Big issue to Open Source. I am Important.

Linux Haters and others miss this issue because it makes them kinda non important. Since most of there arguments is that they are important.

Open Source projects really are the other way over. Most people expect programs to serve them. For successful open source the reverse has to be true you serve the open source program you got it for free the way you pay for it and get new features is treat it right and give back. You serve the Open Source project interest is a entity in its own right.

Upstream and Downstream is also important. Big problems come from Downstream thinking they are more important than upstream. Classic case of this is Ubuntu Wiki mind you Ubuntu is not they only one making this mistake. Most documentation in there really should not be there instead should be split up and stored at each of the projects they are talking about. One of the least commodity in the open source world is document writers. Clustering them at the upstream projects would get the most document writers in the one place to create documentation for everyone. This is for the good of the upstream projects.

So by running parallel wiki's to upstream you starve upstream of writers so harming the open source project you are depending on.

Next is patching issue been common with a lot of distributions history and now. "We are downstream we patch its our right" This over importance and forgetting about the entity the project is.

Ok how is this good for upstream its not good for upstream. Its also extremely bad for downstream since is means more hours work maintaining stuff.

If upstream has bad maintainers bugs will keep on coming. Forking is made out as a bad thing. Lot of project in the history of open source has forking been used to remove bad maintainers. Forking has one clear advantage for upstream. Number one the fork it self becomes a upstream number 2 since the fork and the parent don't have the same name bug reporting systems are not a nightmare.

Now patching does not have to be forbin. Instead all patching should be done in cooperation with the upstream project so preventing where able giving the upstream project a bad name when its not deserved.

Funny enough forking a project due to poor maintainer long term ends up less work. Reason the poorly maintained project most people will leave.

The most important question for a distribution maintainer should will my actions harm the upstream project. If so don't do.

Releasing beta versions to everyone as many distributions has been gulity of does not do upstream projects good. Beta versions are for testers ok there are acceptations like wine were the project prefers before reporting bugs the beta version is used. This is a upstream choice. Big problems are coming from downstream parts like distribution maintainers not following the upstream choice.

If maintainers were respectful of upstream and they want to do something against or without the advice of upstream the system to deal with it exists. Its forking. New name/version so the mistakes are clearly traceable to the maintainers head.

Big thing here is accountability. Failure to use forking makes seeing that the upstream project is not guilty of the problem so get blamed for problems they did not cause. So upstream gets flooded with bugs they should never have seen so start hating the distributions where these problems are coming from so become less responsive.