Stephen Covey describes stages of maturity as dependence, independence and interdependence. Mature FOSS contributors/projects do the latter.
miniblog.
Related Posts
Compiler error messages is such a deep topic. Even in rustc, a mature compiler that invests effort in diagnostic quality, I find interesting issues every few months.
(The majority have been fixed pretty quickly, so it's really rewarding to file issues.)
It feels like a mature software project is one where bugs require multiple commits to fix.
You've hammered out the basic issues, so the remaining issues are often weird interactions between components.
It's weird that GitHub shows time since the last commit, but not time since the first commit. It's a nice way of seeing how mature a project is.