Madison Ruby 2012 - How to Contribute to Open Source: Extensibility from Simplicity
Channel: Confreaks
Date: 2015-07-30

How to Contribute to Open Source: Extensibility from Simplicity  by:  Ryan Davis

The bar for contributing to open source is much lower today due to technologies like git & github... _or is it_?

It is now downright simple for developers to be able to fork projects and send pull requests upstream. As such, the number of forked projects and pull requests have scaled up. But all that burden has been shifted back to the maintainers of the original project. They're left with the decision to accept the patches as-is, reject them, or rewrite them in a more generalized form.

In other words, the maintainers are faced with the decision of increasing maintenance complexity, increased animosity / drama, or somehow distilling the underlying reasoning behind the change and abstracting them so they're usable by everyone.

The latter is both the hardest to do and the most beneficial to all parties involved and much of that effort can be done before the pull request even goes upstream.

Help us caption & translate this video!

http://amara.org/v/Gtks/