Audacity gets a CLA [LWN.net]

Audacity gets a CLA

Posted Jun 16, 2021 18:35 UTC (Wed) by BirAdam (guest, #132170)
Parent article: Audacity gets a CLA

This sadly is true of many open source projects. There are plenty of users and FOSS enthusiasts willing to talk about FOSS, but very few who contribute time or money to the projects they so vociferously “defend”. It is likewise true that guys like Poettering get a lot heat for the things they do, and yet no one else is successfully doing anything (even I have given Poettering undue opprobrium in the past, and that for hearsay, I regret it, but at least I grew up). So here again, the developers of a project are doing something in the best interest of the project and its users, and they get nothing but scorn for it. The most anyone else does is talk. This is, perhaps, a natural outcome. No one owns these projects individually so everyone feels that they get a say. If Microsoft makes Windows worse, we all just laugh. If someone touches an open source project a very sizable minority of FOSS people scream very very loudly. I feel bad for all of the folks who take this unjust castigation, and I hope that people just move on and either fork or get over it.

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Audacity gets a CLA

Posted Jun 16, 2021 21:39 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I think part of it is that there's a gradual shift in the overall FOSS community on what developers in general are comfortable with and want. But even people who are major developers and do a large part of the work on something don't do any work on 99% of the projects they use, and don't even use 99% of the projects that exist. Furthermore, each project has aspects that mean that global trends aren't necessarily the biggest factor in determining the best course for the project, and the developers of a particular project aren't necessarily the same as the average developer from the community overall. Lastly, a lot of developers in the broader community have had bad experiences with particular policies in the past, and get upset when those policies are introduced to other projects, not least because they're worried about those policies being seen as common best practices. So there's a big population of people who have good reasons to care, outside of the people directly affected.

Audacity gets a CLA

Posted Jun 17, 2021 21:16 UTC (Thu) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

I would say a lot of heat Poettering was getting back a decade ago had been quite deserved, but he grew since then, too. At the very least, he is a lot less cavalier about breaking other people's workflows or dismissing use cases as "invalid" today than he had been years ago.

Otherwise yes, funny how almost all people that won't shut up about how a CLA is going to stifle contributions have exactly zero contributions themselves.