if you agree the features or fixes are useful in the first place.
I've already seen college students forced by their teachers to contribute to open-source projects and it's almost always just sad. The patches don't follow your project's practices, they usually have an array of subtle bugs to diagnose... and on top of that, you're dealing with a person who probably doesn't want constructive feedback in the first place. They just want a good grade on their assignment (or, in this proposal, want you to sign off the completion of their "OSS duty").
If you compel 100x as many people to submit half-assed contributions, you'll just drown in noise. Nothing good will be accomplished this way.
KyleW9|3 months ago
darth_avocado|3 months ago
blenderob|3 months ago
On another note: There's very little substance in this post. It comes across as a lazy, shallow, "hot" take! Which is fine. It's your blog and you should write however you like on your blog. But is this really a good fit for HN? It's frustrating to see shallow posts with no substance like this rise to the top but higher-effort go unnoticed.
cantor_S_drug|3 months ago
ptrl600|3 months ago
chrisfosterelli|3 months ago
But the note in the article is getting at something that feels interesting. I think there's a more fruitful conversation around "how might this work in spirit?" instead of "would this work literally?"
Detrytus|3 months ago
tpmoney|3 months ago
candiddevmike|3 months ago
hobs|3 months ago
gchamonlive|3 months ago
firefax|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
stivatron|3 months ago
WilliamIPark|3 months ago
People should have choice and freedom in what they want to spend their time doing. I respect the open source community and some day I’d love to find the time to contribute at my own will, not because I’m called to.
jrochkind1|3 months ago
OfflineSergio|3 months ago
doctorpangloss|3 months ago
HacklesRaised|3 months ago
KyleW9|3 months ago
lawlessone|3 months ago
exabrial|3 months ago
SHOULD a person do it? Yes.
SHOULD they be forced to do it or go to the Gulag? No.
Save jail for violent criminals, not this white collar BS.
lukan|3 months ago
pdonis|3 months ago
So you think that, for example, every single person who uses LibreOffice is morally obligated to contribute code to the project? Even though the vast majority of them don't even know how to code?
dpark|3 months ago
throwaway838112|3 months ago
portaouflop|3 months ago
lysace|3 months ago
Addendum: Particularly when the forum has gone sour.