187 lines
8.6 KiB
HTML
187 lines
8.6 KiB
HTML
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mahdi
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<h1 class="post-title"><p>Open-source: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly</p>
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</h1>
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<p class="post-meta">
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<span>Oct 13, 2015</span>
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• <span>Reading time: 5 minutes</span>
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<article class="post-content">
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<p>I have been doing Open-source for a while, I don’t call myself an “expert” or something like that,
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but I’d like to share my opinion and experience on contributing to, and maintaining open-source code.</p>
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<p>So, I’ve been following and contributing to open-source projects for quite a time,
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and I have had different experiences every time. There are always good and bad experiences
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along a road, it’s never a heaven, never a hell. I’ve had contributions as small as fixing a typo in README, and as big
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as adding a new feature to Firefox Developer Tools or refactoring a whole repository!</p>
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<p>Here I’m going to share my experiences and what I’ve learned along the way that you should consider
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if you want to take this road.</p>
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<h2 id="the-good">The Good</h2>
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<p>I love open-source, it’s awesome how people share their efforts with others, and others give feedback to
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the maintainer to make the software better. It’s an always-growing system, even if a maintainer stops maintaining,
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it’s possible to <em>fork</em> a repository and continue it, although not as easy, but possible.</p>
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<p>The best part of doing open-source, in my opinion, is building connections and learning from others.</p>
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<p>Whether you are maintaining or contributing to a project, you are going to learn new things, it just happens.</p>
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<p>If you are a maintainer of a repository with a countable amount of users, you are going to constantly learn your mistakes from others,
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finding these mistakes by yourself is really hard, because you can’t easily look at a subject <em>the other way</em>,
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but users have this potential to look at your code with their eyes, seeing mistakes you can’t see.</p>
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<p>If you are contributing, following or just exploring projects, you are definitely going to learn, the solutions people suggest to a problem,
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the way they communicate, etc.
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Usually, not always, the maintainer has a better knowledge over the subject of project than you, so you are going to learn from him and other contributors
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by reading their code or exploring the issues and how they’ve been solved. I personally learned a lot this way. I would volunteer to fix a bug, then the maintainer and other contributors would show up to give their suggestions and ideas on the issue, which I would then learn from. I also subscribe to interesting issues that I don’t know how to fix to see how they get solved.</p>
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<h2 id="the-bad">The Bad</h2>
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<p>First off, the most annoying thing about open-source contributions is that people (I’m looking at you, maintainers) think
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that contributors are jobless bored people who don’t know how to spend their time and have come to waste some time on some random open-source project, NO, seriously.</p>
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<p>I have a job, I totally care about my time and I’m not making a Pull-request because I’m bored.</p>
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<p>Now, why is that important to know: it has happened to me a couple of times that I ask on an issue:</p>
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<p><em>”- Okay, I’m interested, what <strong>exactly</strong> has to be done?”</em></p>
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<p><em>”- Great, please do x, y, z”</em></p>
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<p><em>… some time later</em></p>
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<p>_”- Here is x, y and z, please review and merge”</p>
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<p>_”- Oh, thank you very much, but you know, now that I think of it, I don’t want x, y or even z. Closing.”</p>
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<p>and I’m like:</p>
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<!--  -->
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<p><img alt="Are you kidding me?" src="/img/are-you-kidding-me.jpg" /></p>
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<p><span class="image-caption">Are you kidding me?</span></p>
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<p>This is the worst thing that can happen to you, try to avoid it, you don’t want your valuable time wasted.</p>
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<p>How to avoid it you ask, there is a sign that I’ve found which leads to this problem most of the time and that’s <strong>lack of clear specification</strong>, just like with clients, if the maintainer doesn’t specify what should be done, you should stop.</p>
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<p>It happened to me, just like the past discussion, except he didn’t tell me <em>“Please do x, y, z”</em>, he made himself look
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too busy and said: <em>“The title says it all”</em>, no, it doesn’t say it all. “x, y and z” can be implemented in <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">2^9</code> ways, and sadly,
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you are not going to accept the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">192</code>th way, as you “don’t like it”. Do not get trapped in these time-wasting situations, I wish maintainers understood how valuable people’s times are.</p>
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<h2 id="the-ugly">The Ugly</h2>
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<p>The sad part about open-source is, if the maintainer decides not to support the project anymore,
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people will <em>kind of</em> suffer. If the maintainer abandons the project, the project is <em>almost</em> doomed, as forking and continuing is really hard, reading the code from bottom up and understanding it isn’t easy, and as there is no outcome, people usually decide to abandon a project once they lose interest in the topic.</p>
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<p>If I personally lose interest in a project I’ve made, I’ll abandon it, I will try to guide new users through but I usually
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don’t offer as much support, I have more important things to do, it’s really sad, but true.</p>
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<p>To prevent this from happening, you must be able to make money out of your project, or your project must be really interesting
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and challenging to keep you working on it.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>That’s it, please note that everything you read here is my opinion, it’s not a rule, not a judgment, it’s my opinion and experience. If you would like to discuss this further, put a comment below or reach me at <a href="https://twitter.com/mdibaiee">twitter</a>.</p>
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