I was commenting to a colleague the other day how amazed I was at the sheer quantity of github "issues" that I was seeing posted to a few popular open source repositories that were rants about why feature X wasn't available yet or a priority yet, or demanding that someone walk them through some installation issue because the poster couldn't understand (or didn't read) the README. None of the people that posted this stuff appeared to have ever contributed to that project (or any project), but thought they were entitled to what were essentially support requests or re-tasking of developers to meet their demanded schedule.

Our discussion eventually thought it was due to two things: 1) Github, while making the open source process visible and easy to use for many, also makes the process pretty open and barrier free to people who may not yet have the technical (or social) ability to meaningfully contribute to a project; what once would have required posting to a dev mailing list is now just a couple of clicks; and 2) a cultural mindset that some people seem to have that free or open source software is some kind of entitlement (or at least due to communication issues, and the ambiguity of the written word on the Internet that is how I thought it came off). I think the sheer volume of freely available amazing software has caused some to forget the whole reason we have this stuff is someone somewhere spent a lot of time working on it and then decided to give it away.

I don't know if this is really a javascript thing, but I think it manifests itself there more than others simply because javascript might be the first place a lot of people start in their career/learning.

mi100hael

I agree 100%. GitHub muddles the contribution process and support process. Couple that with the irony of developing free software using a bunch of proprietary, commercial tools, and I much prefer the tried & true IRC/mailing list approach to the trendy Slack/GitHub stack.

I think a large part of the problem is that the current generation of new developers is completely conditioned by Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc to relinquish control of their data rather than deal with the slightest inconvenience of configuring an IRC client or whatever else it may be.

petetnt

Creating barriers or deliberately keeping them up is never the solution. Every time you create more obstacles, you'll end up losing a future contributor or two. Contributors that might end up solving larger future problems or ones that end up owning the whole project after you have moved on. It's not about the slightest inconvenience and obviously you might get slightly larger signal-to-noise ratio but when was the last time keeping into your own small bubble paid off? Most likely never.

At the Brackets project (https://github.com/adobe/brackets) we have seen lots of new active contributors that started from none to giving steady stream of PRs and the effort needed for that was just a slight push to the right direction.