Open-source, not open-contribution

Re:Open-source, not open-contribution by benbjohnson on Thursday January 28, 2021 @09:33AM (#25942250)

The main reason is that it takes a lot of time and energy to review pull requests—especially for this kind of software. For example, I have a server that continuously runs Litestream on a database that's constantly producing load. Every time I make a change in how Litestream works, I create and push up a new build to that server and run it for at least 24 hours. After that, I review metrics about performance and throughput and go through the logs to check for any abnormalities. Finally, I have a separate runbook that I go through for manual testing every CLI command and their various options. It's a slow process but it helps catch weird bugs that aren't apparent from automated testing.

As for the license, yes, the PR author agrees with the license but it makes it harder in the future to change the license and then I need to maintain a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which is more work. I don't have any plans to change the license but I also don't know if that will change in the future.

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Re:Open-source, not open-contribution by imtringued on Thursday January 28, 2021 @10:49AM (#25943704)

Have you thought about having an application process to accept new members to the "core" team? The idea that people contribute isn't wrong in itself. It's usually the lack of commitment from the contributor that causes the stress on the maintainer side.

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Re:Open-source, not open-contribution by benbjohnson on Thursday January 28, 2021 @10:56AM (#25943833)

Yes, that'd be a good option and something I would consider if the workload increases to an unmaintainable level.

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Re:Open-source, not open-contribution by jancsika on Thursday January 28, 2021 @01:04PM (#25945980)

Unfortunately, I think you have to start that process before you get to that point. Otherwise you'll be overworked and attempting to onboard someone on a project for the first time. That probably won't go well.

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Re:Open-source, not open-contribution by ashkankiani on Friday January 29, 2021 @12:08AM (#25954206)

Why would trying to create a process for theoretical onboarding of members be less work than actually onboarding someone? I disagree. Leave the consideration of onboarding someone until you need it, and then focus on just that for the month or whatever they need to get up to speed, and then switch back to main contribution.

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Re:Open-source, not open-contribution by __henil on Thursday January 28, 2021 @10:00AM (#25942735)

Thanks for the explanation.

It would certainly more work for you to maintain CLA for your project, but why does sqlite setup CLA? It is sufficiently big project and they could easily setup CLA if they wanted to.

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Re:Open-source, not open-contribution by __henil on Friday January 29, 2021 @01:43AM (#25954752)

why does sqlite does not setup CLA*

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