Open source is not consent for experiments

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

Ian Malcolm, “Jurassic Park”

ScanOSS gave an accidental lesson about this recently when, apparently, an “experiment” resulted in filing issues about profanity in open source project code. According to a comment from ScanOSS’s CTO, this was a “brief experiment involving contributions to a small set of repositories” with the intention “to gather insights.” It’s not clear what insights the experiment wanted to produce. What is clear is that they didn’t work with project maintainers before conducting this experiment.

CTO Julian Coccia made it worse with this comment:

The terms of service of Github (and the Open Source license of your choice under which your contribution was released), openly allow contributions from other users. Therefore, people looking at contributing to your project don’t really need your consent before issuing a PR. You always have the right to accept or reject contributions at your discretion.

[…]

If you are not willing to receive contributions from the community, if you are not interested in your Open Source contribution gaining adoption, or if you prefer people to sign special agreements to make contributions, perhaps you are better off closing down your repository, making it private.

If you’ll pardon my language, I think the fuck not! Maintainers are overworked. They don’t need to deal with spam. If you are making a contribution, whether individually or on behalf of a company, it is your responsibility to make sure it’s meaningful. Yes, you’ll get it wrong sometime, but you have to make a good faith effort.

Typically, making a non-trivial contribution involves spending some time learning about the community. At a minimum, reading the contribution guide (if it exists). It does not mean you’re allowed to lob automated issues at projects and then get indignant when the maintainers are mad about it.

With open source licenses, you can do whatever you want with the code you download. Run any experiments your heart desires on it. But once you’re writing instead of reading, you need to be a good participant. No amount of good intention changes that.

This post’s featured photo by Vedrana Filipović on Unsplash