When it comes to running an open source project, the book Producing Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel (free pdf available) is my bible (see my review and summary of the book).

The book is based on Karl Fogel’s experiences as the leader of the Subversion project and has heavily influenced how I run the projects I’m involved in. Lately though, I’ve noticed one problem with some of his advice. It’s so Subversion-y.

Take a look at this snippet on Committers.

As the only formally distinct class of people found in all open source projects, committers deserve special attention here. Committers are an unavoidable concession to discrimination in a system which is otherwise as non-discriminatory as possible. But “discrimination” is not meant as a pejorative here. The function committers perform is utterly necessary, and I do not think a project could succeed without it.

A Committer in this sense is someone who has direct commit access to the source code repository. This makes sense in a world where your source control is completely centralized as it would be with a Subversion repository. But what about a world in which you’re using a completely decentralized version control like Git or Mercurial? What does it mean to be a “committer” when anyone can clone the repository, commit to their local copy, and then send a pull request?

In the book, Mercurial: The Definitive Guide, Bryan O’Sullivan discusses different collaboration models. The one the Linux kernel uses for example is such that Linus Torvalds maintains the “master” repository and only pulls from his “trusted lieutenants”.

At first glance, it might seem reasonable that a project could allow anyone to send a pull request to main and thus focus the “discrimination”, that Karl mentions, on the technical merits of each pull request rather than the history of a person’s involvement in the project.

One one level, that seems even more merit based egalitarian, but you start to wonder if that is scalable. Based on the Linux kernel model, it clearly is not scalable. As Karl points out,

Quality control requires, well, control. There are always many people who feel competent to make changes to a program, and some smaller number who actually are. The project cannot rely on people’s own judgement; it must impose standards and grant commit access only to those who meet them.

Many projects make a distinction between who may contribute a bug fix as opposed to who may contribute a feature. Such projects may require anyone contributing a feature or a non-trivial bug fix to sign a Contributor License Agreement. This agreement becomes the gate to being a contributor, which leaves me with the question, do we go through the process of getting this paperwork done for anyone who asks? Or do we have a bar to meet before we even consider this?

On one hand, if someone has a great feature idea, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pull in their work without making them jump through hoops? On the other hand, if we have a hundred people go through this paperwork process, but only one actually ends up contributing anything, what a waste of our time. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

NuGet, a package manager project I work on is currently following the latter approach as described in our guide to becoming a core contributor, but we’re open to refinements and improvements. I should point out that a hosted Mercurial solution does support the centralized committer model where we provide direct commit access. It just so happens that while some developers in the NuGet project have direct commit access, most don’t and shouldn’t make use of it per project policy as we’re still following a distributed model. We’re not letting the technical abilities/limitations of our source control system or project hosting define our collaboration model.

I know I’m late to the game when it comes to distributed source control, but it’s really striking to me how it’s turned the concept of committers on its head. In the centralized source control world, being a contributor was enforced via a technical gate, either you had commit access or you didn’t. With distributed version control it’s become more a matter of social contract and project policies.