Chris Siebenmann recently wrote a post about Golang where he said: “Go is Google’s language, not the community’s.” The community makes contributions — sometimes important ones — but does not set the direction. We frequently use “community project” to mean two separate ideas: a corporate-lead project that accept community input and a project (that may have corporate backing) lead by the community.

Neither one is particularly better or worse, so long as we’re honest about kind of project we’re running. Community-contributed projects are likely to drive away some contributors, who don’t feel like they have an ownership stake in the project. Chris mentions that Go’s governance has this effect on him. And that’s okay if you’re making that decision on your project intentionally.

Some community-contributed projects would probably welcome being community-led, or at least somewhere closer to that. But technical or governance barriers may inadvertently make it too difficult for would-be contributors to ramp up. This is one area where I don’t think GitHub’s position as the dominant code hosting platform gets enough credit. By having a single account and consistent interface across many unrelated projects, it becomes much easier for someone to progress from being a bug filer to making small contributions to becoming (if the project allows it) a key contributor.