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How Promoting Open-Source Can Become Problematic

Juraj on February 08, 2024

If you have been in the open-source community lately, you know what I am talking about. The story goes something like this: There were loads of vid...
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Josua Schmid • Edited

This is interesting: github.com/expressjs/express/pull/...

It seems that this is organised. So could it be not a general issue, but an exception?

Update:

Yes, it is
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It's a direct suggestion from here: httpx://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez8F0nW6S-w

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karadza profile image
Juraj

Quite the detective 😉
As I mentioned in the Final Toughs, there were external actors in this incident and yes this is was an extreme example, but it was useful for making a point!

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Gagan

some newbies misunderstood the guide and this is the result

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Matija Sosic

Interesting points! I think, in a way, it is inevitable, but there are ways to deal with this. E.g., Hacktoberfest is introducing stricter rules every year to differentiate between meaningful PRs and simple typo fixes, etc.

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Juraj

The tech community is ever-growing, and I agree that this was inevitable to happen at some point (although this is an extreme example).
Hacktoberfest is definitely making steps in the right direction!

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Josua Schmid • Edited

I would find it very sad, if people were generally discouraged from contributing. Our automated linters and PR templates will improve and maintainers will find ways to automatically tag PRs to suit their process. So they can still choose to look at low quality PRs if they want and don't need to increase contribution barriers per-se. Also GitHub introduced "discussions" exactly to defuse "issues".

We generally encourage our interns for example to contribute to open source because there's a lot to learn about how stuff is done properly. All assuming that they read CONTRIBUTING.md first.

Oh, I forgot to say: I really like how Stackoverflow does it!

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Juraj • Edited

I definitely don't want to discourage people from contributing!
My main goal with the post is to highlight the importance of open-source contributions and to ensure that we're all approaching it with the right mindset and intentions.

By the way, how does Stackoverflow do it?

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Josua Schmid

The stackexchange network knows levels of priviledges: stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
For example you can only write comments or review posts after a certain amount of upvotes.

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Artem Sapegin

I don't think contributions to other open source projects will help you find a job, unless they are very substantial. In my own experience, even making a popular project didn't help me with this.

Contributing isn't about creating a pull request but about learning and collaboration, and for this it could be useful but will require significantly more time.

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cloutierjo

While it is losing everyone times, it's easy and quick to reject those. I'm more worried about chatgpt/copilot pr that seems legit but are not quite done with full understanding of what is done and is either going to be introduce in the project of lazy code review or are really going to lose everyone time as it could start a lengthy discussion that is never going to be merge as the author won't be able to clean it up.

Some of them could have been done as a sort of shortcut for bolstering resumes, which is a far more alarming intent.

Having done cv screening when i look at someone contribution I actually look at the pr content, code and the interaction that happen in that pr

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Juraj

That is a great point! A bunch of PRs like that could be far more damaging to the project than updates to the Readme such as these.

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Volodymyr Yepishev

If you put open source contributions into your resume, be prepared to showcase your contributions during the tech interview, just sayin 🫣

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Juraj

Showcase your amazing markdown skills 😄

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Jan Küster

Copilot detect and close when!?

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Michal Štefaňák

When I was reading this article I realized one thing, this is probably a way for some people how their make GH profile filled with green squares.

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Juraj

You are probably not wrong 😄

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Tori Hevnilva

I appreciate this perspective. Sometimes I think about OSS contributions like a charity. Give your free time as you see fit--but don't treat it like a second job if you value your health.

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Maya Walker

Well written! I agree with your conclusions. This is indeed an important topic that needs to be discussed.

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Juraj

Thank you! I'm glad you found it interesting

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Rickrickiin

Really great post

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Juraj

Glad you enjoyed it!

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Juraj

Thanks! I imagine the ExpressJS team had a rough couple of days 😅

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George Johnson

As I keep saying, these morons wasting everyone's time are just like the god awful fake TikToks of someone giving a homeless person $250, when it's all staged and just done for likes.
It's pathetic and all it does is drown a good project in garbage, someone has to wade through and clean it up. These oxygen thieves need to get a life and stop wasting good people's time. Sorry, but it really makes my blood boil.
I love using open source, it's amazing that so many good people give up their time to help the rest of us save time and money.