State of JavaFX anti-contributor affairs

[sghpjuikit]

I'm reposting here my original comment from a PR (openjdk/jfx#125) on JFX project (https://github.com/openjdk/jfx), where my comments were unceremoniously deleted (I say censored) by Oracle and I was required to sign bunch of things I will not sign in order to have the comments restores. Upon this I have written a complaint comment in the PR, which surprise: was censored (ehm, deleted). So here it is:

[sghpjuikit]

I'm writing this from years long frustration with the way JavaFX has been and still is being handled.

It is disheartening to see PR's like this to go stale. I see this happen again again in JavaFX - any bigger PR, particularly those related to VirtualFlow, virtualized controls and listeners go stale. Every single time. I thought someone should say a word or two.

It is good to have a certain quality standard for the code from contributors, but I'm noticing a pattern, where there is either an onslaught of demotivating responses from maintainers towards PR owners, usually subtle, but demotivating as an (in my opinion) ridiculous amount of demand for effort is pertained in them. Or there is no help from the maintainers, causing the owner to lose interest, probably due to time constraints and having blown too much effort on the issue with no hope of it going anywhere. This are the usual suspects:

• write complete tests for each little thing that can be useful
• this is good but it can be better - rework it
• you did not do enough research
• go sign bunch of weird stuff so we do not ignore you

Why can not the maintainers join efforts with the contributors, lead them towards successful merge and help grow the community? And finish valuable PRs? Instead contributors are expected to provide 100%, or even 120% solution or go home. This alienates like 99% of contribution. This is not contributor friendly and a sole reason I have never contributed to this project (and believe me I would probably be the most active contributor!). I do not understand the OCA (https://www.computertrainingschools.com/oracle-certifications/oca/) thingy at all (and i will never submit my name or organization name to a company so I can contribute to an open source project). I do not understand why there is time to rename bunch of useless code to make the inclusive bunch happy (openjdk/jfx#368), but not enough time to fix 'remove throw UnsupportedException' bug people reported 3 years ago (https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=JDK-8261077), when it takes 10 seconds to fix. You got the priorities straight alright. It seems to me as if there is no interest on part of maintainers to see the PR's actually get merged. It is sad, very sad. Every PR older than few weeks is a testament to my words. The contributors do not follow up their PR's for a reason, did anyone in the jfx project ever think of that?

I find it extremely funny (and disturbing at the same time) that you are even bot-removing my suggestions and comments in PR's now, again because I haven't signed some cursed thing. What are you a GDPR company? I will NOT sign it, now stop wasting my time with notifications.
Oracle is literally removing my comments on an external site. I consider these actions those of a censorship. But whatever.

It seems like JavaFX is a cursed project, from inception. Script, then Java. Standalone, then JDK. Then opensource, but anti-contributor. Firing all evangelists. Abandon project (everybody knows Oracle abandoned it). Jars, then modules. Painful setup. Broken Gradle plugin. Forever private APIs. Simple bugs, unfixed for years. Et cetera. I think most of this curse is from the stiff corporate policies, that wont let it catch a breath (not that anyone cares about my opinion on the subject). The only people that can give needed life into the project are contributors and you make it very hard for them to feel motivated. This project needs massive contributions to stay alive (it is not even feature complete, requiring swing here and there). It is your job to enable people to do those contributions. Do something before even your most rabid fans leave. I just did.

TLDR: After having comments removed for not signing up to Oracle corporate policies, a fan, potential contributor and long time bug reporter decides to stop contributing, commenting PR's and reporting bugs.

PS: I don't care if this comment belongs here or not.

[sghpjuikit]

JavaFX team is doing everything they can to make themselves irrelevant

[Maran23]

Hey. The OCA gives Oracle and the contributor joint copyright interests in the code. The contributor retains copyrights while also granting those rights to Oracle as the project sponsor. You only need to sign the OCA once to cover all changes that you might contribute to any Oracle-sponsored open-source project.

That said, all big companies have this kind of things. In my company, the code I wrote for most of the project does belong to the customer. You basically just need to sign this out, that's it: https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oca-405177.pdf

While I kind of understand what you mentioned, this is a bit more difficult. I also wan't to see his PR (openjdk/jfx#125) merged back. But it is still mandatory to write tests for your changes. The test infrastructure is quite good and should help you on your way. Unfortunately, the author of the PR didn't added some. Also, he made unnecessary changes, making the review much harder. It would be better do make one PR just for this issue, and fixing other issues in a new PR with a new ticket.

[sghpjuikit]

Hey...

Thank you for the comment. I do understand somewhat the reasoning, but I disagree OCA belongs in the open-cource space. Anyway, the OCA is only a lesser part of the actual problem that is behind the lack of contributions from community and lack of drive to finish the little contributions there are. Plus, the straw that broke the camel's back for me was the fact that someone decided to start erasing user's comments in PRs of JFX project. I dont think it should be allowed to change comment removal policy retroactively and even if, not for comments on external site - I do not believe my comments on Github for code in JFX PR's qualify as belonging to JFX project (as they claim, per All comments and discussions in the OpenJDK Community must be made available under the OpenJDK Terms of Use.) - my comments are my own! Anyway these actions show exactly how much the organization behind JFX cares about contributions.

[Maran23]

Well, can't really tell if something like the OCA is really needed, or that might be kind of necessary to protect against lawsuits or something.
About the comment: I don't know the reason for that as well - maybe kind of spam protection, so you need to sign the OCA before commenting. But I don't know.