22 ms·

Sorry everybody, I failed with you

819 points by rinesh 5y ago

danbmil99 5y ago
This may be an obvious point but how can you say you failed when due to the fact that it's open source, anybody could check out the code and start supporting it?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  It's a common thing that a person imagines that he's responsible for something, can't keep up with it and finally feels himself failed, despite the fact that he wasn't really responsible in the first place. But it's still a source of misery and disappointment. I guess, it takes some time to understand what's the real responsibilities are and what's the imaginary responsibilities are. I agree that putting some code public with open source license does not bind author to any kind of responsibility and any continued work from him is just a charity to the world which he can stop providing at any time. If someone needs more guarantees, he can pay author or any other person (if code is open source) to provide those guarantees.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Humility and a strong sense of responsibility. And perhaps a little bit of false guilt, because they were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work. Perhaps they didn't estimate how time consuming it is to do this and feel guilty about that.
- progx 5y ago
  Most projects life because of huge support of few people. Pareto principle: 20% doing 80% of the work. And in my opinion on the most projects doing less then 10% more than 90% of the work. I have an OS project too, people want 1000 things, you can say "ok, make a PR and it will be integrated", many make a good PR, but that's it. Normally they do not make any support, they made feature they need, and they are gone when it is implemented. (not all, but most people) And when issues come up, because of the new feature, you can try to contact the creator, sometimes they help, sometimes not. But to contact them is work too. I am so happy that i found a "community manager" (after years and many try it), who does all the non-programming stuff and keep the project alive, cause my time is spare too.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  How about the insane entitlement that many devs have when it comes to open source? Getting bombarded with requests and angry emails from people who demand free support and bug fixes can burn anyone out. I think Github can be a positive force for change here. Redesign the UI to encourage donations, to encourage people to get involved in project work, to write less hostile issues, etc. If devs and designers can weaponize UI to create addiction, anxiety and FOMO, maybe we can use the same tools for good for once.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    This! Several of my github repos now have a disclaimer that says "if this doesn't work, don't send me insulting emails" It's especially bad if a big company links to you from their tutorial or in their add-on catalogue because then some of their customers will feel like your open source is part of the commercial offering that they bought. So then you're forced to do open source support for entitled aholes and someone else is cashing in on your work.
    - matkoniecz 5y ago
      > So then you're forced to do open source support for entitled aholes I had no opportunity to do it so far, but what is wrong with simply banning such people and closing tickets (with note that this issue is closed for rude behavior, not WONTFIXed)? I would certainly not feel forced to support them.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I wonder if this is a back-firing of the push for people to be "nice" and "professional". Open source maintainers used to have the sterotype of being rather harsh, and basically telling people to f off if they had stupid questions, didn't RTFM or didn't follow cultural norms. And dont get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with that, but maybe it was also that way for a reason.
    - fxtentacle 5y ago
      Agree. I'm active in some communities that are unfriendly if not outright hostile towards newcomers. I'm sure they lose a good amount of potential contributers that way. But the few newcomers that remain are highly motivated.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  Agreed, I would never write such a message. I have zero responsibility toward the users of my open source code, and my license does reflect that fact, unless they pay me. You're not satisfied with my open source work? Fork and fix it. You can't fix it? Hire somebody who can. You don't have the money to hire somebody who can? Then find other users, do a fundraiser and hire somebody who can fix the code. This culture of entitlement has gone way too far. Some companies make billions out of some open source project yet never contribute a cent or a man hour back yet you still find engineers from these companies complaining on github issues that bugs aren't resolved quickly enough. I say this, this might be the golden age of open source now but it's not going to last. Users have become too petty and entitled.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    What bugged me the most was how unwilling users were to dive into code to make small edits. They’d rather spend 3X the time filing issues, writing emails, and tweeting about it. And if you tell them, “maybe you should just not use this,” then you’re seen as unreasonable. The entitlement drove me out. The market is more about chasing shiny things than using things that are the best fit.
rvz 5y ago
> ...People want a lot of things from you and your project, big companies are using the project and need a lot of things as well from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most of the cases this is a talk in just one way. There are more people interest in have things from you, than help! And this crashed me If they are all users of your open source software and are begging for features for free, ignore them and focus on yourself. This is why many developers always prioritise paid support or sponsors and the choice of license is also very important. It's really simple, either the user does the work and contributes the fixes for free (depending on the license) or the user pays for the maintainer to prioritise the work at a cost. Either way, I will never do free open source work on someone else's deadline and will always do it in my own time. Unless you're willing to pay me to add a feature or support.
- dgb23 5y ago
  We don't know how much pay/sponsorship was the issue here. It seems to me that the maintainer was simply overworked and slept very, very little. This is bearable for a certain amount of time but after that one really has to look after themselves, regardless of financial interests or a crash is inevitable.
  - rvz 5y ago
    True, burnout is inevitable with a single developer. That's why paid support or sponsorship is used to hire more developers / contributors to reduce the risk of the project stagnating due to one developer burning out. Either way, no developer wants to do free work on someone else's deadline and it is always done in their own time, unless they want to pay for the effort.
  - chii 5y ago
    > overworked and slept very, very little i would say overwork and no/low pay are the same thing. If you have a large amount of work being demanded of you by users/companies, then it's time to charge money for the time that would've taken. The charge should be big enough to replace your day job. If it's not, then don't do it, except for any fun bits that you would've already done.
progx 5y ago
But what did you change, so that you have now time for the project?
- imhoguy 5y ago
  Recharged? With burnout one may have abundance of time on the clock, but no mental time for anything.
  - progx 5y ago
    But what will you (or he) do to prevent that it happen again?
intricatedetail 5y ago
That's the dark side of open source. Companies think these projects grow on trees and they use them without paying anything. We need law changes to ensure that open source can be sustainable and companies pay the fair share of revenue they make by using it.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  How do you estimate a share? What's the share of libc in Google business? What's the share of openssl? What's the share of ncurses?
  - progx 5y ago
    libc used in Android. openssl -> view boringSSL - BoringSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that is designed to meet Google's needs Nobody says that one company has to support every project and google supports many open source projects.
    - ivanbakel 5y ago
      But how would you estimate the contribution that libc has to Android? Is libc entitled to 10% of Android's revenue? 20%? 100%, since it is a vital component? This is what the GP was asking.
      - progx 5y ago
        Only google can answer that. But i think we can not say one lib make x%, it are all the libs and tools that are necessary. We don't now what e.g. google search uses under the hood, but all are needed so google can make only $1.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  > We need law changes to ensure that open source can be sustainable and companies pay the fair share of revenue they make by using it. We don't need more laws. There is something called a License Agreement. However if you publish your stuff on GPL and other permissive licenses you can't really complain about Amazon, Google and Microsoft making millions on your code while you beg for donations on your Github page.
