I totally agree we need to support open source software. Everyone from beginning students to today’s tech giants are made possible because of OSS. However I do think we need a better model for contributing. Esoteric best practices and developer attitude presents a major hurdle to anyone wishing to give back to the community. Stack Overflow is a simple but perfect example of how it can turn so many newcomers away.
I imagine most people would love to contribute technically to software but are held back by systemic dogma around what constitutes good coding. In fact some individuals do not open source their libraries for the sole reason they will have to micromanage the barrage and resolution of incessant pull requests which have more to do with splitting hairs than improving the library (just because you have a more efficient loop doesn’t mean the library needs one).
One might even argue libraries like pandas, numpy and scikit-learn have become too bloated to maintain at the OSS level. OSS benefits from small, scrappy, creative work, forged from the real-life experiences of a few developers and data scientists. I would rather see smaller dedicated libraries spun off frequently to aid in the development of software, than large hard-to-maintain packages that have reached the limit of what OSS can reasonably support.
Food for thought. Good article, thanks for sharing.
