The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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That is to say: Firefox 1.0. 2004. A smart kid who wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition and global impact had basically four choices: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, the Apache webserver and Firefox; outside serious nerd circles that was basically it.
A decade later, after macports and later homebrew, the explosion of the ruby and python ecosystems, git and GitHub and the entire directional shift of the software world, that kid had 10,000+ choices.
A thing I said a lot in those first few years was: we are competing on the experience and ergonomics of being a part of this community. Every single person out there who is smart enough to turn the crank on a compiler and figure out how to send us a patch has thousands of options. The process complexity and hard-knock oldschool open source "culture" we believe is acting as a "filter" isn't selecting for brains or talent, it's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse.
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That is to say: Firefox 1.0. 2004. A smart kid who wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition and global impact had basically four choices: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, the Apache webserver and Firefox; outside serious nerd circles that was basically it.
A decade later, after macports and later homebrew, the explosion of the ruby and python ecosystems, git and GitHub and the entire directional shift of the software world, that kid had 10,000+ choices.
@mhoye I'm skeptical that "wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition" should be a goal anyone should be supporting.
That's the mindset that got us into the shit we're in: FOSS as a way to get one's foot in the door for cushy tech industry careers, not as a way to take a problem you understand and care about and make things better for yourself and others.
It promotes the same kind of behavior in FOSS as the Google "breaking shit to get a promotion".
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A thing I said a lot in those first few years was: we are competing on the experience and ergonomics of being a part of this community. Every single person out there who is smart enough to turn the crank on a compiler and figure out how to send us a patch has thousands of options. The process complexity and hard-knock oldschool open source "culture" we believe is acting as a "filter" isn't selecting for brains or talent, it's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse.
And to be explicit about this: a long-running filter that's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse is exceedingly useful if you're a terrible manager or a sex pest, two classes of people who have notably flourished in free software for a very long time.
But when smart people have choices, and they choose not to tolerate mismanagement and abuse and stop choosing you, either you grow up or soon all you have are people who think abuse and mismanagement are normal.
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And to be explicit about this: a long-running filter that's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse is exceedingly useful if you're a terrible manager or a sex pest, two classes of people who have notably flourished in free software for a very long time.
But when smart people have choices, and they choose not to tolerate mismanagement and abuse and stop choosing you, either you grow up or soon all you have are people who think abuse and mismanagement are normal.
And you can call this oversensitive, feel-good "woke" nonsense if you want, but I've got the data and I'm right: a code of conduct, community standards and moderation enforcing them, the psychological safety of your community, these are near term competitive advantages and long term survival necessities. Treating the process of getting involved and the experience of staying involved in your community _as a product_, worthy of usability testing and ergonomic refinement, that moves the needle.
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And you can call this oversensitive, feel-good "woke" nonsense if you want, but I've got the data and I'm right: a code of conduct, community standards and moderation enforcing them, the psychological safety of your community, these are near term competitive advantages and long term survival necessities. Treating the process of getting involved and the experience of staying involved in your community _as a product_, worthy of usability testing and ergonomic refinement, that moves the needle.
@mhoye@cosocial.ca currently trying to hold my tears. thank you; this is an excellent condensation
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Just to pile onto this some more:
"Ojeda said that there is a need to deprioritize these contributors, but that we still need to find talented people to join our community. That means finding ways to focus on the people who actually matter."
One of and maybe the biggest challenge we had fostering contributors that I - he said patting himself on the back - recognized early when I started at Mozilla, was in coming to terms, structurally, with the fact that free, open software had... won.
@mhoye It seems like people are betting that open source will lose moving forward and basically bowing to their new corporate overlords. What's the point when you can just strip mine existing reserves?
I don't think this but I can see the point of view.
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And you can call this oversensitive, feel-good "woke" nonsense if you want, but I've got the data and I'm right: a code of conduct, community standards and moderation enforcing them, the psychological safety of your community, these are near term competitive advantages and long term survival necessities. Treating the process of getting involved and the experience of staying involved in your community _as a product_, worthy of usability testing and ergonomic refinement, that moves the needle.