radarsat1 5y ago
Of course it's terrible to become burnt out and it feels awful not having enough time to work on an open source project that you love. But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source project maintainers to feel free to let projects go? I don't mean to let them die, I mean, to find like-minded individuals to which you can defer some or all of the work? I realize that as the original author one feels a sense of ownership, but if you want it to continue, and you don't have the time, there is nothing wrong with putting out a call for someone to take over maintainership. Most projects that I've maintained have been my own work but I've also taken over maintainership from someone on a popular project, and it was a great experience. I got to work with a good code base, add my own ideas, offer some direction, and I learned a lot about maintaining code for longevity, integrating community contributions, and I cared about it probably more than I have for much of my own work, because I felt that I owed it to the original author to do a good job. Now, several years later, I do not use it myself as much, and I am perfectly ready to find a new maintainer for it, should someone appropriate come along. (That hasn't happened but the project no longer takes a lot of my time. since new solutions have come along, so it's fine. If it did take more time, it would mean there were more users, and therefore probably there would be more interested parties in taking over maintainership.) I encourage authors and maintainers who are feeling they are reaching this burnout stage to feel more comfortable putting out requests for help, it can be a good experience and even encourage community building around your work. You don't have to be a BDFL, you can be a temporary one.
- robin_reala 5y ago
  I think part of the worry of handing projects over stems from a couple of fairly high-profile events when projects were handed over to theoretically trust-worthy people who went rogue and used them as a platform for malware or spear phishing. Suddenly, even just relinquishing control can be a bad thing for the community.
  - antran22 5y ago
    The thing is, if the new project maintainers go against the community, but the community really need to use it, the community will just fork out a new path and move on. If the project is really open source.
Johnyma22 5y ago
My technique to avoid burn out is to hack for X duration then take Y time off and let the community fill in the gaps. I'm currently on a 6 month hiatus from OSS, no one has notified me of any fires so I think everything is just fine without me which is how it should be.
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  OSS like the audio?
fock 5y ago
and of course: it's javascript! because literally every other community would have no problem if their doc-generator got unmaintained, because it would probably run for another ten years...
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  There's really something to be said for software that is so ruthlessly simple it runs forever without maintenance. Like most of what DJB has written: djbdns still works after all these years... And of course Knuth's TeX. Maybe people shouldn't start software projects if there isn't a "can leave it here unmaintained" milestone within sight.
  - throw_m239339 5y ago
    > Maybe people shouldn't start software projects if there isn't a "can leave it here unmaintained" milestone within sight. It's because these projects have tons of dependencies and moving parts which tend to break themselves (often for very little reasons) so of course it's going to affect upstream. The software you listed are usually mostly self-contained or rely on stable projects. There is no such thing as "stability" in the Node.js ecosystem (which isn't javascript itself).
    - fxtentacle 5y ago
      I think you just said exactly what the parent comment meant. Nodejs is the new Java jar dependency hell. Maybe package the entire project into a docker container so that people can download and run the pile of dependencies in one step.
      - progx 5y ago
        `entire project into a docker container `, like Linux Flatpak. It is not a nodejs specific problem, every software with dependencies has it. (some more, some less)
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
superasn 5y ago
I don't say for this project but if you own a popular open-source project which is used by many companies it does make sense to think off it as your main business sometimes. I mean not just donate to me or follow me on patreon business, an actual business business. I think once you start making a lot of money from your project and can do it full-time it may help to bring some enthusiasm back (if it doesn't, well you can always leave the project too). For example, take Laravel. The guy created Spark and Forge and it was an instant hit for those who love his software. I think fontawesome, tailwind, sidekiq, browserless are more such successful examples. Some means of montesing OSS projects I've seen include: - Approach big companies to sponsors your project. Often times big and funded companies will love a spot on your readme for a monthly subscription (but they need a little nudge). - Offer a hosted version (like browserless) - Offer specialized subscription courses (like Vue Mastery) - Offer premium features (like Sidekiq) - Use it to drive traffic to your own commercial business (like jwt.io is for auth0)
- muyuu 5y ago
  monetising OSS is not as trivial as starting all these extra fronts and just hope it somehow pays off, people need to survive in the meantime success in terms of usage doesn't necessarily lead to success in these ancillary efforts - take for instance docz which is the project in question, its very main selling point is that it's simple enough you don't need support and it generates output without dependencies that is trivial to package or serve yourself
  - chii 5y ago
    > very main selling point is that it's simple enough you don't need support and yet there's mention of lots of people pressuring him to add new features or fix issues. So i say, OSS developers should actually have a standard set of ultimatums for all projects ; namely, pay up, or don't get any support that the developer doesn't feel like providing.
    - muyuu 5y ago
      one-off changes don't make for a revenue stream, you'll find that people are prepared to ask for features a lot more often than they'd pay for them also, tenuous conditions are inherent to that model - typically you have a couple people paying a few dollars and asking for the moon every other day, and you already said "yes" doing that sort of thing solo is certainly not for everybody, the overlap of people good at producing software and good at customer management + PR is extremely slim
andrewstuart 5y ago
The pattern is familiar: * open source project * success * no monetary reward, maybe just cost * burnout * project abandoned This is why I don't try to make any open source projects - what's the gain? I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay then I'm not willing to work.
- progx 5y ago
  You don't have to do OS, you can if you want. It could be fun. The hope to find similar people who really want to work on the project too and split the workload for everybody. Giving something back: i use so many OS tools, so i give back a tool that a made to solve a problem for me, hopefully it could solve problems for others. On the other side, you don't have to maintain an OS project, you can publish it "as is". I know people that publish basic OS software and sell their time to extend the project to the needs of customers. (so it could be a business model) Burnout is not a OS specific problem, it is something that anybody has to learn and find his own limits. I hope the post author learned how to deal with it in the last year.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay then I'm not willing to work. Would a form of UBI, together with 20 or 30 hours work week work for you? I seriously wonder what the state of open-source hardware and software would be if society would focus on redistributing automation gains more.
  - rvz 5y ago
    > Would a form of UBI, together with 20 or 30 hours work week work for you? Every developer is different, but ideally they would do it full time if it pays significantly more than their current job.
- radicalbyte 5y ago
  I'm exactly the same - I choose not to open source things because it's more hassle than it's worth. Also as someone who works in a Microsoft language, I get really tired of silly immature Go/PHP/Python developers who seem to get off on hating on Microsoft and have this strange desire to preach that opinion everywhere.
zx2391 5y ago
