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There was an existing project that did this, and like a good open source person, I thought there's really no reason not to reinvent the wheel, so I reinvented the wheel and dove in and wrote this thing. Early on in that process of exploration, I was trying to make something that felt a lot more Node-like than what alre... |
While I think I started off in the right way there, I actually had some of the best ideas come from outside. I opened it up pretty early and I started throwing around these ideas on GitHub and in IRC as well, and managed to pick up some ideas from some people who were able to really make it feel much more Node-like. On... |
He actually gave me some really good ideas around - I think it was some streaming stuff that I was tinkering with, but he gave me a couple of suggestions that really clicked and I thought, "Yeah, that’s a great idea, that really feels Node-like" and went with a couple of those suggestions that he had. |
\[11:51\] And that process of getting other people involved in the design stage and then the very early contribution stage where there were some people who were interested in making a tool here that felt much more Node-like... That process of actually saying, "These people actually have really valuable opinions from th... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Open open source? |
**Rod Vagg:** Yeah, open open source. This idea that I shouldn’t claim sole ownership of this thing, and when you give contributions, you are actually giving them to me to claim ownership of; that just didn’t fit, so I decided to go ahead and make this open open source thing around LevelDB at the time. The LevelUP proj... |
That style, the open open source style that has evolved in the LevelUP ecosystem, it's very much about equal sharing. You get ownership of the project, the whole project. You get to have an equal vote as the original person that started it. You get your name on the overall copyright thing; it says "This is copyrighted ... |
There might be some, there’s obviously some situations where that does make sense, but a lot of the time you are putting it out there anyway, you are finding a community of people that it has value to, so why shouldn’t you share that? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So beyond just these initial principles, what were some of the early iterations you did to that policy? I can’t imagine that it was super fleshed out right away, there had to have been some additions or changes you made along the way. |
**Rod Vagg:** Look, to be honest, what you find... If you go to the LevelUP repo and look at the contributing file, that hasn’t actually changed very much since the original version, and it’s not because it’s perfect, it’s simply because no one has thought to update it, or no one has actually -- like, I haven’t gone ba... |
\[16:10\] We've got these five rules: the first rule is no false pushes or modifying the Git history in any way. In practice, that idea suggests that you shouldn’t write over people’s stuff and you shouldn’t mess with the Git history; it’s just a good idea. But in practice, false pushing is sometimes necessary, but the... |
So that rule in practice is quite soft, and people will do what needs to be done with the tools, as these needs come up. So I’m not sure I’d codify that the some way these days. |
Second rule is non-master branches ought to be used for ongoing work. Again, this is just like, whatever works for the project and the people involved. The idea behind it was that the master branch was supposed to represent the pinnacle of the active work, the stuff that has really been accepted. And in practice that’s... |
Sometimes people are quite comfortable doing a fork and submitting from their own fork. I had this idea originally that you wouldn’t need to fork the projects, because you actually have full rights to the project; you don’t need to make a fork and then pull request from your own fork. In fact early on, I actually start... |
And while I still like that idea, in practice it really depends on the individual and the mechanics of the project. So in the Node project, for example, we don’t do very much in the main project at all; we tend to do it from our own forks, so that’s again a bit soft in practice. |
The third one is external API changes and significant modifications ought to be subject to an internal pull request to solicit feedback from other contributors. In practice, the way that I think it actually should be done - and that rule should actually be changed - is that every change should be done by a pull request... |
Early on it was like, okay, if your fixing grammar or some minor little thing, then sure just commit it, but for the sake of visibility, I would change that and say that everything should be done via pull request. |
The fourth one is similar - internal pull requests solicit feedbacks are encouraged for very non-trivial contributions, but it's left to the discretion of the contributor - that's pretty much the same thing. |
And the last one is contributors should adhere to the prevailing code style of the project. I don’t know if that actually needs to be said; that's just how we do open source. The reason I put that there was because I sometimes adopt some quirky code style things, and the last thing I want is people showing up and sayin... |
Mostly, these rules have sort of become really flexible and there's just a more of a general idea of openness and a mechanics to contributing that make that openness work well. |
\[19:49\] In terms of iterations, I actually haven’t had enough time to go back and really pin down the best mechanics that work for the different kinds of projects. Mostly, they just evolve within those little communities and it just works as it works, |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That makes a lot of sense. So we are gonna take a quick short break, and then when we come back we're gonna really dig into the meat of liberal contribution policies and what this does for casual contributions. |
**Break:** \[00:20:18:08\] to \[\\00:21:13:00\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And we are back with Rod Vagg. So Rod, take me through some of these mechanics of liberal contribution policies. You talked a little bit about what went into the LevelDB specific policies. What would say is the overarching philosophy of how these are constructed and how that differs from the more tra... |
**Rod Vagg:** There's a couple of things to look at. The first one is the mechanics of collaboration; how do you do this in a way that involves the whole group of people that have the ability to make decisions, so all of your contributors are these equals that seat at the table? |
GitHub presents the obvious answer to that, which is pull requests. So pull requests for everything, and that means that every time you want to make a change, you do it as a pull request, which is the invitation for discussion. |
If something doesn't garner a discussion, then you take it as an implicit okay. If nobody steps up and says "I don’t like this" or "Hang on, let's talk about these things", then you’ve got the go-ahead. You don’t need to necessarily chase sign up from other people. In practice, people do, and in some of the more formal... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** See, that's a really big departure from traditional policies. Traditionally, in open source if I send a change to a project, it's my responsibility to convince them that it should go in, not the other way around, right? |
