hot take, FOSS development
The "hit-and-run PR" model is a completely unsustainable model for FOSS development, because it shifts the majority of the labour to a handful of core maintainers, and is the outcome of a hopelessly individualist and capitalist understanding of what "collaboration" means
Project management systems should instead be primarily focused on building trust and retaining contributors at varying levels of commitment, and giving them room to breathe without becoming detached from the project
re: hot take, FOSS development
@joepie91 since I saw this I keep thinking of how on-point the description of "hit-and-run" is
like, even if you pretend you run a community, it's still closer to a revolving door of people walking in and out instead of like, actually working together
re: hot take, FOSS development
To make it more explicit; that individualist understanding of 'collaboration' is the belief that people will contribute to scratch their own itch and that this will somehow magically convert into a public good at scale, and you will find this assumption embedded *everywhere* in the design decisions of popular FOSS project management software
Of course in practice this isn't how anything works, and it just means that lots of people submit often low-effort "patches" and then a few people burn out having to review tons of patches from people they have never talked to, whose motivations they do not understand, with zero guarantee of a response to a review, and with little chance of them sticking around in the long term, meaning that core maintainers have to repeat the onboarding process over and over again with every new patch