I maintain OS projects and my stance is simple: I'll fix thing, that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even for that there is no guarantee. The same limits I impose on the community I fully expect to follow when working with any OS project. Period. Remember, in that "other world", we would have to pay for each and every little proprietary piece of sh* code. The "new world" will not be built by profit-maximizing value-extractors, and if you think it will, then I wish you a happy burnout. Also remember, that for millions of people the notion of giving away something valuable for free is totally absent. They literally fail to comprehend. They are happy to sell the same thing many times over. In my book, OS software developers are living in the future, today and a lot of the friction comes from a world, that just works by a totally different set of rules.
- enumjorge 5y ago
  I don’t know why paying for someone’s time and effort is a bad thing. If anything, undervalued/unpaid labor seems a little dystopian, especially when some large companies are getting value out of someone’s volunteer work without giving anything back. I get the value of free software, but lately it feels like OS went from geeks sharing code because we value knowledge, to people who use the software making demands on someone else’s personal time.
- seumars 5y ago
  >I'll fix things that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even for that there is no guarantee. To some this may sound like it ruins the spirit of open-sourc but I totally support this. I should make this quote my default readme.
- contriban 5y ago
  Even PRs often take a long time to review and get to a reasonable point, especially but not only from new contributors. Some are so bad I just have to close them even if I want the feature, and some I waste hours on that I could have spent just writing it myself. Rarely I get PRs that I can merge without non-nitpick reviews.
thrower123 5y ago
At this point, I tend to view open source software not as free as in beer, or free as in speech, but free as in mattress left on the side of the road with a "Free" sign. Expect nothing, and you can only be positively surprised.
slver 5y ago
Let’s invent a token so we can trade goods and services with it so people like this can hire more developers and offload work to them.
- inbx0 5y ago
  Can we call it the Done Labour Reimbursement token?
- cortexio 5y ago
  hmmm.. so.. money? :)
joeblau 5y ago
I’ve seen few OSS burn out posts lately. I created gitignore.io and I’m thankful it wasn’t that successful because even the 5 hours a month I put in didn’t yield much financial compensation. There should really be a more transparent way that projects like this, canihazip, gitignore, redis, and a bunch of other projects can be sustainably run.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  Looking at https://gitignore.io https://gitignore.io - there is plenty of empty space and nothing, even subtle and small like "I would appreciate donations" with link/button. I also see nothing in https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io and GitHub sponsoring seems to be not enabled. (just mentioning in case you would make it more clear that you would be happy about donations)
  - joeblau 5y ago
    I sold the site to Toptal 2 years ago, but trust me I had donate buttons, crypto donate buttons, I messaged multiple big tech firms that used my project to ask for sponsorships, I ran ads using carbon. I tried a lot of things over the 7 years of running it and lots of the avenues failed or didn't generate enough revenue. Now I understand that the project was not that valuable but it would have been nice if I could have run it as a lifestyle business.
glangdale 5y ago
Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hyperscan high performance regular expression library) had to shed most of its staff (including all the original folks who worked on it, including me). One of the big contributing factors was a sense that "well, who really uses this". The answer was "tons of people, including some major Intel target customers" but a number of Hyperscan users picked up the library and never told anyone (not asking for public plaudits, but even a private communication would have been something to show our management). When you can't even say "thank you, we're using your library now, it's great" in a goddamn email, don't be surprised when 75% of the people maintaining and advancing it don't have jobs anymore. Never mind paying money or contributing - even acknowledgement. Open source is a recipe for burn-out. If something is important to people - especially corporate interests - there needs to be a way of getting paid. Much as I dislike those wacky "free for non-commercial use, otherwise, give me a call" licenses, I'm starting to see the point.
- jiofih 5y ago
  > there needs to be a way of getting paid You said you worked on the library at Intel. Doesn’t that qualify as getting paid for your work? That’s not the usual setup when developers talk about getting paid for their OSS contributions, usually off the clock, so its not clear what the lesson is here besides politics/resourcing at big co (which is a real but distinct problem). This situation was supposed to be where OSS shines - instead of a dedicated team subject to the will of a single private corporation, a project should have multiple contributors, working on their employers’ time - then there is no central team to be disbanded.
  - op00to 5y ago
    Not always. Might be a personal project.
  - unreal37 5y ago
kibbleble 5y ago
Has anyone ever modded Bethesda games? And by modding I don't mean "downloading plugins" but making those plugins and doing game development for free? Same sh*t. Same drama and human nature. So much drama about IP and copyright and abandoned mods. Point out that the source code is open. "Feel free to implement something yourself, the documentation is available." Crickets.
eplanit 5y ago
I have a lot of sympathy for developers like this, and this kind of story is too common. It seems like a problem that could be turned into opportunity. If one's software is becoming that popular, and the demands for changes so many that it's too much -- why not try to monetize it? Let the current version stay open source, and create customization and support for a fee. It could make the effort worthwhile, and could even grow into a business. Consumers in the foss world need to understand that getting their wishes fulfilled isn't necessarily going to be free. They might be asked to pay; or, they have the option to fork their own branch.
Vaslo 5y ago
This is kind of sad to read, that someone building and maintaining a free product feels compelled to over apologize for want burning out. It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems like more and more people are demanding higher and higher levels of service for things that they don’t pay much if anything for. I play a game right now that is in Beta called Dual Universe. Some people paid for Kickstarter packages 5-6 years ago for around 40 bucks. The game has its areas for improvement to be sure, but some of the players are just horrible and abusive to the community. I know they paid 40 bucks for a vision some years back and maybe DU has overproduced a bit, but the abuse of the 40 or so staff that is trying to build an amazing game where you can build anything you can dream of with voxels is just unrealistic.
- gpanders 5y ago
  > It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems like more and more people are demanding higher and higher levels of service for things that they don’t pay much if anything for. I know it’s cliche on HN to blame everything on Google and Facebook, but I really do suspect that the “free to use” model pioneered by these companies (among others, of course, but these are the biggest) have got everyone used to expecting things for free.
- hnthrowaway2 5y ago
  This has probably something to do with big tech companies putting out highly polished products for "free" while making money in no-so-obvious ways. People have been conditioned to expect high quality work for free.
  - Vaslo 5y ago
    Excellent point - and people forget the side benefits of those “free” projects are raking millions into the company.
headmelted 5y ago
I can empathise with the author completely here. This exact thing happened to me in the last couple of years (albeit with a much smaller user base than in this case). I maintained a set of Visual Studio Code builds for the Raspberry Pi and for Chromebooks. Unfortunately life happens to us all, and due to similar reasons of mental health (and a few family matters that couldn’t wait) I fell well behind on responding to issues on GitHub and merging patches. It’s hard to know you’re letting people down, especially when it was something you put out there for them that they’ve come to depend on. In my case my project eventually became obsolete due to a combination of direct vendor support from Microsoft for ARM, and because of Linux for Chromebooks. In the end I wasn’t upset to move on from the project, I was just relieved that I was able to stop and still point the users back to something officially supported so they wouldn’t be abandoned. I’m glad Pedro’s doing better, but I really hope for his sake he’s returning to work on this because he wants to and not out of a sense of obligation - his health is way more important than a few feature requests. It looks like a great project, he should be rightly proud of his work here.
cortexio 5y ago
