Comment by jancsika
7 years ago
> Aren't gifts _usually_ at the giver's expense? Anything else is a transaction, surely.
Usually with open source the "gift" is the author/maintainer's time. "Gift" in quotes because there is usually immense pleasure in creating and controlling a project.
If the author/maintainer is ranting about the sacrifices they make for the project, that usually means something has broken in project development process. And I've never heard of another project where the author dipped into their retirement savings and built up less savings than they should have to support their authorship of a project. That's a problem that should never happen, not ammunition for rationalizing the pecking in a project.
The iPhone example doesn't work. I can't send a patch to ostensibly improve the hardware (or even software) of an iPhone. The audience the author was addressing was other developers presumably complaining about low patch acceptance and long wait times. In that light, process conservatism and generally low patch quality are persuasive arguments for the status quo. "I'm sinking my retirement into this" and "community-driven development is a myth" are not.
> there is usually immense pleasure in creating and controlling a project
I think this is the part of a larger myth against which the writer rallies.
The joy is not in maintenance and control. The joy is in working with like-minded peers who share a vision, the joy is in designing and implementing an outcome that does what one wants it to do, the joy is in being able to share it.
The mundane activities associated with that are not joy. That's just work, not pleasure. Those aspects of project management are means to an end, not the actual end.
> I can't send a patch to ostensibly improve the hardware (or even software) of an iPhone. [...] developers presumably complaining about low patch acceptance and long wait times
Rich said that the sorts of patches people were submitting were of low quality and didn't fit the overall project vision. Then people were getting upset because their amazing patches weren't being accepted there and then. Frankly, that's not a community I'd want to foster nor be in charge of. Nobody should want that.
I don't see any conflict at all with a statement along the lines "I am the leader of this project, this is my baby, and I have sunk a lot of my time and resources into it" next to "I'm not accepting your pull requests and patches willy-nilly just because you complain a lot".