Wednesday, July 1, 2020

What is best in open source projects?

Open source project maintainers have a reputation of being grumpy and somewhat rude at times. This is a not unexpected as managing an open source project can be a tiring experience. This can lead to exhaustion and thus to sometimes being a bit too blunt.

But let's not talk about that now.

Instead, let's talk about the best of times, the positive outcomes, the things that really make you happy to be running an open source project. Patches, both bug fixes and new features are like this. So is learning about all the places people are using your project. Even better if they are using it ways you could not even imagine when you started. All of these things are great, but they are not the best.

The greatest thing is when people you have never met or even heard of before come to your project and then on their own initiative take on leadership in some subsection in the project.

The obvious thing to do is writing code, but this also covers things like running web sites, proofreading documentation, wrangling with CI, and even helping other projects to start using your project. At this point I'd like to personally list all the people who have contributed to Meson in this way but it would not be fair as I'd probably miss out some names. More importantly this is not really limited to any single project. Thus, I'd like to send out the following message to everyone who has ever taken ownership of any part of an open source project:

Keep on rocking. You people are awesome!

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