Try to care less about what other people want. It's your project, not theirs. Also, there will always be someone who wants another feature. always. It never stops. So, i'd recommend only doing the features you personally want and tell the others: no thanks. Side note, there are alot of manipulative people on the internet that dont have the skills to create something, and they will try to say certain things to you, so you would create the things they want. And they may act like they care about your project, but they dont, they just care about themselfs, and then on monday they tell their boss, look, i created this new feature. It's sad, but i've met people like that.
hnthrowaway2 5y ago
Instead of expecting corporate users to pay (which can be difficult, corporate finance depts are good at spending large sums of money, but suck at small expenses), or acknowledge use (company policies might mean employees are not allowed to), perhaps the major hosting providers such as Github and Gitlab can directly remunerate open source repo maintainers depending on the popularity of the hosted repo? Surely they make a lot of money by more and more devs adopting their service? Edit: I am the owner of an open source repo on Github which was quite popular a while ago, but fell into disrepair because I could no longer find the time to maintain it. So I understand the pain of this person.
- josephg 5y ago
  I like the idea, but I don't think it should be on github's shoulders to directly fund opensource. They do more than enough. What I'd like to see is a fund which companies who use opensource are expected to contribute to. For every 100 employees at your company building on top of opensource software, I'd like to see at least 1 employee's salary funneled into the opensource ecosystem. That fund could have a default division based on community needs, or each company could specify how their donations are allocated. And if they donate by having their employees publish generally useful packages, thats fine too. I don't think it should be compulsory, but I want this stuff to be very visible. If someone files an issue against one of my projects, I want to know if the organization they're part of contributes to the community, and how, and to what projects. If you want me to donate my time to fix an issue you're running into, but you don't contribute back in any way, I'd like to know that before I decide if I'm going to spend my weekend helping out. Right now there's no incentive for companies to contribute to opensource because contributions are generally invisible. And bugs they run into usually get fixed anyway. If we tie a company's contributions to their reputation, and make reputation affect public standing, we might have a shot at changing social norms.
allochthon 5y ago
As a user of other people's popular open-source projects, I generally lack awareness of the effort and investment of time that the maintainers put into the projects. It's always eye-opening and helpful for me to see posts like this, because I gradually take their work less for granted.
wrren 5y ago
I feel sympathy for the maintainer here, but at the same time I feel as though they've cultivated a very unhealthy relationship with the users of this project. If the users aren't paying you, you really don't owe them anything and you certainly don't need to apologise for prioritizing your own mental health and happiness over users' demands. It's a different story if you're being paid to do some work, then you hold a degree of responsibility, demarcated by contract, for the thing you're working on. In the case of open source, however, that's not the case and it's absolutely your right to minimise or drop your support for a project at any time.
dzink 5y ago
To reduce burnout among open source developers GitHub could offer a couple of additional features: 1. Repo endorsements by companies or brands that use it. 2. Bounty option on feature requests - aka increase the priority on a request by paying a bounty on it of sorts - attracting more contributors to projects in demand.
CarVac 5y ago
I personally think it's most healthy to develop open-source software when you are the target user. This way incentives align so that there's more intrinsic motivation to work on the software.
diegoperini 5y ago
Dear open source software maintainers, Don't use only PayPal to accept donations. There are countries out there (i.e Turkey) that don't allow PayPal payments. P.S: I'm not specifically addressing to Pedro Nauck.
- thiago_fm 5y ago
  So now they even have to care a lot about payment providers in order to receive money? I bet if you really want to contribute even receiving some Amazon voucher would help. Just send then an E-mail and sort it out.
vincentmarle 5y ago
One of these days, a startup will tackle this problem and offer paid support for any open source project.
fartcannon 5y ago
Don't use MIT. Use a GPL.
- swat535 5y ago
  How does that exactly address the core issue of the post which is OSS maintainers are simply burning out due to a lack of support.. ?
  - 533474 5y ago
    The support structure is different if you go with the FSF - someone can takeover the project and big corps that use the code must contribute back. My take is, choose MIT if u want to give developers convenience (and u don't care if you r flooded with request and lack of attribution). Or choose GPL and the FSF if you care about legacy, organized support structure and end-user value. I even think dual license GPL version / paid version is a better choice than just releasing under MIT...I feel sorry but this story keeps repeating itself, we've been at it for decades and people are just realizing that open source is pointless without organized support groups or monetisation plan that respects developers and users freedoms
softwaredoug 5y ago
> big companies are using the project and need a lot of things as well from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most of the cases this is a talk in just one way. This is everything with what's wrong with open source. Many companies treat open source as something they have a right to consume and no obligation to support financially or with dev time. Some poor schlub is on the other end working their butt off and feeling guilty, while the company realizes all the value...
- zx2391 5y ago
  Yes, I've seen corporate presentations on that matter, which basically focused on the zero-cost aspect. Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.
  - stkdump 5y ago
    Well, often you get way more than you pay for, and it would be stupid not to acknowledge that. For example almost all Linux users never pay for nor support Kernel development in any way or form. And I think the people who do the development and create the value for the rest of us mostly are ok with that. That doesn't negate the fact that when you rely on open source software for your business and need more than just read access to the repo it would be polite to wise up on the maintainership status of the project and ask if you can contribute back in any form.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
It's very sad to see this happen. Open Source project leads, this is important: You need to stop thinking about other people using your project. It's incredibly kind of you to consider your users so much, but OSS only works (in the I'm-just-a-guy-in-a-basement-without-funding way) if it is a personal project. That is to say, if it's something you make for yourself, for fun. Once you start worrying about other people, how they will use it, what they want, etc, it stops being fun. If it's not fun, and you're not getting paid for it, it's just going to kill the project (and can make you totally stressed out). There are strategies you can use to maintain the project: - Put out a call for help on your README. Ask for developers to join your project. Ask for people to field user requests. Ask for people to write documentation. You may not get any help at all, but sometimes all you need to do is ask. - Create a specific method of receiving requests, like a mailing list (one for bugs, one for discussion, one for feature requests, one for security). A mailing list can act as a small road block to filter out less urgent requests, and can make it slightly easier to manage in one place. - In the past I have tried "feature bounties", a sort of donation where someone paid me just to develop some feature. It didn't work out well. I still had a full-time job, so while the extra money was nice, I still had to dedicate all my extra time to the feature, and if I got sick of it and wanted to quit, I felt extra bad because I had accepted a donation just for it. Plus it required more support later. So I still think you should ignore any requests that aren't something you personally want, and remind people to send you patches if they want code merged. Donations are nice, but be wary if they make you feel beholden to the users. - Be direct with people. Tell them, "This is my personal project, I only spend X hours a week/month on it, so do not expect any support or features." Sometimes this is enough to get people off your back. Otherwise, I recommend moving off of GitHub or disabling all the features so you don't get barraged with requests. - Above all: have fun! If you're not having fun with your project, either end it, or make some changes to make it fun again.
christophergs 5y ago
