Comment by mook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mook | Hacker News Reader

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I think the important part will not be what gets rejected, but what gets accepted. Nobody will ever remember the rejected error handling or genetics proposals; but people will definitely take notice if the eventually accepted one come attached with Google names.

It's hard for an open source project started (or dominated) by a single company to shake the appearance of being insular. At this point I believe Kubernetes has major contributors from various companies, but I still mentally think of it as Google because, among other things, a bunch of the infrastructure is still Google so it feels very much like Google has dominant control. The dominant company will need to actively drum up interest and try to convince external contributors to take up the work to make it look less lop-sided.

I don't mean this as an attack on Google — getting good community governance is hard; I've also been on the dominant company side on other projects (generally not great at fostering a good external community). I believe it takes extra concerted effort.

> Nobody will ever remember the rejected error handling or genetics proposals; but people will definitely take notice if the eventually accepted one come attached with Google names.

I guess, but my point is that many of the rejected ones are attached with Google names. Also it's unclear to me that the reason for not remembering is due to who proposes and implements the things -- it seems more likely that this is due to a huge volume of proposals over a long span of time. WRT generics, it's also very clear that community feedback is being incorporated.

So this is why I think the issue is really rejection. Nobody's really upset about how error reporting or generics are being handled because it's clear that community feedback is being honored, and it's clear that the core team is holding themselves to the same standard the community is being held to. Those two properties aren't as clear in the packaging situation.

That's why I think Fuchsia having a documented community process and also having been working within that process for some time is important. We're already holding ourselves to the standard we're asking of the community.

> I believe it takes extra concerted effort.

This is absolutely true, and it's why I'm here trying to make sure that folks know there are people involved in the project who care greatly about its open nature.

Many people have pointed out that the existence of open source doesn't necessarily make the project accessible for contribution, and that's I think the more difficult problem to solve in the short-to-medium-term.

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