Fix it, Fork it, Fuck off

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • lovely-forks

    💚 🍴 Show notable forks of GitHub repositories under their names.

    The post resonates with me as an OSS user and a contributor. Many a brave souls have taken to forking the project to fix the bugs but those forked projects almost always suffer from a discoverability problem. I have tried making fixes and tried forking projects only to discover that someone else has done it better elsewhere.

    I've been burned by this problem often enough that I wrote a Chrome extension which would _tell_ me if there are any notable forks of the project I'm currently looking at on GitHub: https://github.com/musically-ut/lovely-forks .

  • Confluent Kafka Golang Client

    Confluent's Apache Kafka Golang client

    You are right, but in practice that's not what happens. Companies do not rely on open source libraries, the developers working for such companies do.

    I can give you a realistic example. If you want to use Kafka and Go, your probably only option is to use https://github.com/confluentinc/confluent-kafka-go. Its LICENSE explicitly says "no warranty". Now, what if I find a bug in the library? Only two realistic solutions from my side:

    1. I submit the issue and hope for the maintainers to fix it

    2. I dig deeper and try to fix the issue. I submit the PR

    None of the above scenarios are guaranteed to have a happy ending. The issue could be ignored, or piled up among thousand of other (maybe higher prio) issues. My solution may not be optimal and could be rejected (or if it's optimal, nobody is taking a look at it, and it could remain open for weeks/months).

    > If that is a problem for you, negotiate a different contract up front - with the maintainer or someone else willing to do the work. That probably means paying them.

    In the real world that would mean that I go to my manager and asks them to pay money to the maintainers of confluent-kafka-go to fix the issue I found. I don't think my manager would approve that, but let's imagine he does. The guys at confluent-kafka-go may not want money to fix the issue. These guys have probably already jobs that pay them well, and they work on the library at will.

    Note: I'm talking about confluent-kafka-go, which I know is behind the Confluent software company. But I could as well be talking about libraries maintained by individuals like https://github.com/edenhill/librdkafka

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • uncurled

    Uncurled - everything I know and learned about running and maintaining Open Source projects for three decades.

    Daniel Stenberg, the lead maintainer of cURL, has some interesting tweets about this topic. In fact several of the toxic comments he posts are from people who seem to lack a basic understanding of what the project even provides.

    https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1561459354431275009

    https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1535188747427405824

    Just to provide some counterbalance there's also this: https://twitter.com/bagder/status/1552414274101940225

    He has an interesting guide on his thoughts on maintaining open-source as well. Here's the People section: https://github.com/bagder/uncurled/blob/main/people/

  • nixpkgs

    Nix Packages collection & NixOS

    The standard build functions in Nixpkgs can apply patches, e.g. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/search?q=patches

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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