At my last gig I got budget to bring in the maintainer of an open-source testing library we using for some really important stuff. We paid him $1500 for a couple of days consulting. He showed us how to fix a couple of tricky bugs and gave a talk to the eng team. At this point we've more than recouped the investment. He was psyched to see his tool being used and I feel the visit contributed to him continuing to maintain the project. After those two days we also tried to hire him (he declined because he was making bank elsewhere). But those two days were also the best interview process ever because we did hours of pairing in non-interview mode. If you're a senior dev at a tech company with money you can easily make this kind of thing happen and it's such a win-win
- elboru 5y ago
  Wow, that never occurred to me, that’s a win-win situation for everyone involved! The maintainer gets recognition and payment for his work, the company learns and has its questions answered. I’ll keep that in mind in my future projects, thanks.
- gnarbarian 5y ago
  This is exactly how it's done. People are willing to pay for modifications and consulting. The only danger here is turning into Oracle where little effort is put towards usability in order to protect your consulting revenue stream. Just build great tools and libraries and people will come to you for help.
- elric 5y ago
  About a decade ago, Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo fame set up fosstithe.org, which was about encouraging companies to set aside some percentage of your profit to donate to FOSS projects. Alas, the website no longer seems to exist. I still think it's a great idea, and every year I donate 5% of my profits to FOSS projects I like. Convincing corporates to do the same is a little trickier. They want things like invoices, which can be hard for many smaller FOSS projects. Not every FOSS developer has a consulting gig. Not sure how to help out those developers, except by using their software and being appreciative, I guess.
makecheck 5y ago
Even when open source is “attributed”, that is usually done in the laziest and bare-minimum way possible (like being buried multiple levels deep in some “Acknowledgements” item, that simply displays a 45 page text document with unzoomable and unsearchable text that casually lists the dozens of open source libraries used). Unfortunately there are a lot of people who really will do the bare minimum and take everything they possibly can from projects and give absolutely nothing back.
gabereiser 5y ago
What’s really sad about this (and other open source devs with pressure from users) is the lack of support _from the users_. Open source should be about being able to dive in and add the wishlist item you have. A lot of people put up this wall that only changes can be made by the author, proliferating this onslaught of requests from the user and in the end burning out the author. If you manage an open source project, you owe it to yourself to make it clear how other devs can contribute and add features they want to see. Don’t be the choke point. Open it up. That’s the whole point. Make it clear how a user can add to the codebase and encourage them to do so.
- kxc42 5y ago
  I was surprised that nobody mentioned the Collective Code Construction Contract of zeromq/Pieter Hintjens [1]. It tries to minimise the friction created by maintaining & contributing to open source projects. It is not perfect of course, but at least it is a good start. Especially the "value-" & opinion-based discussions can be reduced considerably. [1]: https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/ https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/
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santoshalper 5y ago
Imagine giving so much of your life, passion, and energy away for free, then feeling guilty that you couldn't give even more. I'm glad Pedro decided to step back to focus on his health. That is not an easy decision to make. As he starts to return, I hope he will consider letting others take up part of the work and shoulder some of the burden. This kind of open source vampirism isn't healthy.
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sombremesa 5y ago
Reminds me of a phenomenon I see again and again in small business: owners struggling to keep up with demand and sacrificing their sanity in the process. The correct answer there is to raise prices. Another thing that happens a lot is that lower prices bring in worse customers who are more demanding and less respectful of your time.
antirez 5y ago
As somebody with experience in developing many OSS projects of different sizes (Redis, Hping, Jim Tcl, Visitors web analyzer, and many additional smaller ones), I think that the solution is simpler than it appears: just do what you want. When you are inside the flames of a successful open source project, you may think that the solution space is binary: don't do anything, or do everything people are demanding from you. Instead you can just keep doing what you want, cherry picking what issues you want to address, reply to, what features you want to add, and so forth. Just give you a fixed amount of time to spend on the project (in my case most of the time it was "all the time I've in a day, but up to 6/8 max", but it can be even just 10 minutes every day), and in this time do the things you like to do and ignore all the others. A few issues/PRs will be perfectly aligned to what you feel is right and you'll enjoy taking care of them. Others will not, and who cares? And anyway, doing things this way I was able to write a database that beaten, in the market, products developed with hundreds of developers while I was alone, so there must be some merit in what the original author feels is worth investing into. So, just do what you want, but: 1. Don't fall in the trap of thinking that who asks you for things is doing some kind of mistake or abuse just because (for example) they are not paying you. Nope, they are fine asking for things, you are fine to ignore the requests. 2. Don't fall in the trap that you are not accountable about the quality of the software just because it's free software: do only want you want, but ship finished work that is reasonably well written and well documented. To do what you want, at your own peace and according to your own personal expectation has NOTHING to do with the quality of your work. Software fails, but one thing is to ship terrible stuff just because "Hey it's free", another thing is to do things the way you want, but with love. 3. When people attack you, reply gently saying what you think. Don't get trapped into fights, don't feed the troll, remember that many criticizing you, if you are stealing money from the table providing something free, have specific agendas (but sometimes they are just assholes), and their goal is to mount a big case. Stop them replying carefully and without anger, then let the discussion end, or continue without you. 4. Make good friends in the process. They'll help you immensely when there are hard times. Remember: the smartest people 99% of the times have a big hearth and are the most friendly.
- dimgl 5y ago
  This is great advice and it's what I've done with my open source projects as well. The point of open source is that it's just that: it's open and free. People can try demanding things from you, but you don't work for them. So they can fork it and make changes or get lost. I think there's something about seeing a line item on a UI that really breaks people's brains. This is why sometimes having a conversation on Slack can feel different than Zoom or even in person; there's a sort of permanence on these mediums that don't exist in person to person interactions. I think it's similar with GitHub issues. Seeing an issue and getting a notification for it can make repo owners feel inclined to answer. Just don't answer. You don't owe anyone anything.
______- 5y ago
I started appreciating single duty snippets of code instead of creating large abstractions that tie together multiple snippets of code that all work together. I do this to set myself up for success. (Think of it as making the rungs on a ladder closer together). I haven't fully gone no-code[0], but I am close to it. I also do this to avoid the burnout trap. Working on large projects is physically and mentally taxing and it's only over longer periods, you find the project is actually an insurmountable task. Then on top of this, FOSS is never finished. Only few projects have a finished feel to them, and even those require modifications and upgrades. This is why forking dead projects is always a great idea, and why FOSS succeeds. [0] https://bubble.io/blog/no-code-manifesto/ https://bubble.io/blog/no-code-manifesto/
ericholscher 5y ago
I had a similar moment where I almost gave up on Read the Docs, going as far as writing a similar post but never publishing it. I wrote about that experience here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-never-published/ https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve...
debarshri 5y ago
