sourceforge community team recently published an article "Open Source Is Growing, But Not How It Should", such as the title of the article said, the content expressed sourceforge for some insight into the recent development of open-source and worries.
Straight to the point article: Open source has occurred unpleasant things, and in recent years become more and more apparent. From AI to the cloud, open source driving the various fields, and the rapid development, but even though it seems everything goes smoothly on the surface, but in fact only a few developers do all the work.
It has long been believed that the use of popular open source can lead to or equivalent to increasing the number of write open source code, but that is not the case, and this case has become increasingly evident in recent years. Stack Overflow according to the latest survey, only 12.4% of respondents said they open source or at least once a month to contribute more frequently, while 23.1% of respondents say they contribute more than once a year, the rest of the respondents who said that they contribute less than once a year on the open source, or even none at all.
Why is there such a situation? sourceforge believed the answer lay itself open source project, which explain this situation in two ways:
Barriers to entry
According to technical director Mathew Lodge argument, many open source projects can be very unpopular, especially for temporary open source contributors, they believe in order to make the project maintainer their value, must invest a lot of work, but many times, the contribution who do not want or can not take the time and effort to prove their ability to project maintainer.
On the other hand, the maintainer does have reasonable grounds to be alert to temporary contributors, because many of contribution may take time to review, leading to a complex problem or bug, also need to document the merger. The current situation is to provide high-quality code in open source contributors increasingly rare.
Find time to contribute
Most contributors are not available from open source software written in remuneration, and often takes time revenue contribution, contribution and participation also needs to be a witness value for the sample so that now more and more developers who can not participate in open source. sourceforge considered a "transaction form" can solve this problem, but such a mechanism would not result in reduced contributions to the project criteria.
Specifically, the company will pay a programmer so that they not only work but also in time to participate in open source projects in my spare time, so you can encourage them to contribute. By paying programmers to participate in open source projects, and companies can not only improve the guidance of the key projects they rely on, but also can help their employees improve their skills, so that they do things that interest you. Within the company establish a positive project culture, thereby greatly improving the company's image and attract more diverse talent.
Open source can provide a lot of things for developers and companies, but in fact it is not a free lunch. In order to obtain the maximum benefit of open source, the need for some investment, whether it is time, money or effort. Only when all stakeholders, including the use of open source software knows that open source can benefit from the best in the state, and the ability to thrive on demand.
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