Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="resistor" data-source="post: 4747214" data-attributes="member: 9142">This represents a total miscomprehension of how open source works.A lot of people around here seem to be of the impression that it's just "everyone adds their improvements to one big pool."  But that's not how it works.There are distinct projects, with their own design goals.  They usually start from one or a few motivated individuals deciding to start their own project.  They then accept contributions from others IF the contributions are of acceptable quality and meet the design goals of the project.  Eventually they come to trust this outside contributors and start to allow them to freely contribute to the project without prior review.  As the project closes in on its design goals, more people become aware of it (provided its design goals align with theirs), leading to new contributors.  Rinse and repeat.Of course, sometimes a contributor will have a different vision for the project than the maintainers.  When this happens, sometimes that contributor will make a "fork" of the project, a duplicate incorporating their changes, and then continue to develop it according to their vision.  A lot of these forks peter out, as they exist only to fuel one individual's vision, but some of them prove successful and eventually compete with or even displace the project they branched from initially.There's not some magical "technical requirements" that make every open source contribution good.  In fact, lots of them are crap.  The "goodness" comes from individuals coming together to satisfy their shared design goals, and then sharing the resulting work with the world.</blockquote>

Verification