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A comment on Time Till Open Source Alternative. Parent comment

Re:Time Till Open Source Alternative by seanhunter on Sunday August 28, 2022 @03:01AM (#32626395)
I'd be somewhat skeptical of anyone trying to product manage an open source project, and I think unless you were a truly exceptional product manager, most contributors would perceive your contribution as net negative if you tried that. The point of open source is people work on the things they want to work on (for the most part, obvious exceptions apply) and via a Darwinian process, what survives is the result of the best ideas of the people who stick it out.

Open source contributions I've made have been mostly because I need a certain feature or there's something that doesn't quite work right etc. Eg recently I took up qubes os. I like using the i3 window manager, and it had some problems on qubes, so I made some small contribution (I can't even remember what it was now) to fix that.

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Re:Time Till Open Source Alternative by travisjungroth on Monday August 29, 2022 @10:26AM (#32638695)
The normal PM process wouldn't work, but I think normal PM processes are broken anyway. It also wouldn't cover all the wonderful small features, ports and fixes people like you contribute.

Any notion of "setting priorities" would go right out the window. It would have to entirely be about giving gifts, which is what open source is based on, anyway.

"I talked to 5 of our users about this problem. Here's what they said in summary, with some pull quotes. Here's how 3 other libraries solve this problem. I added 2 more ideas, made a table comparing all of them. Here's the 1 I think is the best, if anyone wants to make it."

Then it gets picked up or not (probably not lol). But no "influencing" past that. The influencing is just doing useful research, idea generation, and sharing it.

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