bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

(Easy) ways to help struggling open source projects:

  • step in and help review a few PRs

  • help the project triage/reproduce bugs

  • if code in the PR looks complicated or is hard to understand, ask for an explanation

  • express your gratitude to the maintainers

  • make your company sponsor projects they depend on

nyx,
@nyx@im-in.space avatar

@bagder One thing I do not really understand ...
"Free" is fine. But I see "Companies" mentioned pretty often. Companies have one master goal: Make money. Taking something for free and selling it for money does not contradict that goal.

So why not adjust the licences to something like "If used by a legal entity generating at least a turnover of 240 times the average monthly income of the country their headquarters are located at, at least 3% of the total turnover has to be spread equally across the products used that are covered by this license."

Problem solved.

nyx,
@nyx@im-in.space avatar

@bagder You can add something about contributing to the projects, but ...
Once upon a time, one of our devs solved an issue in an open source library we are using. He asked his superior to create a corresponding pull request. The request got denied because "It may also contribute our competitors".
So I have my doubts that a call for contribution will generate much participation.

bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

@nyx then you get an excellent opportunity to educate your management!

potungthul,
@potungthul@toot.io avatar

@bagder
What is "PR"?

bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

@potungthul Pull Request. Sometimes known as Merge Request. What we would say "a patch" back in the old days. Proposing a change to a project.

warriormaster,
@warriormaster@mastodon.social avatar

@bagder Or make a pr that adds a comma to a README file and request that the pr is merged asap.

tradersbulletins,
nrk9819,
@nrk9819@mastodon.social avatar

@bagder also

  • do not ask maintainers to add new features unless they are explicitly asking/looking for it.

Opensource maintainers deserve better. It is not like one should randomly come and ask for adding new features like it was some commercial product.

codepope,

@bagder but unfortunately these are also the same steps you need to do to infiltrate an open source project as a bad actor.

Maybe the open source community needs to create a network of trust which can at least offer a “This is a known person” qualification to contributors.

bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

@codepope Jia Tan was trusted. It did not help. We can't accept contributions based on trust, we need reviews, verification and tests.

codepope,

@bagder Jia Tan's trust was generated through humint style pushing on a vulnerable maintainer using sock puppet accounts.

We still need reviews, verification and tests, but if we ignore the load we place on a project maintainer and expect them to do better at identifying bad commits, then this will happen again and again.

bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

@codepope my point is that contributors normally are not "trusted" at all by maintainers - like myself. I don't need trust for that. As long as their contribution is good. That's the vast majority of contributions.

Trust is for when handing over responsibilities and powers, which is MUCH rarer.

bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

@codepope and I doubt a "web" of trust would work well, as many will not be part of "a web"

codepope,

@bagder But isn't that the point. The lone maintainer ends up taking on the full load, and add in the knowledge that bad actors will try and subvert their project with apparent good code obfuscating their attack over multiple projects, then thats a huge burden. The kind of burden which ends up with projects with n year backlogs and no activity and then there's a push to move the maintainer to someone new and (see xz)…

bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

@codepope but with a lot of additional requirements the burden on the maintainer is also increased when being unable to bring in more maintainers because they are not in the web...

So no, I don't see how a web of trust thing is a realistic scenario for where I have been in my maintainer life.

codepope,

@bagder Are you basing that on the assumption that nobody trusts anybody so no one would be eligible? And as I said in another part of the thread, it'd be up to each project to decide how much weight they put on the trust graph ratings - I'd expect most projects to start with it on low and ramp it up in line with current maintainers own ratings over time.

But I’m guessing from the responses, we're going to be stuck with zero trust FOSS going forward.

bagder,
@bagder@mastodon.social avatar

@codepope you can do your OSS with zero trust, I do mine with larger than zero

avlcharlie,
@avlcharlie@mastodon.social avatar

@bagder
Localization (languages and such) help as well and don't require tons of tech savvy

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