@mhoye I think this is a good thread.
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And to be explicit about this: a long-running filter that's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse is exceedingly useful if you're a terrible manager or a sex pest, two classes of people who have notably flourished in free software for a very long time.
But when smart people have choices, and they choose not to tolerate mismanagement and abuse and stop choosing you, either you grow up or soon all you have are people who think abuse and mismanagement are normal.
@mhoye Developers also have more choices outside the "Free Software"/"Open Source" scene now.
When all this stuff got started, the transaction costs of proprietary meant that if you started on a student/hobbyist budget and wanted to do globally useful software, free was the main option.
Now mobile app stores make non-free projects even lower hassle than free ones. And SaaS platforms aren't much harder. The overhead advantage of participating in open source went away while the downsides stayed.
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And you can call this oversensitive, feel-good "woke" nonsense if you want, but I've got the data and I'm right: a code of conduct, community standards and moderation enforcing them, the psychological safety of your community, these are near term competitive advantages and long term survival necessities. Treating the process of getting involved and the experience of staying involved in your community _as a product_, worthy of usability testing and ergonomic refinement, that moves the needle.
We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
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@mhoye I think this is a good thread.
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Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
@mhoye I am not a kernel contributor, yet, but I am currently in the middle of a massive personal push to get on top of C (which I consider a naively honest language, now that I'm learning about it in earnest) because mainly I'm tired of not being able to write my own device drivers, but other reasons too.
It's been difficult but I found a way to keep this going and track progress in a way that is not at the mercy of me not losing or misplacing a notebook. And basically, I'm doing it the ultra-hard way, studying the underlying math as math before I inevitably encounter it used in code - I dropped out of school, but grasping concepts was never the issue - and basically just acquiring this new mental toolset so I can have more agency in what I do with my computers.
Everyone, especially the capitalists, knew that others would just "hey I want this thing you handle the hard stuff" because we live in a world of opportunistic Idea Men who think their inherent genius makes them worthy of skipping the actual doing. That they were allowed to do this is obscene, of course.
Side effect, it's so much fun. And if anything ever felt like I was learning Deep Magic, this is it - you learn hacks as a fundamental exercise, because they save you cycles, and this stuff runs at the speed of god. C still has some genuine awe to offer in the results it can give you.
Now, I can see also the tedium in implementing things from this level of scratch, so I can see why experienced devs would want to pass off "write me a function that takes int x, char y, structedtype gerble, applies these operations, and returns whatever," and then look said fairly generic but also specific function over, rather than doing the tedious housekeeping all day.
I have a few GUI projects that will come in time, which I will probably do only the core functionality (DSP, 3D mesh operations, etc) in C, while implementing the UI in something easier and higher-level that only needs to run at human speed.
But if by that point I have a local inference model that can do that level of simple C code for me, hand off a function declaration with a comment that describes it, and thus I can implement everything in straight C, except with the tedium removed, I can't say I won't use it.
Fuck the datacentres, but this shit works, especially for code, and I don't think I need a datacentre for that, even with my crappy old 1070. Saying this is wrong is like saying we should do 3D animation exactly the same way they made the Money For Nothing video. It's a tool that automates complex operations quite reliably, in the hands of a discerning expert. Nobody opens Blender for the first time and makes anything more complex than a donut on their first day.
But any use of actual code generation would be long after I've finished learning how to understand Assembly, as well as finally getting my head wrapped thoroughly around how you write good, fast C code, along with all the mathymaths I will need to understand in order to do the things I want the apps to do. None of it is magic or a secret, it's just a lot of time spent getting the concepts into your head and building the muscle memory, like I did when I learned piano, and by necessity, music theory - you just put in the time and do the exercises, be they scales or math problems.
