When waiting for containers to build, or dependencies to download, my mind tends to wander. Yesterday it wandered to the plight of new contributors to modern free and open source projects; how much they must do before even attempting to collaborate! I started a Twitter poll, asking:

In order to participate in my open source project, you must have at minimum:

  • GitHub account
  • Google account
  • Slack account
  • signed CLA faxed to legal

The results were overwhelmingly in favor of requiring, at minimum, a GitHub account. This was the result I expected and certainly matches the anecdotal experiences I have had in recent years.

Unfortunately Twitter polls doesn’t allow multiple selections, as the reality for most people is that they need all of those, as Felix Frank alluded to in his response. When I think of the Jenkins project in particular, the “registration” process for new contributors might typically include:

  • A GitHub account.
  • An LDAP account to access Jira, Confluence, and Jenkins-on-Jenkins.
  • Connecting to IRC over Freenode, or a Gitter channel, depending on their focus area.
  • Subscription to a mailing list operated by Google Groups.
  • A Google account, if they want to participate in Hangouts or comment on Google Docs for various design documents.

As we have discussed newer services to incorporate into the community, I have grown weary over the number of logins we would expect each contributor to maintain.

I do not find myself reminiscing about the “good old days” of open source software, when things were more oriented around Bugzilla, CVS/Subversion, mailing lists, and IRC. There too we had account sprawl, it was perhaps a bit more non-obvious.

For the Jenkins project, the ideal world would mean that everything linked to our project’s LDAP infrastructure. With services like GitHub, That is obviously not possible, so the next best thing would be to use GitHub as the source of identity for all our other development services. Yes this couples us more closely with GitHub, but at least then we would stop pretending we’re not already intricately bound with GitHub as a service.

As many projects approach the summer, and Google Summer of Code kicks off, I encourage you to consider the number of accounts, repositories, groups, and other information a student or new-contributor must have in order to start adding to the community.

Our goal as stewards of such projects, should be to push that number towards zero.