Jan Wildeboer 😷Oct 3, 2024

(Thread) In the olden days, a FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) project typically had:

- A source code repository
- A web page with the documentation, FAQ and links to downloads
- At least one mailing list called announce, typically also one for users and one for contributors, all with public archives
- (maybe) An IRC channel to chat with other users and maybe also the developers

Maybe it’s time to try that simple approach again? Everything open, everything accessible? 1/7

Show threadJan Wildeboer 😷Oct 3, 2024
In those olden days, we also had some helpful rules. One was that only things that can be referenced in code or mail archives actually exist. So when there was a long discussion on IRC, someone wrote down the outcome (or coded the patch) and made it accessible to all. This was an important rule to avoid excluding those that didn’t have the time/willingness/connectivity to spend hours on IRC. 2/7
Show threadJan Wildeboer 😷Oct 3, 2024
When I now see slack, discord, github etc everywhere as a *requirement* for participation, I think that we are exchanging a bit of comfort for the IMHO very high price of excluding a lot of potential contributors and giving a lot of data to proprietary companies without a real need for that. 3/7
Show threadJan Wildeboer 😷Oct 3, 2024
Maybe this short thread makes you think a little bit about that. That would mean a lot to me! Run your projects in every way you want, I am not telling you to make changes. I merely hope that you start to think a bit about what's best to grow your community in an inclusive and open way, is all :) 4/7
Show threadJan Wildeboer 😷Oct 3, 2024
I am throwing this out here not to come over as a grumpy old man, yelling at the clouds. But because I guess many enthusiastic, young people simply never experienced the olden ways. Maybe they want to explore them a bit and see for themselves if there could be something viable in it for them. Especially wrt async communication. Is all! 5/7
Show threadJan Wildeboer 😷Oct 3, 2024
Seeing how quite some commenters (want to?) take the wrong conclusions from my thread: I am all for the GitHub/gitlab/forgejo/codeberg based approach of managing issues, PRs, releases in "modern" ways. It made drive-by contributions so much easier! I am however not sure if discord et al are better for asynchronous communication and feel that mailing lists with public archives were a superior approach that we gave up on prematurely. HTH! 6/7
Show threadchx
@jwildeboer drive-by contributions yes but the moment two non maintainers want to try to work on something together GH/GL fails so hard. The Drupal project added some automation on top of GL to make it possible but it's bumpy.
Oct 3, 2024 at 3:50pmWeb