Why are open source projects too rigid and stuck in dogmatic position ?
take for example mastodon, its CEO recently posted a toot asking who has already considered deleting facebook / threads after the recent controversies, but on the other hand ignores that his stubbornness about certain points like not adding quotes just doesn’t make the project appealing for ordinary people, this feature has been the most request since twitter exodus two years ago. and at every surge of new users mastodon struggles to keep them using the platform, why do these projects struggle to acknowledge what people want the most and deliver on it.
another example is LibreOffice, I was trying to get acclimated to this new office suite and was happy to find that I can theme it to my liking to ease up my transition. but it wasn’t long before I found out how tiny dogmatic decision really pushes to give up on it. I found that LO doesn’t auto-capitalise first letter after line breaks but only after end of sentences, something Word has been doing as long as I can remember, LO argument is that only a . and ! characters mark the end of a sentence in “proper English”. line breaks don’t qualify as a proper end of a sentence for them.
For people coming from proprietary software that among many short comings still strive to offer the best features and smoothest user experience, it is hard to try and stick to open source projects and even contribute back.
Should big OSS project shift to more democratic structures, where decisions are made based on consensus? or do you think the actual models are fine, and I am an entitled user ??
Still sounds like it could get quite messy if Google adds a feature, Qualcomm adds a fix to that feature and then you need to add a fix on top of that. Does it work better in practice and just needs to been seen to be understood?
Competence, Time and Direction are often quite hard to find in any professional team, let alone an open source team :D
Of course it can, the point is how difficult it is to get out of the mess. Patching upstream source directly is magnitudes worse. In practice, an upstream merge would typically be completed in a few days to several weeks at worst with little to no breakage. These days that’s even easier because a lot of pieces got modularised and separated as part of the work done in Project Treble.