Is it? Because there's an awful lot of base knowledge you need to understand any kind of OSS project. Can you explain what nginx does to someone who doesn't have a smart phone in any kind of meaningful way?
I have fifteen years of professional experience in software development and I didn't have the slightest clue what Veneur did from its description of "A distributed, fault-tolerant pipeline for observability data."
- Distributed - Got this one, but it's an adjective and doesn't mean much on its own.
- Fault-tolerant - Same.
- Pipeline - OK, great, totally meaningless noun. I guess stuff goes in it?
- Observability data - What the heck is observability data?
The scope of software development is so broad I think you could spend 100 years doing it and still not understand everything.
For example, _I_ know what observability data is, but I'd have a difficult time explaining the problem Redux tackles. If you've spent most of your time building user facing apps + web apps, how would you immediately understand a problem that someone working on large scale payment infrastructure has to solve?
> but I'd have a difficult time explaining the problem Redux tackles.
Do you think you couldn't understand a short description of the problem it tackles? Because if you could, then a short description in a readme would be valuable to you, and presumably the developers of the thing are able to explain the problem.
> Can you explain what nginx does to someone who doesn't
> have a smart phone in any kind of meaningful way?
Nginx was released in 2004 and the iPhone in 2007, so there's at least three years of proof that people without smartphones are still able to comprehend the purpose of a low-overhead HTTP server.
I didn't say you need to have a smartphone to get nginx. But someone who doesn't have a smartphone _now_ probably won't have any idea what the heck nginx does. And there's no way to Einstein it up and simplify it for them. You'd have to have a conversation.