**Rod Vagg:** Right, this is where the initial gating process comes in. So if you send a pull request to one of these liberal projects and you are not one of the core contributors to it, then you have to go through the process of convincing that the change is good, and that can mean a whole lot of things. That actually... |
\[23:40\] That can be things like going through looking at your code style, "Hang on, you're not actually conforming to the code style of the project. Just do the basic here!" There’s always these hurdles that you go through, which are quite normal in open source projects. You get this thing right, fit into the project... |
And what's more, you can actually be involved in changing some of those things that you had to go through. So if you really hate the code style, like if there is something wrong with it, then you're perfectly within your rights to propose that it be changed; you've just got to convince the other people that may stand u... |
So getting through that initial gate is the important bit, but once you're through, then you've proven yourself as somebody that places enough value in this thing and is willing to give your valuable time and effort, too. So you have rights to change it as you think it needs to be changed. But in practice, people know ... |
So every change, if it doesn’t get a discussion, it usually means it’s pretty trivial and no one cares enough about it, so just go ahead. You do need to leave time for a discussion. If I were to rewrite the policy in general for open source, I would definitely build in something about that time period, because you do n... |
Also, the different ways that people do open source; some people do it in their work time because it’s a part of their work, and they are using projects for their work; other people do it on the weekends. So you do need to make sure that you leave enough time for these pull requests so that all of the people involved i... |
It's not fair on the other people in the project, and it's usually frowned upon. So they do need to be left open for enough time to get going on a discussion. And then when discussion does happen, consensus-seeking really is at the heart of the process, and that does really need to be written into any liberal contribut... |
So you don't have to reach consensus as something that is good, but you have to reach enough consensus that nobody is gonna put their foot down. So the gating for something getting in is really that somebody is willing to strongly enough assert that this thing shouldn’t get in. If somebody gives it a no, then that's a ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, there's a big difference between pure consensus and consensus seeking; with consensus seeking, the goal is that everybody agrees that this should go in, but if one person objects, in pure consensus they would basically get a veto. In consensus seeking, they have to convince everybody else that ... |
**Rod Vagg:** Yeah, and that depends on how strongly they feel. And that's actually an interesting thing, because the strength of somebody's feelings about technical changes actually reflects more than just feelings. It's a technical opinion and it usually carries along with it some technical merit, so that’s why these... |
\[28:10\] So just that process of allowing people to say no is important. What it means is you 'to have to drop into a discussion mode, which can be uncomfortable for people, and can actually be intimidating for outsiders, as well. That’s something in practice that we've found, that it becomes occasionally discussion-h... |
The other thing to note is that the way I often describe these things is we try to make open source more like a Wiki, so we think more like a Wikipedia. Trying to turn open source projects into their own little mini Wikipedia is the goal here; everyone has these valuable contributions, and they may be tiny or they may ... |
If you look across pull requests across almost any open source project - the kinds of things that people from the outside are waiting to get in, they're these small things that will make a huge difference to them and very little difference to other people who haven't even encountered the same problem, or haven’t wanted... |
Usually, most of the changes are not these big architectural changes, they are minor. So moving open source projects closer to a Wiki is one of the goals here, but the challenge that code presents that you don’t get in the same way with Wiki articles is that you want to occasionally make releases, and these releases ha... |
So we do still need this process of being able to make releases that we agree are of quality and that represent the project at that point in time, so we can’t quite act just like Wikipedia. We do have to have a process that allows us to assert quality at these snapshot points. |
That’s where the idea of having a master branch, or a branch that is sacred is important. This branch represents a place where we only put things that we all agree are good, and then having some way of making releases off that, and often that will involve an individual or a group of individuals that are a subset of the... |
\[32:21\] What they use is your releases, so try not to get too hung up in what’s in your repository; it's the releases that matter to end users, so try and separate those two things a bit. That's my thoughts on mechanics for now. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Let's get a little bit into the casual contributions that you touched upon. I think there is a perception that casual contributions are really small things, nothing really substantial and we can't really rely on them for anything useful. What types of contributions do you see coming from casual contri... |
**Rod Vagg:** I don't make as much differentiation between casual contributors and whatever the opposite of that is, because I don't think you can actually know when somebody is a casual contributor and when they are not. Something might be small to start with, but that might be somebody testing the waters. So they mig... |
So I don't think that distinction is actually that helpful, unless you are able to measure it over time. So if you look back in the history of a project, look over the past six months, then you might actually be able to actually see who were the casual contributors. But at the time that it's happening, I'm not sure you... |
I've seen people come and show up with documentation fixes, even minor ones, and you give them the right signals that, "We're open for business, we're open for contributions" and they level up really quickly. In fact, one of the most interesting things about this kind of contribution policy is that you can actually tak... |
So I’ve seen people come in, saying things like "I don't really understand C++ or this fancy stuff you are doing in here, so just contributing to the documentation is good enough for me." But they may contribute enough documentation to get over that initial hurdle of non-trivial changes, and they may become of the core... |
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