| You forget Conway's law: > organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations Open source has a very different communication structure than a company. While the big three (MS, Google, FB) try to work towards good inter-departmemt relations, it is usually either - a single person
- a small group that are the gatekeepers for a small amout of code, typically encapsulated in a "project". They do commit a lot to their project, yet rarely touch other projects in comparision. Also, collaboration is infinitely harder, as in the office you can simply walk up to someome, call them, or chat them - in OSS a lot of communication works via Issues and PRs, which are a fundamentally different way to communicate. This all is reflected by the structure of how a functionality is managed: Each set of gatekeepers gets their own repository, for their function. Interestingly this even happens with bigger repositories: DefinitelyTyped is a repository for TypeScript "typings" for different JS libraries, which has hundreds of collaborators. Yet, if you open a pull-request for an existing folder the ones that have previously made big-ish changes can approve / decline the PR, so each folder is its own little repo. https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped/pull/1672... So: maybe the solution is big repos for closed companies, small repos for open-source? |