Martin, I enjoyed reading your article. I have limited experience contributing to open source projects.
I remember reporting a bug to the Upspin mailing list. I wasn't expected to fix it; the team reacted quickly and was prepared to take advantage of my observations. This is atypical, and I'm not sure how to explain it. Could it be significant that Upspin's core group, many of whom are long-time colleagues of Rob Pike, has a lot of joint experience? Or that they're mostly Google employees? I've also interacted with SageMath, libunwind and vis. These clearly followed the DIY ethic. SageMath is so complex (using Python to glue together every existing computer algebra package) that contributing (and using) is difficult. The team was spread too thin. Libunwind, too, has a complex codebase, but much less development activity. It has no choice but to be DIY. I had some trouble building the vis editor to my liking, but it wasn't their problem. No hard feelings. A guess: the DIY ethic is an indication of how much resources are available. Best Regards, Karl Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Friday, December 21, 2018 7:55 PM, Martin Tournoij <mar...@arp242.net> wrote: > Hey there, > > I wrote a brief article about "Open source DIY ethics", which I think > describes the mentality of open source development for many (in the > suckless community it's more explicit, but I think it's hardly contained > to suckless): > > https://arp242.net/weblog/diy.html > > I'd be interested to know what the suckless community thinks. > > Cheers, > Martin
