[LEDE-DEV] Why technical elitism is contrary to stated goal of community

[Hauke Mehrtens]

On 05/06/2016 05:05 PM, Daniel Dickinson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have noticed that some of the policies of this project are already
> veering towards a brand of technical elitism that I feel is completely
> contrary to the stated goal of having a stronger community.
> 
> A strong community welcomes 'outsiders' and noobs and helps them find
> their place in the community and *helps* them learn how to to
> participate in a friendly, open manner.
> 
> Technical elitism tends give a 'you're not good enough / you don't think
> like us, go away' feel to a community.  The 'we won't event look at your
> bug report if it doesn't meet the special format we came up with that no
> one else uses' policy is I fear an example of this.  I realize the
> reason for it is to try and get better quality bug reports, and less
> ones that aren't useful, but I don't think that is necessarily a good
> way to about it.
> 
> If LEDE is *serious* about community some of it's core members need to
> rethink how they approach contributions and the project.  Perhaps time
> is the issue, and perhaps the issue is attitude, or perhaps it's a bit
> of both.  Either way, if nothing genuinely changes from what was the
> case in OpenWrt, this project and OpenWrt will both die.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Daniel

We see a big problem in how Issues at OpenWrt are handled now. OpenWrt
has a very low barrier to report bugs and about 50% of them re not
useful. Most people working on OpenWrt are doing this in their spare
time and I do  not think anybody gets paid for handling random bug
reports. When I look at a bug report it takes me some time to read it.
If I think I can fix it I first have to reproduce it on some device
which is often hard because I do not even know what version they are
using or if they have done big modifications to it, like using OpenWrt
CC with kernel 2.6.28.

The other problem with the OpenWrt bug tracer is that people are often
unreachable for further questions, because they haven't provided a mail
address or do not care anymore.

This is not a criticism at OpenWrt, I just want to point out the problem.

Hauke