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Comment by snowstormsun | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Maintainers shouldn't judge the people trying to contribute, but the contributions. If the contribution is misguided or not good, it's their responsibility to reject it. On the other side, if the contributor's intention is to boost their resume, but the contribution is also good and an improvement, so be it! Good contributions are too rare to only select the ones done with selfless intentions...

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As one communications book said (paraphrase): "Should is a word for the lazy. Eliminate it from your vocabulary."

> If the contribution is misguided or not good, it's their responsibility to reject it.

Arguably, they do not have a responsibility to even look at it. They definitely do not have a responsibility to accept/reject it.

All good rules fail when confronted with constraints. If a maintainer had infinite time and resources, your advice is good. Because they don't, utilizing heuristics is necessary. What the author is hinting at is being clear about turning away people seeking to boost their resume is a useful heuristic.

Same reason why employers reject people whose main goal of joining the company is to boost their resume.

If I'm an open source maintainer and I feel the contributor is an annoying twit, I find no problems in ignoring him altogether (i.e. implicitly rejecting his contributions). If you want to be an intermediary and take the time to judge his contributions, and report to me which ones are worth my time, I'll be happy to have you do it.

Judging by the Jia Tan situation, I think maintainers should judge contributors as well.

It’s the maintainer’s job to be defensive of their projects and prevent them from being abused. It’s not necessarily their job to build and foster a community.

What does it mean to judge a contributor? They're a faceless account, maybe a dog on the internet. Isn't the contribution the defining piece of work?

Maybe for growing your maintainer collection, with privileged access, but not contributions?

> What does it mean to judge a contributor?

It means whatever the maintainer wants it to mean. We’re all humans. Open source isn’t a structured corporation.

I think it’s perfectly fine for a maintainer’s opinions to affect the people and contributions to the project that they’re maintaining.

Accounts aren't always faceless. They can have real names, long histories and connections to other profiles.

This is one one of those things that sounds nice in theory, but falls down in practice, because in reality the overlap between "spammy junk" and "contributions done purely to boost resume" is very close to 1:1. I'm sure there's the odd exception, but it's rare.

So in practice "judging the contribution" and "judging the contributor" are identical.

They aren’t really. Even if the overlap was completely perfect and all spam contributions were the ones done to boost resume, you still shouldn’t judge the contributor for trying to boost their resume but judge the contribution by how useless and spammy it is.

After seeing several decade-long, slow supply chain attacks, maybe knowing who is contributing might matter a little bit.

Contributors are humans, so it doesn’t work like that.

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