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No one likes an unkempt public area - Open Source guidelines to Cleanliness

edwardhotchkiss.com

10 points by edwardhotchkiss 14 years ago · 6 comments

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tomjen3 14 years ago

> You have an obligation to release code that is tested. Automated spec is preferrable. You have an obligation to document your code and build process, most especially — your contribution and pull request policy

No I don't. Unless I signed a document saying otherwise you should consider yourself damn lucky that you get to access my source code.

  • edwardhotchkissOP 14 years ago

    Correct. You don't, unless you'd like other developers to contribute to your project.

    You also owe it to yourself. But hey: if you want to post sloppy seconds untested code on GitHub - consider yourself lucky that they let anyone in.

    • city41 14 years ago

      I'm honestly not sure if I want other developers to contribute. All of my github repos are personal projects. I have no problem with them being open source (and they are all rather tidy and well tested btw) and no problem at all with patches, pull requests, bug reports and such from other people. But if one took off then suddenly my little baby project becomes a second full time job. Popular open source projects are a lot of work for the maintainers. I'd only want that to happen if it was a project I was particularly passionate about.

kstenerud 14 years ago

Open source developers tend to fall into two camps:

1. I am providing a public service, so I'll do my best to make it simple, complete, accessible, and reliable.

2. I've invested a lot of my precious time writing this code and am graciously providing it free of charge. Therefore, you should consider yourself lucky that I'm allowing you to use it at all.

In my experience, it's difficult for those in one camp to find common ground with the other. Group 2 tends to flourish in wild frontiers, whereas those in group 1 tend to do better in more established areas.

gte910h 14 years ago

I think this is a bit uppity.

Many people are graciously letting people share in stuff that they themselves need to have. It's laughable to obligate the guy throwing the free picnic or donating his used couch to anything and similarly so for given code.

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