Not for real.

Many already did, and many more will, but I doubt it was for this reason. I’m not a huge fan of GitHub, but it’s not because they require you to be verified in order to submit stuff.

Open source exists just fine without anonymous contributors, and the value difference between closed source is not that contributors can be pseudonymous or anonymous, it’s that anyone can be a contributor.

I am an open source maintainer. I do not want unfettered anonymous access to submit things to my repositories. I welcome feedback, criticisms, bug reports, feature requests, pull requests, and support requests, but I do not want any of that from anonymous users. If someone abuses me or other members of my open source communities, I want there to be potential recourse.

Anyone on earth is welcome to download my code and do whatever they want with it (as long as they follow the license terms) completely anonymously, but I do not welcome communications from them anonymously. I don’t feel like that’s unreasonable, and I’m happy that GitHub is a place where I can have those kind of restrictions.

If you want a more “Wild West” approach to social coding where anonymous users can submit things to your repos, you’re free to host your projects elsewhere.

You’re just wrong if you think the most valuable people to an open source project are anonymous randos.

I would think it would be astoundingly obvious that the most valuable people are the core team members. They do all of the maintenance work. They guide the project’s direction and define its mission. They implement new features and do most of the bug fixing. They triage, handle releases, coordinate.

Look at the commit stats of any major project; there are a handful of people who do >90% of the work. Those are the most valuable people to open source. They are who keep these projects going year after year.

Anonymous randos might fix a low-pri bug once in a while, but they don’t actually help a project much. It’s vastly more likely that anonymous randos will just add more work to a core dev’s plate and provide nothing of value. Now, please note that I’m not talking about new devs. Plenty of new devs will start by submitting some bug fixes to help projects. Those are actually helpful. I’m talking about randos. People who go by new pseudonyms not tied to any established Internet presence. And this problem has only gotten exponentially worse with AI.

I’m assuming, from the way you talk about it, that you’ve never been a part of a large open source project‘s community. You should try it. It’s extremely rewarding work (in that it makes you feel accomplished, you will not be paid for it). You’ll see that the work you label as busywork is actually what makes the project both valuable and maintainable.

I actually run some large open source projects:

https://github.com/hperrin/svelte-material-ui

https://github.com/sciactive/pnotify

And a bunch of smaller ones:

https://github.com/sciactive/tinygesture

https://github.com/sciactive/nephele

https://github.com/sciactive/nymphjs

https://github.com/hperrin/stream-overlay

https://github.com/sciactive/quickdav

So I’m speaking from experience here.

Just to give you an example, if you look at the v9 branch of SMUI, you’ll see the work I’ve been doing on it lately to separate it from the upstream library that has been abandoned. All of that work will not change the outward utility of the project one bit from v8, but it is absolutely necessary if the project is going to continue into the future. This kind of work will always fall on a core dev. No random passerby is ever going to do weeks of grinding labor just to make sure the project has a path forward.

So yes, the occasional bug fix or performance improvement from an anonymous stranger is nice, but no, it is not necessary nor the most important part. And to me not worth opening the project up to potential unaccountable abuse from bad actors.

OpenOffice was dead before it was transferred to Apache, so it’s not old enough to excuse.

That Firefox logo is from 2019. Oracle killed OpenOffice in 2011. Like, they actually completely stopped all work on it. They intentionally killed it at least eight years before this image was made.

Apache OpenOffice??

Surely you meant LibreOffice. OpenOffice has basically been dead for years, with no significant work going on.

Ah, that’s what you mean. Yes, I remember the internet before Facebook. I also remember software development before distributed version control. It was easier to keep track of incoming patches when they were all in email. Not better, but easier.

I’ve been managing open source libraries and projects for two decades. In general, community involvement is good, but anonymous, ephemeral community “members” are very rarely helpful, and way more often a pain in the ass.

Why would that possibly matter to you?

I’m not sure I would want completely anonymous, unknown, and unaccountable actors to be able to comment, submit issues, and submit PRs on my repos. So, it’s annoying, but the alternative is so much worse.

Is that from a movie?

In semantic versioning the first number is for any change to a public API that is not backward compatible. It could be incredibly small, like fixing a typo, but if it changes the API your users are using in an incompatible way, you’re supposed to bump that number.

Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.

They’re basically little double pane windows. They work well for insulation because there’s air in there.

If you really know me

You’ll tell me what kind of JPEG cosine I am.

Great article. That guy is legitimately being driven insane.

I love it.

Yeah. 3D printing a gun is a great way to blow your hand off.

I have a bit of an issue with the title, considering federated end to end encrypted messaging has existed since, at the latest, 1991.

Oh, cool, I definitely trust them again. 🙄

It depends on whether the BIOS is unlocked.

(Baked Input/Output Spud)