I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on what principles open source projects should adhere to in order to promote transparency, inclusiveness, and effective development. Are there any specific projects you feel do a great job following certain principles in how they operate? I’m interested in how projects organize decision making, manage donations, incorporate community feedback, communicate updates, and more. Please share projects you appreciate for how they approach open source development!
A couple things that I think are crucial:
Firstly: have a clear code of conduct for forum members, developers, contributors, etc. If the project as a whole tolerates a raging transphobe who terrorizes and mistreats other contributors just because he’s contributed 10,000 lines of code, then the project deserves to fail. Software doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Code isn’t value neutral. And the people who are part of the community are more important than whether or not certain others will continue developing X feature. FreeBSD is one example of this that I really like. They made it clear that intolerant asshats weren’t welcome. It created a shitstorm of chuds throwing tantrums, but it made FreeBSD better for it.
Secondly: don’t accept just any PR/MR that comes in. There has to be a design, architectural, and philosophical vision guiding a software project, and contributions need to adhere to those. Otherwise you end up with UI/UX nightmares that make a great application miserable to use. Have a clear vision, and be open and transparent about what that vision is.