The exponential curve behind open source backlogs
by armanckeser on 4/14/2026, 11:37:56 AM
https://armanckeser.com/writing/jellyfin-flow
Comments
by: spenrose
Fantastic piece: shows how fundamental dynamics (queuing) generate practical problems AND what to do about them. This essay is better than 95% of tech blog posts I read via HN. Kudos!<p>An original sin of Free Software which carried through to Open Source and infects HN via its many Open Source believers is a reluctance to take project management seriously. OP shows that Jellyfin’s dictat... er, <i>maintainer</i> is not effectively managing the project. Open Source has no adequate answers (“fork” is not adequate).
4/14/2026, 1:50:20 PM
by: erikerikson
Have you paid?<p>I too have been frustrated by the way open source works. Maintainers are frequently people in high demand and open source rarely pays commensurate.<p>So too have I given my work away and been met with entitled demands for service and time. I enjoyed writing the code and making something useful. I enjoyed the validation of that belief based on use but that doesn't feed the family or further my actual goals in life.
4/14/2026, 4:25:34 PM
by: NortySpock
First, I think sorting PRs by "recently updated" can be a good proxy for "does anyone care about this PR"... If it's being bumped and reviewed, it is.<p>But also definitely start setting up linting rules / labels to indicate how healthy or close something is to being merged.<p>The goal is to limit work-in-progress, and focus on getting PRs that are easy to merge over the finish line.<p>Edit: and yeah, a weekly review cadence goes a long way to triage tickets and PRs and get some initial feedback to developers. I also like the "next review on this date" proposal to push certain problematic PRs to a slower cadence so they're not occupying too much bandwidth.
4/14/2026, 3:47:04 PM
by: dvh
You need to go back to the roots of open source. Fork it, merge your two changes, remove 90% of code you don't need, rename it, write article about speed up in the new successor vs the old thing.
4/14/2026, 1:15:54 PM
by: lstolcman
I read about similar issue today in another context, in a thread about introducing AI code review in OpenWrt [0]. The idea came from the fact that the project has too few maintainers compared to the number of incoming patches.<p>Automated code review is supposed to help catch the most trivial and basic mistakes (which, as the author claims, are often repetitive), and also speed up feedback. Ultimately, this should help push issues forward and let maintainers focus on harder problems like architectural issues, which needs deep knowledge, and AI can't solve this part yet.<p>On the other hand, there are comments opposing the policies of AI companies, complaining about pointless and nit-picky-annoying code review comments, that don't add much, and raising the concern that AI reviews are treated as checklist for getting things merged; which can be frustrating regarding to the amount of bot comments. The suggested mitigation would be to explicitly note, that the AI code review is only a suggestion of changes. [1]<p>In the end, I think accepting AI in a way similar to the rules introduced in Linux (i.e., you can make your life easier, but you still have to understand the code) makes sense, given the limited code review capacity, compared to the volume of incoming contributions - which is also referred in a mailing list thread I'm referring to [2]<p>[0] <a href="http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2026-April/044693.html" rel="nofollow">http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2026-April/...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2026-April/044704.html" rel="nofollow">http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2026-April/...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2026-April/044699.html" rel="nofollow">http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2026-April/...</a>
4/14/2026, 2:00:22 PM
by: PaulKeeble
When it comes to open source projects before you do any work go and look at the merge requests/PRs and look at who is getting them resolved and if lots of them are seemingly stuck. Some projects just don't take PRs from unknown people and they don't invite contributors onto their team, those projects with one maintainer and little community collaboration aren't worth writing code for.<p>There is a constraint still but a project like the Linux kernal has put a lot of layers of review and testing and merging between the source of truth and the underlying contributions. Having a number of leutenents that deal with subsections of the system that test merges and review the contributions is necessary for a project to grow.
4/14/2026, 3:25:53 PM
by: mkj
Looking at the PR discussed, it's 34 commits! I'd probably ignore that too as a maintainer. The PR description isn't particularly motivating, "Cleans up the implementation", "see #6735 for the actual motivation".
4/14/2026, 3:38:33 PM
by: pessimizer
The basic problem is that these projects need democratic governance, not dictators. If you do the thing that lawyers always tell us not to do and compare code to law, you'll see how inadequate a king alone is to maintain all the law of a kingdom. He does not have time to approve everything. He does not have time to even be aware of everything. He has no easy way to figure out what his subjects want.<p>The problem is that we haven't created theory and tools for online governance. We just went with dictatorship. If using a piece of software automatically made me part of the <i>community</i> of that piece of software, we'd have something. Only to the extent that I felt like participating of course, but if software would aid that, in a uniform manner, across projects, that would be an achievement.<p>The code has been treated as the end-all be-all, but projects get rewritten. The important part is the institution. We've been regularly concentrating that institution into one unpaid or poorly paid guy, until it gets handed to some corporate vulture who thinks of the users as prey.<p>The irony of this situation is that a backlog of PRs means that you have a <i>overwhelming surplus of people willing to do free work.</i> Seeing it as a problem is some sort of ideological failure. We just hate democracy and losing control so much that we're willing to starve surrounded by food.
4/14/2026, 4:04:22 PM
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4/14/2026, 2:23:16 PM
by: esafak
When it comes to open source software I would:<p>1. Modularize the code to allow plugins so users can start using them immediately, and you can vet them at your own pace. 2. Make tests robust and easy to run (one command to run, at most one to setup) so you don't have to pore over their code to have some confidence that it works.
4/14/2026, 2:51:15 PM