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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.

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

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.