Intro
A few weeks ago an Microsoft employee made some statments that relying on email is a barrier to entry to develop on the linux kernel. A lot of people didn’t like that comment – for whatever stupid reasons (microsoft? female? really liking email?)
There have been arguments in either side. I personally liked this and this one best.
But I assume that most open source contributitor do not want to be long term, core members of that project. They are first and foremost users who happend to stumble upon a problem and just want to fix it. They want to a) fix that problem and right now (for themselves) and continue working on their actual work and b) save others from running into the same problem again.
They are drive-by contributers, who need an easy, common way to submit their issues and patches.
My contributions to other software
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I was annoyed by thunderbird being slow to filter many mails[0] so I switched to another email client. It wasn’t very stable but it was fast. It had a bug when replying to mails from an famous, not to be named, email client starting with “ou” and ending with “ook”. I filed the bug but because I wasn’t familiar with the language the mail client was written in I didn’t send in a patch myself. but it got fixed anyhow and all was well.
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To help people write code for embedded systems I was supposed make the emulator easier to grasp. That meant adding an GUI where you could see the blinkenlights. And because it was meant for university students it had to run on what people actually use – windows. (If only this story had took place in 2021, the year of linux on the desktop). The emulator was almost cross platform – there was only one linux specific path left. I filed an issue, sent in the patch. It was merged and all was well.
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In another instance I had a bug where some customers could not be allow-listed in a popular CMS. Turns out that allowlist checked IPv6 addresses case sensitive. I filed a bug, sent in a patch. It got merged and all was well.
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My earliest contribution to open source was in an TLS library which only connected to the first IP of an domain. I sent in a patch request, it wasn’t up to the coding standart. I didn’t care much, since I had my local fork. Some time later that code in the library was rewritten anyway and all was well.
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An freelancer did large portions for $PRODUCT in my company. His code wrapping the Zend/Laminas Framework had an error where for plaintext only mails it still sent multipart/alternative which meant that no mail client could show the content. I sent in the patch, it got fixed and all was splendid.
In none of these cases did/do I intent to become a maintainer. I wouldn’t rule it out to become a maintainer[1] but all these projects are just building blocks used for whatever my actual job at that time is.
How DID I submit patches to these projects?
Now what where the barriers of entry to each and every single one of these projects? It would be ludicrious to try and see anything meaningful for all (FOSS) projects in the world from such a small sample size, so I am only going to give my very subjective view.
In all but two cases the whole communication happend on github (I will talk about github in a minute). One was the freelancer where I could do anything from writing an email, filing an issue on gitlab to just driving over to his house. The other one was a “proper” email based workflow.
Many people have already stated what they think the barriers to entry are for sending patches over mail, there is no need to rehash them. Let me just say that for some misguided non-sexual fascination with masochism I wanted to learn mutt at that time and still found it hard to send in the patches. I actually practiced sending them to another account of mine first. And all that only after finding in outdated wiki pages where the mailing list is in the first place.
For the rest I have used github (and similar). Github has by no means a perfect UX. But things like issue templates, a interface which I am accustomed from the last one thousand, three houndred and forty seven projects I checked out do help people to submit a ok-ish issue easily.
Conclusion
I think the discussion about Sarah Novotny’s plea/suggestion to move away from an email only way of submitting issues & patches missed the point that most projects have a long tail of single-issue contributers. I personally am one of these drive by contributors.
Personally I don’t think that everyone should migrate over to Microsoft owned, working with ICE github. Such an huge concentraion of basically all software on one single platform is never good. HOWEVER even with all those flaws it would solve the issue at hand: removing barriers to entry for first time contributors to open source
Footnotes
[0] think an outage causing a couple hundred mails to be sent out during the night. Then as I walk into the office, hearing about the outage and opening up Thunderbird having it freeze for multiple seconds as it sorts these mails into the “cron & other junk folder”. Seconds which make me very nervous as I can’t start to figure out the actual incident. [1] well I shouldn’t be let near the TLS Library