Overall it has gotten much easier to report bugs and submit patches to open source projects, and I give that credit to Github.
The thing is, to most people who aren't geeks, Github sounds like somewhere you want to avoid, where nasty hackers meet to compare notes on their cyberstalking victims or something.
The geek community seems to have an almost comical ability to come up with such terrible names for projects and not even realise it.
(And I write that while posting on another site that sounds like somewhere nasty hackers would meet to discuss writing viruses or something.)
I think it's very telling that many of the comments in this discussion speak positively about OSS because you can fix things yourself or there's an open system for submitting patches. I wonder whether the people posting those comments have even considered that the overwhelming majority of people using big name OSS software like Firefox or LibreOffice today aren't programmers and aren't going to report bugs like a programmer.
The thing is, to most people who aren't geeks, Github sounds like somewhere you want to avoid, where nasty hackers meet to compare notes on their cyberstalking victims or something.
The geek community seems to have an almost comical ability to come up with such terrible names for projects and not even realise it.
(And I write that while posting on another site that sounds like somewhere nasty hackers would meet to discuss writing viruses or something.)
I think it's very telling that many of the comments in this discussion speak positively about OSS because you can fix things yourself or there's an open system for submitting patches. I wonder whether the people posting those comments have even considered that the overwhelming majority of people using big name OSS software like Firefox or LibreOffice today aren't programmers and aren't going to report bugs like a programmer.