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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

(github.com)
848 points thefilmore | 2 comments | 13 May 25 05:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.556s | source
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floriangosse ◴[13 May 25 06:55 UTC] No.43970232[source]▶
I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower.

I think you can dislike the general move to a service like GitHub instead of GitLab (or something else). But I think we all benefit from the fact that Firefox's development continues and that we have a competing engine on the market.

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fhd2 ◴[13 May 25 08:14 UTC] No.43970680[source]▶
In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.
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arp242 ◴[13 May 25 08:39 UTC] No.43970824[source]▶
I spent quite some time writing a patch for FreeBSD and Linux a few months ago, including getting to grips with their contribution process.

Both patches have been ignored thus far. That's okay, I understand limited resources etc. etc. Will they ever be merged? I don't know. Maybe not.

I'm okay with all of this, it's not a complaint. It's how open source works sometimes. But it also means all that time I spent figuring out the contribution process has been a waste. Time I could have spent on more/other patches.

So yeah, there's that.

It's certainly true that making the bar higher will reduce low-quality contributions, because it will reduce ALL contributions.

(aside: FreeBSD does accept patches over GitHub, but it also somewhat discourages that and the last time I did that it also took a long time for it to get reviewed, although not as long as now)

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1. elric ◴[13 May 25 09:17 UTC] No.43971056[source]▶
In all likelihood, if the patch had been a pull request, the pull request would have been ignored as well. Much like the thousands of pull requests that are often ignored by various larger open source projects. Ain't nobody got time to triage drive-by pull requests from unknown contributors, especially on large projects.

There's no easy solution. Much like the recent curl security kerfuffle, the signal:noise ratio is important and hard to maintain.

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2. amanda99 ◴[13 May 25 12:32 UTC] No.43972200[source]▶
I think the OP's point here was that if it's a PR and it's ignored: you spent a bunch of time writing a PR (which may or may not have been valuable to you, e.g. if you maintain a fork now). On the other hand, if it was an esoteric contribution process, you spent a lot of time figuring out how to get the patch in there, but that obviously has 0 value outside contributing within that particular open source project.