I'm happy that I've preserved enough of my brain that I can enjoy this now, and I mean, people who just don't want to learn are always going to be annoying, but at the moment they are enabled by the fact that technology is not run by technologists, it's run by rich manbabies exclusively.
The problem is the capitalists. The problem has always been the capitalists. Deal with them and everyone will be free to study Calculus for fun, and bring back the joy in computers.
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That is to say: Firefox 1.0. 2004. A smart kid who wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition and global impact had basically four choices: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, the Apache webserver and Firefox; outside serious nerd circles that was basically it.
A decade later, after macports and later homebrew, the explosion of the ruby and python ecosystems, git and GitHub and the entire directional shift of the software world, that kid had 10,000+ choices.
@mhoye Why does it matter that the project that kid contributed to be "high profile" and have "global impact"?
Hint: it's the capitalists.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye@cosocial.ca that is damn cool to have hard confirmation for. thanks for sharing!!
was that ever publicly published? i can’t seem to find anything from Montreal, closest come https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3756681.3756994 as a 2025 dataset and its sole citation https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-15621-1_30 p. 367
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye much earlier this year I basically gave up on an attempt to contribute to Matplotlib because the process was so painful. Like, the existing code also had issues, but that's never a big deal for me. But I would need day job money to deal with their CI setup or their patch notes process, let alone both. It's not that I couldn't soldier through it if I needed to. It's that I couldn't justify spending my life that way.
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye “… if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability…”
I’m not, but I’m starting to see the appeal
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@mhoye Why does it matter that the project that kid contributed to be "high profile" and have "global impact"?
Hint: it's the capitalists.
@jpaskaruk @mhoye Plus the lure of the glamorous conference circuit with all its free sanswiches and petty cash.
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@paulmckrcu ooh, ta. My reading comprehension/energy is sporadic these days but I will give it a go
Many years ago I heard someone attribute a quote to Rudolf Steiner about "the point of absolute materialism from which all progress will be made" - I've never managed to actually find a reference, but it does feel like it describes where we are now.
@srtcd424 Glad you like it, but as they say, be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
On the other side of that coin, the psychological safety part of it, a true story: I'm the guy who killed IRC at Mozilla. I'm proud of it.
One of the reasons I'm proud of it is the mobile IRC bouncers that didn't let people delete old DMs so I got to have conversations with colleagues where they showed me pages and pages and pages of vicious scrollback harassment that they had to endure for their jobs, sitting in their phones forever.
The feature request was "I just want this to stop."
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@mhoye I'm skeptical that "wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition" should be a goal anyone should be supporting.
That's the mindset that got us into the shit we're in: FOSS as a way to get one's foot in the door for cushy tech industry careers, not as a way to take a problem you understand and care about and make things better for yourself and others.
It promotes the same kind of behavior in FOSS as the Google "breaking shit to get a promotion".
@dalias @mhoye I can second that from the contributor side (in my younger days). It meant I ended up with less team loyalty, less systemic knowledge, and a lot of (internal) inappropriate reactions to setbacks and obstacles. It also led me to make some bad choices of projects to contribute to, not in the sense of the project being objectively bad, just not a good fit for me. None of that applied to the work I did for the right reasons.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
I violently agree.
Even in a closed shop environment, the money/time/effort (which ware all equivalent) you invest in on-boarding new contributors, streamlining the path to their first commit and accolades for following established processes by _following the documentation_ pays huge dividends that vastly outweigh the cost in maintaining all that stuff.
When I ran things around here, the record for a new just-graduated CS kid to his first ready-to-code-review bugfix PR was _a day_. He read the onboarding material, setup all the repositories and toolchains, self-served from the architecture and "welcome to the shitshow that is our main code repository, read this first to figure your way around" on day 1 and picked, fixed and auto-tested a bug by 10am the next day.
In his case the motivation was "I want a raise, eventually". In open source, people show up on your doorstep wanting to... begging to help. Make the experience easy and memorable and they'll stick around.
