It's kind of unfortunate because existing developers have the privilege of experience with the systems and where they're going that external contributors simply don't have, and it will take a non-trivial amount time for interested parties to develop that knowledge.

At the same time, it is an active project with active development that are informed by goals and processes not all of which are open. And really, while the development has been "in the open", it hasn't engaged the public until now. To that end, it's not possible to engage in a "bazaar" approach off the bat, whether or not that's a goal of the project.

Having been active in Go development and seeing some of the issues there, I understand what you mean. I don't think we state anywhere "this is clearly a cathedral model of development", but I think we're pretty clear on it:

* We have a section of documentation on project governance https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance

* We have a section of documentation detailing different kinds of contributors, acknowledging that there are kinds of contributors with special powers, and also reserving the right to revoke contribution privileges in some cases: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/community/contrib...

To the extent that you can look at these as a set of policies, follow all the policies, submit a change, and have that change rejected, I think that is unfortunate. I think this is much less likely if you first engage with the stakeholders, and having opened up mailing lists, we've made it simpler to do that.

However, the "bazaar" is also a bit of a myth in this regard. I'm not really aware of any open source projects where I can go submit a PR without talking to anybody and have the expectation that it'll be merged without discussion. I can fork the repo, but that's also already the case with Fuchsia.

> the fact they are only now taking potential contributions

We were honest about this too, and our documentation used to explicitly say that we did not accept external contributions.

user:	dhodell
created:	April 3, 2017
karma:	132