Issues are fine. You don't need to tackle them, they're not an obligation - you don't have a contract with your users saying you'll fix their issues. If that's

Issues are fine. You don't need to tackle them, they're not an obligation - you don't have a contract with your users saying you'll fix their issues. If that's something you want, then say so in your README; corps will always be happy to pay for high quality code and support. Most people freaking out about being burned out by their open source stuff are generally people who don't open source their stuff. Most open source projects, even very good ones, get very little traffic therefore very few issues. If you can't deal with the occasional email once every few months, turn notifications off. > But 'screw you'? Not classy. Saying "Write a test" is essentially saying "screw you". Github has been a blessing, in that it greatly lowered the barrier of entry in filing an issue with a project. It's a blessing for users and it's also a blessing for maintainers if you know how to deal with the influx of issues. Increasing the barrier of entry again is not the solution. When I myself find bugs I'll certainly PR a fix if I'm able to (and have the time); but I often can't. Most of the time, because the development environment is unknown to me and I have no way to even run the tests (if there are any), let alone write one. So asking someone to get involved and up to speed with a project to the point that they're able to do this, before they can even file an issue with a screenshot that says "the padding looks bad on firefox", that's nonsense. It's even more nonsense when this is just a pet project of yours that most people will not care about. IMHO, "this is stuff we do give away for free" is an excuse that's too often passed around. It is always true that projects you push to Github for free come with no obligation to care about it, its issues or the pings and cries for help from your desperate potential users. However, you lose the ability to say you're a good open source citizen and you're "giving things away". A real-world parallel I can make is to the people giving their old/smelly/crappy/torn/bad clothes to charity shops and feeling ever so good about themselves. It's cool you have good intentions, but it's not charity if it ends up in the bin anyway. Disclaimer: 99% of my work is open source and ends up on Github. A bunch of it sucks and when issues come up, I ignore them or write a 10-second close-reply. A bunch of it is good and I actually care about; and if I care about it, I'm not going to turn off issues just to make myself feel better about having an already-perfect project.