I agree. The author has released something into the world in the hopes that it will further progress for someone else or themselves. That's awesome. And the OSS community on GitHub has some great tools to fork the project if the author disengages.
But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors, and can be a real detriment to convincing developers that open source is worth their time.
It would be great to point less-experienced developers to a list of open source projects that are very responsive and supportive in their pull request management for their first contibutions. Does a list like that exist?
It would be awesome if Github exposed a metric for contribution responsiveness.
- The average time it takes for a member to reply to a pull request.
- The average time it takes to merge a pull request.
- The percentage of pull requests that get merged.
These metrics will vary pretty widely even between repos that are trying to be responsive. Maybe just comparing these metrics to the their historical values within the same repo would shed some light on whether or not the members are becoming unresponsive. Maybe there are better metrics.
"But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors"
You HAVE to fork the project to even submit a pull request. That's the exact opposite of "not obvious". If you're viewing the source on Github, clicking the "Edit" icon will even do that for you...
But I do think that those tools aren't obvious or are outside the confidence level of many new contributors, and can be a real detriment to convincing developers that open source is worth their time.
It would be great to point less-experienced developers to a list of open source projects that are very responsive and supportive in their pull request management for their first contibutions. Does a list like that exist?