wacked
/
blog

---
title: "Drive By Contributions to Open Source Software"
date: 2020-10-11T13:58:00+01:00
draft: false
---
# Intro
A few weeks ago an Microsoft employee made some statments that relying on email
is [a barrier to entry](https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/)
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](https://www.labbott.name/blog/2020/09/01/emailgateway.html)
and [this](https://lobste.rs/s/0jt525/relying_on_plain_text_email_is_barrier#c_bv3txg]) 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

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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