What makes one OSS project's community better than the next? What are the things the biggest OSS projects do well, or not so well (think top 20 on GitHub).
In a word: <i>Humility.</i><p>The maintainers of LogStash, for example, have a philosophy that "If our users are confused, it is a bug. It is not that they are stupid."<p>Another good example is PHPUnit, whose maintainer unarguably has a much higher prestige in the PHP developer community than I do, yet responded to trolling by implementing the change I suggested and taking the time to hash and PGP sign all of the past releases.<p><a href="https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1334" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1334</a><p>The CodeIgniter maintainers responded to my gripes about their CI_Encrypt library by researching and writing a brand new library to fulfill that role.<p>And of course, we have some good bad examples.<p>OpenCart:<p><a href="https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1534" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1534</a><p><a href="https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1594" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1594</a><p>Mojolicious:<p><a href="https://github.com/kraih/mojo/issues/656" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kraih/mojo/issues/656</a><p>Etcetera. Humble lead developers are less caustic and create less barriers for entry. This encourages people to contribute and allows a community to flourish.