One of the observations I have had is supporting opensource on donations is not a model that works long term. It could have been true back in the 90s and early 2000s. But these days the tech shift happens at very fast rate. So if your opensource product or concept is successful in the market, you cannot compete with another product or a startup cloning you idea on donations. As coding and software development is getting democratized, if you have a concept that definitely has a market even though you are first to market. Other developers will build similar product and saturate the market, essentially diluting your value. For instance, I have been tracking Heroku style deployment tools in the market, there is like tons of opensource platform doing the same thing built by startup as well as individual developers. Same for opensource airtable clones.
ezekielchen 5y ago
I think this is the kind of problem that might be solved by tokenomics. Gitcoin (https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/) seems like a good step forward.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Dude, you spent your own free time which you barely had making software for others. You could've done anything else with that time and you spent it helping others. And now you have to take care of your mental health, because when you're burnt out or miserable you psychologically can't help others. You take time off for yourself now or eventually you'll physically and mentally break down and be forced to take time off. So even now your decision to care for yourself is actually for the benefit of others. You have nothing to be sorry for. Thank you for giving docz to the world, and I hope you feel better soon :)
maerF0x0 5y ago
Commenting more on the general pattern than specific case here, but sounds like the only failure here could have been to either 1) ask for help or 2) effectively delegate At some point a leader/entrepreneur has to get out of the way and open the path for others to do some/all of the lifting.
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steelframe 5y ago
For every single one of my Open Source projects, having an exit strategy has played a central part. This included setting clear expectations and boundaries around what the scope of the project is, defining "feature complete" to be below what some users are happy with, and making sure occasional contributors can fix the critical bugs. Millions of people are currently using what I've built, and I spend zero time on those projects any more. Life's too short to be a slave to anything.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
First, no need to apologize! Then, I don't think this is a specific problem with open source. My view. The lack of knowledge about how to delegate work is a real problem. I mean, I worked with junior developers on the edge of breaking down while being on same team writing pointless games to pass time. I think this is more of an issue with young people enjoying the heights of the Dunning Kruger Effect.
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
First, no need to apologize! Then, I don't think this is a specific problem with open source. My view. The lack of knowledge about how to delegate work is a real problem. I mean, I worked with junior developers on the edge of breaking down while being on same team writing pointless games to pass time.
ajarmst 5y ago
The only problem here is that the author perceives a need to apologize, or to even feel regret. If the only compensation for starting and maintaining an open source project is the work itself or personal use of the product, then you are your only customer. The moment it stops being fun or worth the effort, you have every right to just stop without feeling a tiny bit of guilt or remorse. You have a bug they want to fix or a feature they want to add and the author/maintainer is not doing it fast enough? Fork away! Submit a pull request! Oh, you don't have the skills/time to do that? Wow, that's too bad. Offer to pay the author! Post a message to the project list or bug reporting tool offering to pay someone to do it for you. Oh, you want it for free? Immediately? You built critical infrastructure around a tool you don't understand and don't have the skills or resources to maintain? You're a parasite, and can be safely muted and ignored. This is the important bit: If you're afraid the person maintaining your key infrastructure for free might suddenly stop doing that, just take some time to send them a nice note thanking them. Periodically getting one of those in your inbox is remarkably effective in maintaining passion for a project. Find a way to give them a gift. Do they have Venmo/Patreon/Amazon wish list? Use it. Are you a developer or do you employ some? Fix a bug. Say nice things about them in social media. Offer to help pay for the resources to host the project. Send them an effing Starbuck's card with your sincere thanks.
asim 5y ago
After 6 years of working on two open source projects full time (16k and 10k GitHub stars) I decided to close off issues and discussions. GitHub has a nice checkbox you can untick to remove that tab and I did it. It's a thankless job, one that's pretty stressful and it's unclear what you gain from letting people berate or complain at you about their problems. I think I mostly built these tools for myself anyway so it felt like the right time.
young_unixer 5y ago
And Github still doesn't allow you to disable pull requests or issues in a repository. If I had an open source project, I would not publish it on Githib precisely for this reason. Open source doesn't necessarily imply open development, or horizontal organization, or constant support, or anything. It just implies that the source is open. Plus, on the Internet it's very hard to tell when someone is demanding something from you from when someone is just making a suggestion.
- rirze 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can archive a repository and disable issues that way. I've seen that happen (unfortunately) to a few libraries I follow.
- Nition 5y ago
  You actually can disable issues now; I'm glad they finally added it as an option.[1] [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/managing-repository-settings/disabling-issues https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository...
- sodality2 5y ago
  I think issues are a great way to get people who are willing to maintain it, together and working on forking and getting on a single repo. Completely cutting it off is a bad idea. Perhaps disable notifications and pin an issue saying "I can no longer work on this project, feel free to fork it" and if people fork and good-faith maintain it, perhaps list it on the Readme or pinned issue.
Waterluvian 5y ago
Tangentially related: My personal opinion is that github UI should make it bloody obvious by default "this project does not provide support." Maybe even with the issue tracker disabled by default. There's a kind of pressure that can come from an unsolicited email of a real human explaining how your project is broken for them.
okareaman 5y ago
It seems like some open source maintainers need to learn the power of "no" and how to say it without guilt. My life improved when I learned I could say no without explanation. Like everyone says whenever this topic comes up, you don't owe anyone anything. Edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+say+no+without+feeling+guilty https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+say+no+without+feelin...
draw_down 5y ago
I don’t understand dhow people do this. It’s just an extra unpaid job on top of your real job. Your reward for your troubles is an endless litany of issues, complaints, requests, and maybe a nice message or two. Thanks but no thanks.
xtat 5y ago
This is the argument for UBI
sagarpatil 5y ago
I maintain a wordpress plugin that is actively used by 50,000+ websites and makes me $10,000+/month. Here's what has worked for me. - Provide a paid version + support: The free version on its own does everything. The paid version saves you time. I have a full time support staff that helps Premium customers (they get first priority) as well as Free customers but we won't hop on a call and provide you one-on-one support. That's simply not sustainable. - I've got bills: As much as I would love to provide everything for free, I can't. I don't have another job, maintaning the plugin and charging for support is how I make money. - Put money to good use: I use the money I make from the paid version to improve the free version. That way, its a win-win situation for all the parties involved.
jude- 5y ago
I think we need to stop seeing open-source development as a form of free-as-in-beer labor, and start seeing it as a form of professional empowerment. Nothing -- nothing! -- stops you from forking my code and making the changes yourself. You don't need to ask me to make the changes for you; you are not helpless. I've already solved 99% of one of your problems, and now I am empowering you to solve yours with 1% of the effort. Just because I release my code under an OSS license doesn't mean you're entitled to my time and attention. My labor is not free-as-in-beer, and I take a very dim view on wage theft. If you want me to care about your issues, you will pay me my consulting rate. If you harass me about it, I'll block you. Framing OSS development as empowering developers I think would remove a lot of the toxicity from OSS. Being involved in OSS should be about improving your effectiveness, not working for free for entitled Internet strangers. You owe it to yourself and the OSS development community to demand that you be paid for your time.

