To hell with opensource politics

Alan has nicely put into words something I’ve been pondering for a couple of days now. GitHub is a place where forking a codebase is the norm. You fork a particular codebase, play around with it, add your modifications and if the master branch owner agrees and think your stuff is cool he can merge the changes. If he doesn’t agree, you could continue with your cool additions and can tell people to pull from you.

Compare this with a more traditional method of maintaining an open source project. Alan mentions SourceForce as an example. It’s not the only one. You have a central repository where a few people act as committers who can control what changes can go into its repo. GitHub on the other hand provides a new perspective. See the graph for Ruby on Rails for example. With a decentralized view like that you can quickly find out who meddles with the code and who are the people having a keen interest to contribute.

Amount of politics that’s going to be generated around the project is very limited compared with a centralized cvs/svn repo project. You can get rid of all those private mailing lists and just carry on with what matters most, after all code speaks on everyone’s behalf ;-)

Posted in Uncategorized, git, github, open source · November 17th, 2008 · Comments (3)

3 Comments

  1. Yeah, GitHub is just awesome. It really changed the way open source collaborates. No more worries on projects without active maintainers. No more worries on submitting patches, no more requests for commit access. As you said it allows the code to do the talking.

    From my personal experiences with GitHub, I know any interesting project could get good traction via GitHub.

    — Lakshan #

  2. The comment I started to type here, ended up at my blog: http://gaveen.owain.org/2008/11/open-source-foss-politics-github-and.html

    Thanks for the post. :)

    — Gaveen #

  3. @Lakshan: Indeed it is!

    @Gaveen: :-) You’re welcome.

    — Chintana #

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