Comment by einpoklum
16 hours ago
> Before GitHub, Open Source was a much smaller world.
Not that much smaller right-before GitHub and right-after it became available.
> but in the number of projects most of us could realistically depend on.
Most FOSS I realistically depend on I don't obtain from GitHub actually.
> There were well-known projects, maintained over long periods of time by a comparatively small number of people.
There were even more not-well-known projects, maintained for less time, by a larger number of people. They just weren't that many of them in one place.
> You knew the names.
You absolutely did not know the names. Post author is just thinking of the names they knew as though those were everybody.
> reputation mattered in a very direct way.
And now it doesn't?
> We took pride (and got frustrated) when the Debian folks came and told us our licensing stuff was murky or the copyright headers were not up to snuff, because they packaged things up.
RedHat was just as popular a distribution; and most users used Windows (like they do today); and the BSD distributions were a thing (although we didn't have Apple's BSD, i.e. MacOS)
Bottom line: Inaccurate description of history.
> You absolutely did not know the names. Post author is just thinking of the names they knew as though those were everybody.
I absolutely knew the names of the people I interacted with and whose projects I used. I even went to conferences with some of them. When I worked on my first web portal for Ubuntu we had a total of about ~4 dependencies and all was vendored. I knew the person who packaged my Python libraries for Debian.
You might call it an inaccurate description of history but it is very much my experience.
back in the day, I work in a web hosting company.
I know every name on mysql devel team.
The only reason i subscribe that mail list is: i reported some bugs and need to follows the release.
Signal to noise ratio on those mailing list was high. I can't say the same for github or discord
> I know every name on mysql devel team.
That's one project. You did not know every name, or most names, in FOSS generally. Today as well - a project which uses GitHub still needs a mailing list, web forum, chat channel (Matrix/IRC/discord/Telegram/whatever) to discuss and coordinate, and that hasn't changed.
As for whether signal to noise ratio on mailing lists was high - that really depends on the list. I don't see that much noise on GitHub repositories, to be honest - it's not easy to post noise that many people will see, so there's not much motivation for it.