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Most open source maintainers are developers who work full time - I am a maintainer of a major project, but there are times my activity is light, such as the pas

by Bahamut 10y ago

Most open source maintainers are developers who work full time - I am a maintainer of a major project, but there are times my activity is light, such as the past two months. In that time, I travelled to Salt Lake City, Reno, Portland, San Diego, Seattle, and now in route to Chicago - I ran a half and full marathon in that time, and about to run another half tomorrow morning. I am currently in crunch time at my current job for the past two weeks, and I am about to leave for a well earned 2 1/2 week vacation to England, France, Switzerland, and Italy. I don't plan on coding much, if at all, while in Europe. I very much enjoy working on open source, and have implemented some tricky but highly useful features over the past almost 1 1/2 years of my stewardship that users greatly appreciate. However, I also have a rich life outside of development as well, and I believe that each persons' choices with how they choose to use their time should be respected. If you are not paying or contributing your own time feature developing or assisting maintainance, complaining about maintainer absence is really poor. We are not on demand tech support.

StevePerkins 10y ago
In the Java world, most major open source projects are sponsored by companies. Someone(s) is getting paid to maintain and evolve that thing as part of their job. Companies might do this to drive traffic toward the commercial "enterprise" version, for which they charge money. More commonly though, it's just something that they use internally... and they open it up for marketing/prestige/recruitment purposes. In most other language ecosystems, most open source projects tend to be driven by individuals as unpaid side projects. That's great in a certain sense, and a large part of the reason why Java is less "cool" among young people who are eager to plant their own flag on an open source thing. But sadly, it's just really difficult to keep a major side project alive and healthy over the long-term without sponsorship. So those ecosystems tend to be chaotic and flaky.
- n0us 10y ago
  Couldn't have said it better. In the webdev world this turns into a problem because I need to rely on these oss projects and while some of them might be high quality, there is a significant overhead involved in determining which ones are worth using and which ones I can rely on. For personal projects it's a not big deal but for work I want to be as efficient and reliable as possible and the chaotic/flaky ecosystem gets in the way. edit: fixed to *not a big deal

by Bahamut 10y ago

StevePerkins 10y ago

In the Java world, most major open source projects are sponsored by companies. Someone(s) is getting paid to maintain and evolve that thing as part of their job. Companies might do this to drive traffic toward the commercial "enterprise" version, for which they charge money. More commonly though, it's just something that they use internally... and they open it up for marketing/prestige/recruitment purposes. In most other language ecosystems, most open source projects tend to be driven by individuals as unpaid side projects. That's great in a certain sense, and a large part of the reason why Java is less "cool" among young people who are eager to plant their own flag on an open source thing. But sadly, it's just really difficult to keep a major side project alive and healthy over the long-term without sponsorship. So those ecosystems tend to be chaotic and flaky.

n0us 10y ago
Couldn't have said it better. In the webdev world this turns into a problem because I need to rely on these oss projects and while some of them might be high quality, there is a significant overhead involved in determining which ones are worth using and which ones I can rely on. For personal projects it's a not big deal but for work I want to be as efficient and reliable as possible and the chaotic/flaky ecosystem gets in the way. edit: fixed to *not a big deal