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I predict that the problem of overburdened open source maintainers will be solved by adjusting expectations, rather than new funding or new business models. Op

I predict that the problem of overburdened open source maintainers will be solved by adjusting expectations, rather than new funding or new business models. Open Source maintainers owe nothing to non-paying users. The norm should be that only those that pay get support.

pabs3 6y ago
Requiring payment for support would mean that poor people who switch to open source are going to have a bad time. A better option would be to create a community of users and contributors that are willing to support each other and improve the project at the same time. The new GitHub discussions feature can help facilitate creating such a community for those projects that use GitHub.
- rectang 6y ago
  How do you differentiate leechers from contributors? "Github discussions" looks to me like Github discovering user forums. It's not an innovation — user forums have been around for decades. The expectation that maintainers will provide unlimited support to poor people illustrates exactly why maintainers burn out. Maintainers don't owe poor people anything, any more than they owe corporations anything.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    The "leechers" are part of the ecosystem of the project too, putting down people who haven't yet started to contribute is a sure way to sour your project in their minds and prevent them from ever trying to answer other folks support questions, let alone contribute code to the project. So don't try to divide the community like that, instead treat everyone as future contributors and create spaces for them to start contributing in their preferred way, one step at a time.
    - rectang 6y ago
      What has become clear over time is that most users don't contribute meaningfully to open source projects. The burden falls almost entirely on core maintainers. From the article: > But, with the exception of some big projects—like Linux—the labor involved isn't particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people. Offering unlimited free support is guaranteeing that either the project will fail when the core maintainers burn out, or that the core maintainers will live in perpetual misery.
      - pabs3 6y ago
        Don't offer unlimited free support, create a space where users can and do help out answering support questions and turning them into well-researched actionable bug reports, which can be turned into well-written pull requests, which turn into knowledgable and ongoing codebase contributors. Its (one of) the marketing funnel but for open source contribution.
        rectang 6y ago
        Community development is a lot of work. I was very active in the Apache Incubator for several years, so I've seen many projects build exactly what you're talking about. Once the community exists, it doesn't get easier. Core maintainers now have more to do: reviewing contributions, steering architectural discussions, teeing up starter issues, nurturing prospects, resolving personality conflicts... It's not impossible to do that kind of work as a hobbyist, but it's more sustainable when there is somebody getting a steady salary to do it. But not everybody enjoys such tasks, and not every open source project needs to be able to be economically viable. All of this leads to the kind of burnout described in the article. And what makes it worse is the guilt tripping that if they don't either respond to every support request (reasonable or unreasonable) or build a community that does, they are not living up to their supposed obligations as open source authors.

pabs3 6y ago

Requiring payment for support would mean that poor people who switch to open source are going to have a bad time. A better option would be to create a community of users and contributors that are willing to support each other and improve the project at the same time. The new GitHub discussions feature can help facilitate creating such a community for those projects that use GitHub.

rectang 6y ago
How do you differentiate leechers from contributors? "Github discussions" looks to me like Github discovering user forums. It's not an innovation — user forums have been around for decades. The expectation that maintainers will provide unlimited support to poor people illustrates exactly why maintainers burn out. Maintainers don't owe poor people anything, any more than they owe corporations anything.
- pabs3 6y ago
  The "leechers" are part of the ecosystem of the project too, putting down people who haven't yet started to contribute is a sure way to sour your project in their minds and prevent them from ever trying to answer other folks support questions, let alone contribute code to the project. So don't try to divide the community like that, instead treat everyone as future contributors and create spaces for them to start contributing in their preferred way, one step at a time.
  - rectang 6y ago
    What has become clear over time is that most users don't contribute meaningfully to open source projects. The burden falls almost entirely on core maintainers. From the article: > But, with the exception of some big projects—like Linux—the labor involved isn't particularly communal. Most are like Bootstrap, where the majority of the work landed on a tiny team of people. Offering unlimited free support is guaranteeing that either the project will fail when the core maintainers burn out, or that the core maintainers will live in perpetual misery.
    - pabs3 6y ago
      Don't offer unlimited free support, create a space where users can and do help out answering support questions and turning them into well-researched actionable bug reports, which can be turned into well-written pull requests, which turn into knowledgable and ongoing codebase contributors. Its (one of) the marketing funnel but for open source contribution.
      - rectang 6y ago
        Community development is a lot of work. I was very active in the Apache Incubator for several years, so I've seen many projects build exactly what you're talking about. Once the community exists, it doesn't get easier. Core maintainers now have more to do: reviewing contributions, steering architectural discussions, teeing up starter issues, nurturing prospects, resolving personality conflicts... It's not impossible to do that kind of work as a hobbyist, but it's more sustainable when there is somebody getting a steady salary to do it. But not everybody enjoys such tasks, and not every open source project needs to be able to be economically viable. All of this leads to the kind of burnout described in the article. And what makes it worse is the guilt tripping that if they don't either respond to every support request (reasonable or unreasonable) or build a community that does, they are not living up to their supposed obligations as open source authors.