[_ea1k]

I think you have a point, but unfortunately I didn't get it from your first comment as well. It read as a pretty negative comment.

It sounds like the point that you are making is reasonable, though, and unfortunately one that I see play out with a lot of FOSS projects as well. I remember a talk one time where a project lead essentially made the point that every new talk is met with a lot of "I'll setup CI for you" and "I'll setup JIRA for you", but that none of the people who say those things end up contributing code or issues.

For some reason there is a natural desire among some to organize the organizing before the thing to be organized really exists.

[zenojevski]

Note: I was not the original poster: his comment simply rang very true to me; "lean" is being a motif in my work, as the complexity of precious time and resource management increases.

Contributions are all well-intentioned, but they cost resources, especially if you're not great at ruthlessly filtering out, or don't want to, for any reason; they generate a lot of heat where this energy can't be used.

Also well-intentioned contributors will set up grandiose structures, with no intention other than "to help", but no actual will to carry the actual work out. This usually turns out a wasteland after a while, which is not so much a problem until you realize you have to support it; or worst, it over-shadows the original, leaner-but-actually-productive intent.

> For some reason there is a natural desire among some to organize the organizing before the thing to be organized really exists.

I think this is why we have so many engines which have no games written for it :D

[_ea1k]

It is amazing how closely this matches my experiences. I've been on projects where we were forced to accept "gifted" code that was a tremendous difficulty to actual maintain and fix to a maintainable state. Of course, the whole time lots of people wondered why it couldn't just be merged without testing or anything.

It is very easy for software contributions to create lots of friction and your analogy to heat and energy loss is really great, IMO.