alt Hacker NewsI value Open Source very highly, and enjoy contributing. Fix a bug here, add a small feature there, most OSS projects have low hanging opportunities. And these days, to "switch off" from my at-work code, try to do more OSS contribution as well.
What I see instead, really, is that most projects no longer, or very rarely look at any contribution, and e.g. any issue + PR/MR combo I make, has a much higher chance of never being looked at and some bot just closes it. Even though the rest of the project might be actually quite active.
It takes some getting used to, apparently being filed together with the "noise", when I try to go out of my way to be as much "signal" as possible. But well, if I really wanted to, I can just run my own changes locally, that's the beauty of OSS, but I hope we can get to some more balanced place over time (being forever the optimist).
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I wish we had a license like "this project merely extends the project it's based on to add features and fix bugs". So that we could justify immediately switching to the fork that solves our immediate problem.
When OSS first got big in the 90s, I thought that it was a free-for-all where anyone could contribute (no maintainers/PRs/MRs) and people would use the most popular branch. That way it would evolve freely at lightspeed to go around 500 pound gorillas like Microsoft.
Imagine my disappointment when we ended up with the same old gatekeeping, now we just police ourselves.
I have the same pattern and same observation. No one wants a PR any more as far as I can see. In some sense, this has always been the case. People are happy to do their own thing but not so keen on integration with other people's code. Now though it is on a different level.
I can see maintainers are being overwhelmed by AI driven PRs but if we filter our new features and concentrate just on bug fixes, does it really matter where a PR comes from if it fixes a bug?
I do work on a very complicated agent based simulation. The data shaping and loading is all open source python. There are dozens of long standing bugs that prevent the simulation from loading some of the data correctly. I used to send PRs but they were always ignored so I gave up. Now, when there is a new release I need to spend a day reviewing the new code to see what patches I need to re-apply.