Plotters

Recently, I’ve been introduced to a communication technique called mediation, which is a process often used to avoid lawsuits or to resolve conflicts within companies or families. Mediation is far better than other options in almost every single aspect and typically concludes with a win-win situation for all parties. This made me wonder whether some conflicts that happened in the free software community could have been avoided by utilizing this technique. Therefore, in this blog post, I will have closer look at mediation and its potential specifically regarding free software development. Even if you don’t plan on using mediation yourself, there is a lot to be learned from its concepts. ...

This is a short update on my recent post regarding the plotters crate. The maintainer of plotters did respond and fortunately all plans for forking the project are dropped. Now all repositories live in the plotters-rs organization and can be maintained by members of the community. Also, we’re looking for people who want to join the maintenance team (#345). What can we learn from this? Open source projects often start as personal projects. Sometimes they grow bigger over time. People start using and depending on the project, yet still only a single person has all the responsibility. Often unexpected things happen in our lives and projects are suddenly left unmaintained. ...

With over 1900 stars on GitHub and over 600.000 downloads per month, plotters is a very prominent and widely used Rust crate. By a huge margin it is the most used plotting library for Rust and covers a lot of different use-cases and back-ends. Yet, since roughly June 2021, almost 10 months ago, there hasn’t been any considerable activity on the main branch of the repository. At the same time, the community has been very active with 22 pull requests submitted since then, but none of them was reviewed or merged. Everything looks like the project was discontinued by its original creator. ...