Comment by mprime1
8 months ago
> 5.9k stars, 727 forks, 132 contributors: https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go
That's the NATS Go _client_.
The server project is https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server 17k stars, 1.5k forks, 160 contributors
8 months ago
> 5.9k stars, 727 forks, 132 contributors: https://github.com/nats-io/nats.go
That's the NATS Go _client_.
The server project is https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server 17k stars, 1.5k forks, 160 contributors
Look at the contribution history, basically all active contributors work for Synadia: https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/graphs/contributors
That's not a healthy / functioning open source community. Less than 30 people have made more than 10 commits; most of the 160 were "drive by" who fixed a single small thing.
Good point!
On the face of it, that sounds healthy. But dig in further, and you discover that only the top 10 or so contributors have enough activity to make their personal contribution graph anything other than a flat line on zero.
The vast majority of the work here is being done by a very small group of people - likely those paid by the commercial sponsor (a random sample of the top few suggest that well over half of those top contributors fall into that category).
If those people aren't paid to work on the project any more, it will likely die very quickly.
> On the face of it, that sounds healthy. But dig in further, and you discover that only the top 10 or so contributors have enough activity to make their personal contribution graph anything other than a flat line on zero.
This is something I always do manually and it is annoying. The number of contributors we see on the front page of a project on Github is misleading and can easily be faked by a malicious actor because a user who corrected a typo 5 years ago is counted as a contributor.
Github should really improve that.