Re:Of GitHub and Pull Requests (and comics)
by jamesu on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @11:55AM
(#3828107)
Bumping into friction and problems when contributing to open source projects is hardly limited to github.
A long while ago after hearing all about the virtues of open source software i decided to try and contribute to a project. I found something which needed implementing and decided to have a little go at implementing it. After a bit of discussion on the mailing list, i came up with a fairly minimal implementation which was a good starting point at least, and posted a ticket to the tracker.
For about 7 months nobody seemed to take much notice of the ticket, when all of a sudden i got a message: someone else had independently worked a new implementation, and only just noticed the ticket. In effect 99% of the work i put in was ultimately wasted.
Still was a good learning experience. Nowadays i think of open source projects as being more about people in a community rather than being merely about contributing code.
A long while ago after hearing all about the virtues of open source software i decided to try and contribute to a project. I found something which needed implementing and decided to have a little go at implementing it. After a bit of discussion on the mailing list, i came up with a fairly minimal implementation which was a good starting point at least, and posted a ticket to the tracker.
For about 7 months nobody seemed to take much notice of the ticket, when all of a sudden i got a message: someone else had independently worked a new implementation, and only just noticed the ticket. In effect 99% of the work i put in was ultimately wasted.
Still was a good learning experience. Nowadays i think of open source projects as being more about people in a community rather than being merely about contributing code.