| > What “principles” are you referring to? Those of Open Source software development: > The users are treated like co-developers and so they should have access to the source code of the software. Furthermore, users are encouraged to submit additions to the software, code fixes for the software, bug reports, documentation, etc. [0] Introducing a paywall to keep out those who wish to submit improvements to a project, is the antithesis of encouragement. > I’d also pay that in a heartbeat as a user. Not every Open Source contributor has money to give. A better alternative might be for a forge website (GitHub or whomever) to implement a user-scoring system. Wikipedia uses this approach quite successfully, where only users with a certain level of 'credibility' are permitted to make changes to semi-protected articles. StackExchange/StackOverflow does something similar to avoid spam on 'highly active questions'. Even HackerNews does something like this, showing usernames in green for new accounts. What the forge would actually do with the user-score, I'm not certain. It would be difficult to do anything without making the forge less welcoming to newcomers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Developme... |
The point, as I see it, is to raise the investment / friction required to contribute. You are less likely to pollute a project with inane comments if you're invested (not guaranteed, just less likely). I wouldn't recommend this for any / all OSS, but instead when you start getting tons of low value contributions. In fact you'll see a lot of issues on large OSS projects that I wouldn't even categorize as "contributions", but more like complaining or simply asking questions that are often already clearly documented. E.g. "Doesn't work! Fix please!"
We're seeing a lot of OSS projects simply close down their issue reporting because they don't want to deal with it. If there was an easy way to enforce investment / quality of feedback I think some of these project would probably keep their issue reporting open.
User scoring could potentially work too. It would be an interesting experiment. I think there's a lot of room to try things. For example, you could complement a paid model with an application process to gain free access (for those who can't afford it) as both would require user investment (money OR time).
You mentioned Linux as an example. They have a detailed process for reporting issues. You can't just one-line tweet an issue and expect it to receive attention. https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/reporting-issues.html#st...