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I am starting to gestate a line of thought that is pondering what people think open source is for? E.g. from the article: > Once the first version exists and

I am starting to gestate a line of thought that is pondering what people think open source is for? E.g. from the article: > Once the first version exists and is found usable, the next step is to make it production ready. Why? Why does open source ever have to get to this stage at all? What are people's expectations? Is there a - potentially unconscious - expectation that all open source projects need to end up at the scale of linux or kubernetes or firefox or whatever? Why can't open source just be some twiddly little bit of fun that captures your imagination for a week or two, ends up on github and is then abandoned? Don't be so hard on yourselves. Create things for the joy of it.

vharuck 6y ago
Even when open-sourcing code for dull work problems, there are other things to offer besides a "production quality" library. Well-organized data files in a simple format could help people. I've snatched CSVs and JSON files from plenty of GitHub repos, even if I never use the repo's primary language. Saves me days of effort.
nineplay 6y ago
Part of what's been happening is that your open-source project is now part of your resume. If your name is on it, prospective employers are going to see it. If they see it and decide that there isn't sufficient error handling and too many edge cases are missed, they are going to hold that against you. It's a nutty situation we've gotten ourselves into.
willismichael 6y ago
Super vulnerable moment... My open source pet project is an audio plugin that I developed to use in my own music projects. For whatever reason, it has become popular among a certain niche of musicians, and now I get reports of a rare bug that blasts their headphones with a high decibel noise. It's super unnerving that it threatens to damage people's ears and equipment, and I still don't know enough about why it is happening in order to fix it, because I mostly just wrapped an existing library that I wanted to use.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  What about adding a warning message in the repo about that and asking for help with fixing it, and messaging the author of the wrapped lib and see if s/he has any ideas

vharuck 6y ago

Even when open-sourcing code for dull work problems, there are other things to offer besides a "production quality" library. Well-organized data files in a simple format could help people. I've snatched CSVs and JSON files from plenty of GitHub repos, even if I never use the repo's primary language. Saves me days of effort.

nineplay 6y ago

Part of what's been happening is that your open-source project is now part of your resume. If your name is on it, prospective employers are going to see it. If they see it and decide that there isn't sufficient error handling and too many edge cases are missed, they are going to hold that against you. It's a nutty situation we've gotten ourselves into.

willismichael 6y ago

Super vulnerable moment... My open source pet project is an audio plugin that I developed to use in my own music projects. For whatever reason, it has become popular among a certain niche of musicians, and now I get reports of a rare bug that blasts their headphones with a high decibel noise. It's super unnerving that it threatens to damage people's ears and equipment, and I still don't know enough about why it is happening in order to fix it, because I mostly just wrapped an existing library that I wanted to use.

cutemonster 6y ago
What about adding a warning message in the repo about that and asking for help with fixing it, and messaging the author of the wrapped lib and see if s/he has any ideas