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0 pointsbarnacled5y ago0 comments

The real question is, moving forward, if somebody submits a proposal, properly tested, described and discussed with the community that makes a fundamental or deeper change whether that is likely to be accepted or not.

The bazaar certainly exists for the Linux kernel insomuch that this can and does happen (partly as a result of the fact many companies contribute but none control it). For go it does not, for chromium it does not seem to either.

It is tough for a company with internal aims and pressure to adhere to that kind of model for sure.

And it is good you have been honest about your approach prior to this in that no contributions were taken but now it is a matter of whether or not a non Googler has the opportunity to make such a change, in accordance with your policies.

But obviously as a hobbyist with limited free time I am understandably cautious as to where I put my effort.

Honestly on a personal level it is probably no loss on fuschia's part, I am a minor contributor at best, but the general point stands.

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dhodell5y ago· 2 in thread

I understand the concern. I spent the vast majority of my career not at Google while also involved in open source communities, and I can empathize with this. I think one place we have a leg up here is that we do have documented processes for performing this type of work. It's certainly possible that the outcome of a proposal is rejection, but the hope would be the process does that quickly. We're all human and we don't want to waste anyone's time.

One of the cases that people cite for Go rejecting the community outright is the modules work. My perspective is that could've been handled better, but I didn't have a stake in that. But then I look at the error handling proposals, all rejected, including the ones originating from Googlers. And the iteration on generics, which has been reworked several times due to dissatisfaction expressed by community members of all experience levels. I think it's fair to say that even though there are deciders of what happens, they hold themselves to the same standard.

I hope you'll consider at least taking a look as a hobbyist. It's a large system, so both lots of opportunity for contribution and lots to learn. I think many of us are very eager to work with people outside the team, especially as many strive for more social interaction in general, and I know many of us are individually looking forward to welcoming external contributions. Certainly we can never find out if the process works if no one tries.

edit: redundancies

mook5y ago

I think the important part will not be what gets rejected, but what gets accepted. Nobody will ever remember the rejected error handling or genetics proposals; but people will definitely take notice if the eventually accepted one come attached with Google names.

It's hard for an open source project started (or dominated) by a single company to shake the appearance of being insular. At this point I believe Kubernetes has major contributors from various companies, but I still mentally think of it as Google because, among other things, a bunch of the infrastructure is still Google so it feels very much like Google has dominant control. The dominant company will need to actively drum up interest and try to convince external contributors to take up the work to make it look less lop-sided.

I don't mean this as an attack on Google — getting good community governance is hard; I've also been on the dominant company side on other projects (generally not great at fostering a good external community). I believe it takes extra concerted effort.

dhodell5y ago

> Nobody will ever remember the rejected error handling or genetics proposals; but people will definitely take notice if the eventually accepted one come attached with Google names.

I guess, but my point is that many of the rejected ones are attached with Google names. Also it's unclear to me that the reason for not remembering is due to who proposes and implements the things -- it seems more likely that this is due to a huge volume of proposals over a long span of time. WRT generics, it's also very clear that community feedback is being incorporated.

So this is why I think the issue is really rejection. Nobody's really upset about how error reporting or generics are being handled because it's clear that community feedback is being honored, and it's clear that the core team is holding themselves to the same standard the community is being held to. Those two properties aren't as clear in the packaging situation.

That's why I think Fuchsia having a documented community process and also having been working within that process for some time is important. We're already holding ourselves to the standard we're asking of the community.

> I believe it takes extra concerted effort.

This is absolutely true, and it's why I'm here trying to make sure that folks know there are people involved in the project who care greatly about its open nature.

Many people have pointed out that the existence of open source doesn't necessarily make the project accessible for contribution, and that's I think the more difficult problem to solve in the short-to-medium-term.

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