GitHub Is Not Your Sweatshop

GitHub is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

That people will enthusiastically give up their free time and intellectual property for nothing more than fun and maybe community recognition means that maybe the world isn’t as bad as the newspapers would have you believe.

The quality of output on GitHub is another surprising thing: maybe it’s a peer recognition thing, but there must be something about putting all the code out there that makes people think twice about dodgy code standards:

However…

I think there need to be some basic rules should you decide that you want to interact with someone’s GitHub project.

I’m not talking about developers who want to fork a project for their own means, that’s a solved problem.

I’m talking about the other people.

The ones that probably don’t have a GitHub account.
That found your code on Google.

That don’t really care how it works, or why it works.
That want to shoehorn it into their project to save themselves some thinking time.

This list is for you:

• DO remember that you get what you pay for. You didn’t pay anything, so don’t expect ANYTHING. Whatever you do get is a bonus.
• DO attempt to understand the code before you complain that it doesn’t work. It does work, it just doesn’t work for you. You can bet the code got checked and double checked before the first upload to GitHub – developers have “huge and fragile egos” – and a quick check at the number of downloads or forks will confirm that it must be you.
• DON’T treat the contributors as an extension of your development team. They probably do this in their spare time, so if you want to ask them something, you need to be very, very specific. You need to pique their curiosity, otherwise you’re going to get ignored.
• If you’re gathering code for your own commercial project, DO your research about the contributor before you make contact. If the code has been submitted by a company that specialises in the same area you do, or in the area you want help with, is it really likely that they are going to offer you advice for free? You’re more likely to find success by approaching them with a commercial project-sharing offer. If it’s an individual, consider how important the code and their expertise could be to your project. Make contact with them to find out how busy they are, and how willing they might be to help. Consider paying them.

Respect

Finally, DO have respect. People gave up their time to make a genuinely positive difference to the world by contributing their brain-cycles for free. If you’re going to just rock up and walk off with their output, don’t complain when it doesn’t do exactly what you want it to do.

If you’re going to just rock up, spend 5 mins with the code, declare “it doesn’t work” and expect the contributor to help you, I think you might be disappointed.

Rant over. Sorry.