[smartmic]

There are great Open Source projects doing fine with the cathedral style, just look at Sqlite and its siblings (Fossil, …).

So I do not see a problem with Ladybirds decision, in contrary, IMHO it strengthens the human aspect of software development and puts the brakes on AI free riders

[gbalduzzi]

I still don't see solutions on how a normal person can become a mantainer though.

If all relevant open source projects close up their contributions, you can't enter the project anymore from an external point of view.

Almost all open-source public figures started by being interested in a project and submitting PR to it, until eventually either joining the project as core mantainer or creating a separate open source project. The path is now closed, and I don't see a way in, outside of creating a popular open source yourself

[appreciatorBus]

> how a normal person can become a maintainer though.

Is the goal to produce high-quality software, or is the goal to produce an apprenticeship scheme for developers who are interested in the project but not so interested that they are willing to write an email to introduce themself or otherwise engage in normal human social interactions?

Normal people will still be able to get involved if they want to, just like normal people can get jobs. You learn about the organization you’re interested in joining, you try to meet some people and introduce yourself, you gain trust and prove your worth. It can be true that a pull request once embodied some of these tasks, but it is not true that being unable to submit a request means that these tasks are no longer possible to perform. It just means you’ll have to do them differently, just like the rest of humanity does when they want to get involved in an organization.

[Barrin92]

>Normal people will still be able to get involved if they want to,

there isn't much evidence that this is happening. When you eyeball the average age of maintainers on mailing lists these days for prominent open source projects like the linux kernel, it's been steadily creeping up, to somewhere in the 50s now I'd guess. There's a complete dearth of people in their 20s or even 30s in particular in positions of responsibility, there's no next generations of leaders.

That's fatal in the long run. You need to have an apprenticeship system or something like a vocational pipeline to engage people in a structured way so that you can produce talent and also be objective and systematic. Something like a guild system you have in the DACH region where companies survive centuries, and that's not because random people write mails, it's because there's a industry wide support system and training process.

[appreciatorBus]

Yes but that predates AI & projects rejecting pull requests, so I would argue this is a separate unrelated phenomenon. If anything, the fact that despite accepting PRs, most projects have little new blood, means that PRs were rarely a significant pathway for future maintainers.

[smartmic]

The path is not closed; it must be earned through trust. It has always been this way. Also, note that "pull requests" are a GitHub invention; the concept is not native to Git or most other SCM systems. Before, you would have to submit your patch by email. It would be reviewed by the "maintainer" (or BDFL), who would then accept or reject it. If your contributions are accepted several times, you may be able to earn the rank of "maintainer."

Returning to the topic at hand, the challenge for new developers is to earn trust. I bet there are ways to do so aside from the muddy swamp of GitHub's (AI) bazaar.

[creesch]

In this case they seem to be firmly closing the path though

> There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means. We do not want to create a shadow contribution system through issues, comments, email, or forks. External code can of course exist under the terms of the license, but we will not treat forks or patch dumps as a review queue for upstream Ladybird.

This does raise the question on how they are going to get new maintainers. The only thing I can think of is by active outreach to people contributing to adjacent projects that are still open. But that does not seem ideal to me as that will not yield people specifically interested and caring for the project you invite them to.

[grebc]

They don’t even have an alpha product yet. This used to be called vaporware but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that something will come in the future and they’re just focusing on fixing their own crappy code.

[fc417fc802]

The amusing thing is that emailed patches and a listserv aren't actually all that different from github pull requests at the end of the day. In either case you're sending some code you wrote along to a group and asking them to look over it. The only real difference is the lack of a familiar web interface that's uniform across all projects and reduces friction to near zero, but emailing a patch hardly adds much friction in practice.

I think the primary difference is that it removes some of the incentive to status seek because there's no centralized network operator tracking contributions and displaying them on your profile for others to look at.

That said, the linked post explicitly says that Ladybird won't be accepting emailed patches, reviewing changes from downstream forks, or anything else. Hopefully that's not the case since entirely closing off the project would probably be an overreaction as well as jeopardize its future.

[skydhash]

It’s really different because there’s no public signal between the email and the project itself. You can maybe search the log and see your patch, but there’s no central identity where you can brag about it. At most you can get a notice in a CONTRIBUTORS text file, or in the copyright header.

[hypfer]

Just uh.. build your own thing?

Boom. Maintainer. Easy.

Why would normal people even want to become an unpaid janitor for someone else's stuff?

[justin66]

> Why would normal people even want to become an unpaid janitor for someone else's stuff?

Social validation. Or, to be slightly more generous, sort of a compulsory way to force someone more experienced to provide some mentorship, by compelling them to review your pull requests.

[cestith]

That’s the point here, though. The maintainers of Ladybird don’t want to be compelled to mentor people making throwaway contributions without a commitment to the project. It’s pretty frustrating to try to mentor an absentee mentee who isn’t actually ready to learn from you.

[justin66]

I expect they'd like to not mentor new people attempting to make real contributions as well. Sometimes you're just not in a position to do that.

[cestith]

You make a strong point. Large parts of a decision like this have less to do with what you can get from the community, but what you have person-hours available to do with it. The core team is pretty small, and a lot of these automatically coded PRs are bound to be huge. They’re taking back their own time to focus on their own project.