19
votes
Accepted
How do I deal with (enthusiastic) contributors who damage more than they help?
Linus Torvalds has talked about his experience on this subject; the book Producing Open Source Software also has a section that deals with difficult people, which is mostly related. If you want to ...
- 8,415
15
votes
Accepted
How to deal with a very productive contributor who wants to steer the project in a different direction?
Discuss, discuss, discuss
This is absolutely essential. You can't solve personal problems digitally - so when I say discuss, I mean call a meeting. You need to sort out some things with them:
Project ...
- 8,650
7
votes
How to deal with a very productive contributor who wants to steer the project in a different direction?
Bring it up, clearly.
This might seem obvious, but can't be stressed enough. If you are positive that the direction they taking the project into is incompatible with the vision of most, then this ...
- 2,060
5
votes
Can a LGPL project use contributed code after the original contributor withdrew it and was banned from the project?
There doesn't seem to be a copyright violation here. The code was pretty clearly released under the LGPL, and open source licenses are (almost certainly) irrevocable; it doesn't matter that the patch ...
- 10.2k
4
votes
How do I deal with (enthusiastic) contributors who damage more than they help?
The best way to deal with people who are ultimately being more of a bother than a help is to:
First
Talk to them.
They may not know what they are doing wrong, talking to them may help solve the ...
- 5,752
3
votes
Accepted
How can I mitigate or avoid clashes with project maintainers over my bug report(s)?
There are at least two competing interests in how open source maintainers run their projects:
a desire to foster and accept outside contributions
developer bandwidth
Developers have limited time to ...
- 30.8k
1
vote
Example of open source project that has had legal problems with contributors claiming any kind of right over their contribution?
Vaguely related because Apache contributors are under a CLA, a long time ago there was some feud between JBoss and Apache Geronimo, ... a very long time ago...http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread....
- 13.8k
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