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The community I've been most involved in over the past few years has been R/tidyverse. Some developers are paid (by RStudio [now Posit] and other orgs, like R Consortium) to work on software, docs, community initiatives etc. The experience as a programmer in this domain is amazing. Having these funded full time OSS contributors lets thousands of R enthusiasts (like me) benefit because someone incredibly high-leverage was paid to give a lot of their time to a project. So when you go to use that library, its docs are immaculate (I'm thinking all the tidyverse packages, Shiny, RMarkdown etc), and the examples are simple and brilliant. Getting up and running is often as little as taking an educated guess at how it would work, and often that's exactly how the function/package was designed! Having at least one dedicated person seems to dramatically improve the quality of OSS, possibly because it helps organise the dozens of people each making smaller contributions. I suspect this works so well because open source projects sometimes don't attract attention to key areas like documentation, and UX (some of my most-loved OSS projects still have horrendous UX because, I suspect, contributors love to add things but nobody wants to be the person who organises it into a coherent package for users, much less remove people's contributions because they're unnecessary and confuse users). When I contrast the experience with communities that have much fewer (or no) full time funded OSS contributors, there's much more niggle and inconsistency with libraries, interoperability, and especially in documentation. Sorry, I'm rambling, but the R community has been an amazing example of how paying a few dozen full time OSS people can have a dramatically outsized benefit to the community for years to come. I'm very appreciative I get to stand on the shoulders of these humble giants. |