The forked elephant in the room

[Don Allen]

On Friday, 19 January 2024 at 09:50:06 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 20:51:48 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>>
>> Yes, that's certainly true.
>>
>> My intent is not to focus on Adam Ruppe's case specifically, 
>> but on the broader pattern that also includes former 
>> contributors like Sebastian Wilzbach, Jonathan Marler, 
>> ag0aep6g, Suleyman Sahmi (SSoulaimane), etc. When one 
>> relationship fails, that's unfortunate. When a long string of 
>> relationships fail in the same way, that's a sign of a deeper 
>> problem.
>>
>> Even if we grant that there was nothing more to be done in 
>> Adam's case, I think D's approach to contributor relationships 
>> is leaving a lot of value on the table.
>
> I get the impression that these kinds of problems are more of a 
> rule than an exception in succesful open-source projects though 
> (by succesful I mean attracting dozens of contributors or 
> more). Looking at the lobse.rs discussion Guillaume posted, 
> Hacker news discussion about OpenD and considering what you 
> hear about say Linus Torvalds or Theo de Raadt, strong 
> enthusiasm to contribute seems to go hand in hand with a strong 
> personality. I think keeping those kinds of contributors is 
> simply hard. It might not be that hard for an average Joe were 
> he leading, but I suspect the same qualities that make language 
> creators succesful in the first place tend to make good 
> leadership in these cases hard for them.
>
> I don't think D leadership is doing particulary badly - 
> otherwise they would be developing the compiler alone by now. 
> But sure it's still a critical thing that might well determine 
> the future between stagnation and an explosion in popularity. 
> Therefore you're right we ought to pay attention to it, however 
> understandable the problems are.

Again I agree with you.

Another obvious factor that makes open-source projects difficult 
to manage is that people are contributing voluntarily. Their 
livelihood doesn't depend on toeing the line, as it frequently 
does in paid employment. *And* they have access to the source 
code. So when personal styles clash, as I think was the case 
here, it's much easier for things like we've just seen with this 
project to happen.

I have personal experience with de Raadt (not good) and have used 
OpenBSD on and off for years. OpenBSD is absolutely a cult of 
personality, exactly as you said. But it takes a particular kind 
of personality to be willing to drink the de Raadt Kool-Aid. And 
recall that OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD, the result of some 
particularly nasty circumstances.

So I think the right way forward is to learn what can be learned 
from this kerfuffle, but don't over-react to it. You certainly 
want to try to retain someone like Adam,  talented and volatile, 
but sometimes it's just not possible. C'est la vie.