There are many examples in daily life of things that we do which are hurting us but for which the momentary pleasure outweighs the long term pain. Just to be cl

There are many examples in daily life of things that we do which are hurting us but for which the momentary pleasure outweighs the long term pain. Just to be clear, I'm not saying OSS maintaining is addictive, but it comes with costs and those costs don't go away just because you want to back away from the project. At some point you have to declare a sort of public bankruptcy, as has been done here -- otherwise the costs continue out forever. To be more explicit using a personal example -- as a very small time OSS maintainer, I've had many people email asking me how to do something with my project. I put it out there, I would like to help them, but every bit of time I give them is time I'm not putting elsewhere. If I decline to help them it's natural to feel bad about it, especially when some people are less than polite about things. For larger projects you add in the responsibility you feel to contributors -- someone has written a PR and would like you to merge it. Often that involves quite a lot of time. Users file issues against you, or try to make your software work in environments it's not designed for, or just don't understand how it works. Very rarely does this lead to income -- in my case I wrote software as part of my job that I was able to open source. Great! But without prioritization from the company, it falls on me to manage these things, even if that's no longer my job or if I move on from the company. And my case is a good one -- many OSS maintainers will never see a dime for their work.