819 points by rinesh 5y ago

This may be an obvious point but how can you say you failed when due to the fact that it's open source, anybody could check out the code and start supporting it?

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vbezhenar 5y ago
It's a common thing that a person imagines that he's responsible for something, can't keep up with it and finally feels himself failed, despite the fact that he wasn't really responsible in the first place. But it's still a source of misery and disappointment. I guess, it takes some time to understand what's the real responsibilities are and what's the imaginary responsibilities are. I agree that putting some code public with open source license does not bind author to any kind of responsibility and any continued work from him is just a charity to the world which he can stop providing at any time. If someone needs more guarantees, he can pay author or any other person (if code is open source) to provide those guarantees.
dgb23 5y ago
Humility and a strong sense of responsibility. And perhaps a little bit of false guilt, because they were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work. Perhaps they didn't estimate how time consuming it is to do this and feel guilty about that.
progx 5y ago
Most projects life because of huge support of few people. Pareto principle: 20% doing 80% of the work. And in my opinion on the most projects doing less then 10% more than 90% of the work. I have an OS project too, people want 1000 things, you can say "ok, make a PR and it will be integrated", many make a good PR, but that's it. Normally they do not make any support, they made feature they need, and they are gone when it is implemented. (not all, but most people) And when issues come up, because of the new feature, you can try to contact the creator, sometimes they help, sometimes not. But to contact them is work too. I am so happy that i found a "community manager" (after years and many try it), who does all the non-programming stuff and keep the project alive, cause my time is spare too.
arkitaip 5y ago
How about the insane entitlement that many devs have when it comes to open source? Getting bombarded with requests and angry emails from people who demand free support and bug fixes can burn anyone out. I think Github can be a positive force for change here. Redesign the UI to encourage donations, to encourage people to get involved in project work, to write less hostile issues, etc. If devs and designers can weaponize UI to create addiction, anxiety and FOMO, maybe we can use the same tools for good for once.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  This! Several of my github repos now have a disclaimer that says "if this doesn't work, don't send me insulting emails" It's especially bad if a big company links to you from their tutorial or in their add-on catalogue because then some of their customers will feel like your open source is part of the commercial offering that they bought. So then you're forced to do open source support for entitled aholes and someone else is cashing in on your work.
  - matkoniecz 5y ago
    > So then you're forced to do open source support for entitled aholes I had no opportunity to do it so far, but what is wrong with simply banning such people and closing tickets (with note that this issue is closed for rude behavior, not WONTFIXed)? I would certainly not feel forced to support them.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I wonder if this is a back-firing of the push for people to be "nice" and "professional". Open source maintainers used to have the sterotype of being rather harsh, and basically telling people to f off if they had stupid questions, didn't RTFM or didn't follow cultural norms. And dont get me wrong, there's a lot wrong with that, but maybe it was also that way for a reason.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    Agree. I'm active in some communities that are unfriendly if not outright hostile towards newcomers. I'm sure they lose a good amount of potential contributers that way. But the few newcomers that remain are highly motivated.
throw_m239339 5y ago
Agreed, I would never write such a message. I have zero responsibility toward the users of my open source code, and my license does reflect that fact, unless they pay me. You're not satisfied with my open source work? Fork and fix it. You can't fix it? Hire somebody who can. You don't have the money to hire somebody who can? Then find other users, do a fundraiser and hire somebody who can fix the code. This culture of entitlement has gone way too far. Some companies make billions out of some open source project yet never contribute a cent or a man hour back yet you still find engineers from these companies complaining on github issues that bugs aren't resolved quickly enough. I say this, this might be the golden age of open source now but it's not going to last. Users have become too petty and entitled.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  What bugged me the most was how unwilling users were to dive into code to make small edits. They’d rather spend 3X the time filing issues, writing emails, and tweeting about it. And if you tell them, “maybe you should just not use this,” then you’re seen as unreasonable. The entitlement drove me out. The market is more about chasing shiny things than using things that are the best fit.

rvz 5y ago

> ...People want a lot of things from you and your project, big companies are using the project and need a lot of things as well from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most of the cases this is a talk in just one way. There are more people interest in have things from you, than help! And this crashed me If they are all users of your open source software and are begging for features for free, ignore them and focus on yourself. This is why many developers always prioritise paid support or sponsors and the choice of license is also very important. It's really simple, either the user does the work and contributes the fixes for free (depending on the license) or the user pays for the maintainer to prioritise the work at a cost. Either way, I will never do free open source work on someone else's deadline and will always do it in my own time. Unless you're willing to pay me to add a feature or support.

dgb23 5y ago
We don't know how much pay/sponsorship was the issue here. It seems to me that the maintainer was simply overworked and slept very, very little. This is bearable for a certain amount of time but after that one really has to look after themselves, regardless of financial interests or a crash is inevitable.
- rvz 5y ago
  True, burnout is inevitable with a single developer. That's why paid support or sponsorship is used to hire more developers / contributors to reduce the risk of the project stagnating due to one developer burning out. Either way, no developer wants to do free work on someone else's deadline and it is always done in their own time, unless they want to pay for the effort.
- chii 5y ago
  > overworked and slept very, very little i would say overwork and no/low pay are the same thing. If you have a large amount of work being demanded of you by users/companies, then it's time to charge money for the time that would've taken. The charge should be big enough to replace your day job. If it's not, then don't do it, except for any fun bits that you would've already done.

progx 5y ago

But what did you change, so that you have now time for the project?

imhoguy 5y ago
Recharged? With burnout one may have abundance of time on the clock, but no mental time for anything.
- progx 5y ago
  But what will you (or he) do to prevent that it happen again?

intricatedetail 5y ago

That's the dark side of open source. Companies think these projects grow on trees and they use them without paying anything. We need law changes to ensure that open source can be sustainable and companies pay the fair share of revenue they make by using it.

vbezhenar 5y ago
How do you estimate a share? What's the share of libc in Google business? What's the share of openssl? What's the share of ncurses?
- progx 5y ago
  libc used in Android. openssl -> view boringSSL - BoringSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that is designed to meet Google's needs Nobody says that one company has to support every project and google supports many open source projects.
  - ivanbakel 5y ago
    But how would you estimate the contribution that libc has to Android? Is libc entitled to 10% of Android's revenue? 20%? 100%, since it is a vital component? This is what the GP was asking.
    - progx 5y ago
      Only google can answer that. But i think we can not say one lib make x%, it are all the libs and tools that are necessary. We don't now what e.g. google search uses under the hood, but all are needed so google can make only $1.
ulzeraj 5y ago
> We need law changes to ensure that open source can be sustainable and companies pay the fair share of revenue they make by using it. We don't need more laws. There is something called a License Agreement. However if you publish your stuff on GPL and other permissive licenses you can't really complain about Amazon, Google and Microsoft making millions on your code while you beg for donations on your Github page.

radarsat1 5y ago

Of course it's terrible to become burnt out and it feels awful not having enough time to work on an open source project that you love. But, is it just me or has it become rarer for open source project maintainers to feel free to let projects go? I don't mean to let them die, I mean, to find like-minded individuals to which you can defer some or all of the work? I realize that as the original author one feels a sense of ownership, but if you want it to continue, and you don't have the time, there is nothing wrong with putting out a call for someone to take over maintainership. Most projects that I've maintained have been my own work but I've also taken over maintainership from someone on a popular project, and it was a great experience. I got to work with a good code base, add my own ideas, offer some direction, and I learned a lot about maintaining code for longevity, integrating community contributions, and I cared about it probably more than I have for much of my own work, because I felt that I owed it to the original author to do a good job. Now, several years later, I do not use it myself as much, and I am perfectly ready to find a new maintainer for it, should someone appropriate come along. (That hasn't happened but the project no longer takes a lot of my time. since new solutions have come along, so it's fine. If it did take more time, it would mean there were more users, and therefore probably there would be more interested parties in taking over maintainership.) I encourage authors and maintainers who are feeling they are reaching this burnout stage to feel more comfortable putting out requests for help, it can be a good experience and even encourage community building around your work. You don't have to be a BDFL, you can be a temporary one.

robin_reala 5y ago
I think part of the worry of handing projects over stems from a couple of fairly high-profile events when projects were handed over to theoretically trust-worthy people who went rogue and used them as a platform for malware or spear phishing. Suddenly, even just relinquishing control can be a bad thing for the community.
- antran22 5y ago
  The thing is, if the new project maintainers go against the community, but the community really need to use it, the community will just fork out a new path and move on. If the project is really open source.

