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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: 0.407s | 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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berkes ◴[13 May 25 08:24 UTC] No.43970739[source]▶
You just showed the poster-child of gatekeeping that is harming Open Source.

Every contributor is valuable, it's in the name, the definition of "contribute".

Any bar to entry is bad, it certainly never is the solution to a different problem (not being able to manage all contributions). If anything, in the longer run, it will only make it worse.

Now, to be clear, while I do think GitHub is currently the "solution" to lower barriers, allow more people to contribute and as such improve your Open Source Project, the fact this is so, is a different and other problem - there isn't any good alternative to Github (with broad definitions of "good") why is that and what can we do to fix that, if at all?

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1. matkoniecz ◴[13 May 25 11:12 UTC] No.43971646[source]▶
> Every contributor is valuable, it's in the name, the definition of "contribute".

No. I definitely seen people who created multitude of misleading bug reports, flood of stupid feature requests. I personally did a bit of both.

There are people who do both repetitively, fill issue reports without filling requested fields. Or open issue again when their previous report was closed.

I got once bug report where someone was ranting that app is breaking data. Turned out (after wasting my time on investigating it) that user broke data on their own with different software, through its misuse.

There were PRs adding backdoors. This is not a valuable contribution.

There were PRs done to foment useless harmful political mess.

Some people pretend to be multiple people and argue with themselves in pull requests or issues (using multiple accounts or in more bizarre cases using one). Or try to be listed multiple times as contributor.

Some people try to sneak in some intentionally harmful content one way or another.

Some contributors are NOT valuable. Some should be banned or educated (see https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html ).

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2. berkes ◴[14 May 25 08:02 UTC] No.43982086[source]▶
This can be categorized as "spam".

Fighting spam isn't done by using unfamiliar tech, but by actually fighting the spam.

With good contributor guidelines, workflows, filters, etc.

Contributions that don't adhere to the guidelines, or cannot fit in the workflow can be dismissed or handed back.

Two random examples of things I came across in PRS recently:

"Sorry, this isn't on our roadmap and we only work on issues related to the roadmap as per the CONTRIBUTION-GUIDELINES.md and the ROADMAP.md"

"Before we can consider your work, please ensure all CI/CD passes, and the coding style is according to our guidelines. Once you have fixed this, please re-open this ticket"

That is fine, a solved problem.

Using high barrier tech won't keep intentionally harmful contributions away. It won't prevent political mess or flamewars. It won't keep ranters away. It won't help with contributors feelings of rejection and so on. Good review procedures with enough resources, help prevent harmful changes. Guidelines and codes of conduct and resources and tech to enforce, help against rants, bullying or flamewars, not "hg vs git". Good up-front communication on expectation is the solution to people demanding or making changes that can never be accepted.