Comment by rty32
2 years ago
Not 100% agree but would almost say the same thing.
As someone who made small contributions to several projects and left comments under many GitHub issues, things that I see:
* Heavy users are more likely to report bugs and end up contributing to the project * If many people run into the same issue, more likely someone will create among them will write a fix, or at least suggest a workaround * A "healthy" project -- one that addresses GitHub issues and pull requests quickly, that responds to people's questions instead of ignoring them, that encourages technical discussions, is more likely to attract even more contributions. * Some projects have issues and pull requests that are open for a long time without any response from maintainers (despite active development). I myself wouldn't even bother reporting a bug because it's not worth it
Meanwhile, even under this thread, you can find people that expect certain amount of experience with a particular language. That just says to me they don't want contribution. Why? I am no expert in that certain language, but I am experienced enough in software engineering that I can jump into many codebases and create a high quality patch with some ChatGPT. I've done this many times before. If they are so obnoxious I'd rather put my energy elsewhere.
you can find people that expect certain amount of experience with a particular language
what then should they be doing different? to contribute code to a software project you need to know or learn the language the project is written in. there is no way around that.
does it bother you that they don't want patches created with chatGPT? did you miss the controversy around that? can you assert that the code you submit is really free of copyright claims?
They can do all of that, of course. My point is that their condescending attitude is going to lose potential contributors like me, when most open source projects embrace a much more welcoming environment. Maybe they are doing fine, I don't know. But I have worked on enough open source projects to know that it is not the best position they can be in.