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This is pretty discouraging honestly, from the perspective of what the article calls a “fan”. I like to make small contributions to projects I use when I can, b
by sgillen 6y ago
This is pretty discouraging honestly, from the perspective of what the article calls a “fan”. I like to make small contributions to projects I use when I can, but I don’t become a core dev on any of them.
Is it really not worth the maintainers time to merge a bug fix or look at an issue I opened? Are they just doing it as “fan service”?
Genuinely, does this type of “participation” really waste more time than it saves on the whole?
That seems to be the implication of the article. I wonder if any open source maintainers can chime in.
- titanomachy 6y agoThe article doesn’t say large fan bases are useless, just that managing them requires a different skill set (and possibly personality type) than conventional team management or pure dev work.
- maxbrunsfeld 6y agoI think there's a lot of open-source projects that are somewhere in between the two extremes presented in the article (communities vs makers-and-fans). As a maintainer of a project with more moderate user base, it's a mix. I have a lot of interactions with contributors that are very rewarding to me, and also add genuine technical value. On the other hand, there are also a lot of contributions that are more of like "support requests", where I feel like I need to respond to them because it's my responsibility. I would guess that the bigger a project's user base gets, the greater the proportion of interactions that are more like makers-and-fans.