You’re under no obligation to offer support for your projects, but vice versa is also true: no one’s under any obligation to use them. I’ve maintained a lot of

You’re under no obligation to offer support for your projects, but vice versa is also true: no one’s under any obligation to use them. I’ve maintained a lot of (reasonably popular) open source projects, and the ones I supported I do so because I wanted people to use them. Offering a quality product is part of that, and I was willing to dedicate my time and effort to it because I wanted that success from it. The difficulty with open source is not so much in doing this, but in scaling it. Unlike commercial (i.e. paid) projects, there’s no built-in incentive that really scales with usage. Once you get past the point of “I made something people want to use”, it easily becomes a victim of its own success, and it can become overwhelming to deal with. Your best hopes are either that you find a business model (if you even want to!) or find people willing to help in the community. But nothing stops you from creating projects that you don’t want to support. I throw tonnes of code out there (particularly since writing it isn’t my primary job anymore) with fairly explicit disclaimers that I’m not going to support it, and I think the article’s advice on this is pretty good. You need to be willing to say no sometimes. I find it’s best to know which sort of project you’re creating going into it, and try to communicate this clearly to your users but also to yourself.