Yes, many projects lack a style guide for UI and/or coding.
And often big projects have, similar to closed source software, rather ugly workflows where you have to discuss stuff before you're assigned to a bug and then have to send it patches and what not.
A good review process is important or else everything ends in chaos.
Re:Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone
by qu4z-2 on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @11:02PM
(#8200922)
Closed products always have that visual polish
Re:Lime Text: Open Source Sublime Text clone
by shangxiao on Tuesday August 19, 2014 @12:29PM
(#8198217)
Every single? You sure you want to make that claim on HN?
Yeah, take the go language, for instance. No vision, cobbled together by amateurs without any clear goals, and no real-world experience. Awful. /s
A lot of open/free projects are indeed "hobby" projects (and not in a good way) -- but to claim that all of them are bad? Compared to what? The shareware scene from the 90s?
> Every single open source software looks like it was cobbled together with no vision or coherency in design.
Creating a Pull Request doesn't mean that the developer of the open source project has to accept it verbatim if it doesn't fit with the 'vision.'
[Also, I'm pretty sure that the parent to your post was talking about bugs that probably don't involve visuals.]
It's no surprise that most open source software is clunky and hard to use whereas closed products always have that visual polish.