

Ask HN: What makes a good OSS community? - drygh

What makes one OSS project&#x27;s community better than the next? What are the things the biggest OSS projects do well, or not so well (think top 20 on GitHub).
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sarciszewski
In a word: _Humility._

The maintainers of LogStash, for example, have a philosophy that "If our users
are confused, it is a bug. It is not that they are stupid."

Another good example is PHPUnit, whose maintainer unarguably has a much higher
prestige in the PHP developer community than I do, yet responded to trolling
by implementing the change I suggested and taking the time to hash and PGP
sign all of the past releases.

[https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1334](https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1334)

The CodeIgniter maintainers responded to my gripes about their CI_Encrypt
library by researching and writing a brand new library to fulfill that role.

And of course, we have some good bad examples.

OpenCart:

[https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1534](https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1534)

[https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1594](https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1594)

Mojolicious:

[https://github.com/kraih/mojo/issues/656](https://github.com/kraih/mojo/issues/656)

Etcetera. Humble lead developers are less caustic and create less barriers for
entry. This encourages people to contribute and allows a community to
flourish.