Johnyma22 5y ago

My technique to avoid burn out is to hack for X duration then take Y time off and let the community fill in the gaps. I'm currently on a 6 month hiatus from OSS, no one has notified me of any fires so I think everything is just fine without me which is how it should be.

scruffyherder 5y ago
OSS like the audio?

fock 5y ago

and of course: it's javascript! because literally every other community would have no problem if their doc-generator got unmaintained, because it would probably run for another ten years...

KirillPanov 5y ago
There's really something to be said for software that is so ruthlessly simple it runs forever without maintenance. Like most of what DJB has written: djbdns still works after all these years... And of course Knuth's TeX. Maybe people shouldn't start software projects if there isn't a "can leave it here unmaintained" milestone within sight.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  > Maybe people shouldn't start software projects if there isn't a "can leave it here unmaintained" milestone within sight. It's because these projects have tons of dependencies and moving parts which tend to break themselves (often for very little reasons) so of course it's going to affect upstream. The software you listed are usually mostly self-contained or rely on stable projects. There is no such thing as "stability" in the Node.js ecosystem (which isn't javascript itself).
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    I think you just said exactly what the parent comment meant. Nodejs is the new Java jar dependency hell. Maybe package the entire project into a docker container so that people can download and run the pile of dependencies in one step.
    - progx 5y ago
      `entire project into a docker container `, like Linux Flatpak. It is not a nodejs specific problem, every software with dependencies has it. (some more, some less)
mattgreenrocks 5y ago

superasn 5y ago

I don't say for this project but if you own a popular open-source project which is used by many companies it does make sense to think off it as your main business sometimes. I mean not just donate to me or follow me on patreon business, an actual business business. I think once you start making a lot of money from your project and can do it full-time it may help to bring some enthusiasm back (if it doesn't, well you can always leave the project too). For example, take Laravel. The guy created Spark and Forge and it was an instant hit for those who love his software. I think fontawesome, tailwind, sidekiq, browserless are more such successful examples. Some means of montesing OSS projects I've seen include: - Approach big companies to sponsors your project. Often times big and funded companies will love a spot on your readme for a monthly subscription (but they need a little nudge). - Offer a hosted version (like browserless) - Offer specialized subscription courses (like Vue Mastery) - Offer premium features (like Sidekiq) - Use it to drive traffic to your own commercial business (like jwt.io is for auth0)

muyuu 5y ago
monetising OSS is not as trivial as starting all these extra fronts and just hope it somehow pays off, people need to survive in the meantime success in terms of usage doesn't necessarily lead to success in these ancillary efforts - take for instance docz which is the project in question, its very main selling point is that it's simple enough you don't need support and it generates output without dependencies that is trivial to package or serve yourself
- chii 5y ago
  > very main selling point is that it's simple enough you don't need support and yet there's mention of lots of people pressuring him to add new features or fix issues. So i say, OSS developers should actually have a standard set of ultimatums for all projects ; namely, pay up, or don't get any support that the developer doesn't feel like providing.
  - muyuu 5y ago
    one-off changes don't make for a revenue stream, you'll find that people are prepared to ask for features a lot more often than they'd pay for them also, tenuous conditions are inherent to that model - typically you have a couple people paying a few dollars and asking for the moon every other day, and you already said "yes" doing that sort of thing solo is certainly not for everybody, the overlap of people good at producing software and good at customer management + PR is extremely slim

andrewstuart 5y ago

The pattern is familiar: * open source project * success * no monetary reward, maybe just cost * burnout * project abandoned This is why I don't try to make any open source projects - what's the gain? I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay then I'm not willing to work.

progx 5y ago
You don't have to do OS, you can if you want. It could be fun. The hope to find similar people who really want to work on the project too and split the workload for everybody. Giving something back: i use so many OS tools, so i give back a tool that a made to solve a problem for me, hopefully it could solve problems for others. On the other side, you don't have to maintain an OS project, you can publish it "as is". I know people that publish basic OS software and sell their time to extend the project to the needs of customers. (so it could be a business model) Burnout is not a OS specific problem, it is something that anybody has to learn and find his own limits. I hope the post author learned how to deal with it in the last year.
mschuster91 5y ago
> I'd only do it if it paid money. If people aren't willing to pay then I'm not willing to work. Would a form of UBI, together with 20 or 30 hours work week work for you? I seriously wonder what the state of open-source hardware and software would be if society would focus on redistributing automation gains more.
- rvz 5y ago
  > Would a form of UBI, together with 20 or 30 hours work week work for you? Every developer is different, but ideally they would do it full time if it pays significantly more than their current job.
radicalbyte 5y ago
I'm exactly the same - I choose not to open source things because it's more hassle than it's worth. Also as someone who works in a Microsoft language, I get really tired of silly immature Go/PHP/Python developers who seem to get off on hating on Microsoft and have this strange desire to preach that opinion everywhere.

zx2391 5y ago

I maintain OS projects and my stance is simple: I'll fix thing, that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even for that there is no guarantee. The same limits I impose on the community I fully expect to follow when working with any OS project. Period. Remember, in that "other world", we would have to pay for each and every little proprietary piece of sh* code. The "new world" will not be built by profit-maximizing value-extractors, and if you think it will, then I wish you a happy burnout. Also remember, that for millions of people the notion of giving away something valuable for free is totally absent. They literally fail to comprehend. They are happy to sell the same thing many times over. In my book, OS software developers are living in the future, today and a lot of the friction comes from a world, that just works by a totally different set of rules.

enumjorge 5y ago
I don’t know why paying for someone’s time and effort is a bad thing. If anything, undervalued/unpaid labor seems a little dystopian, especially when some large companies are getting value out of someone’s volunteer work without giving anything back. I get the value of free software, but lately it feels like OS went from geeks sharing code because we value knowledge, to people who use the software making demands on someone else’s personal time.
seumars 5y ago
>I'll fix things that are broken - mostly because I want things to work. I won't add new features for you, unless I really see the appeal. If you come up with a PR, nice! I'll take the time to review, but even for that there is no guarantee. To some this may sound like it ruins the spirit of open-sourc but I totally support this. I should make this quote my default readme.
contriban 5y ago
Even PRs often take a long time to review and get to a reasonable point, especially but not only from new contributors. Some are so bad I just have to close them even if I want the feature, and some I waste hours on that I could have spent just writing it myself. Rarely I get PRs that I can merge without non-nitpick reviews.

thrower123 5y ago

At this point, I tend to view open source software not as free as in beer, or free as in speech, but free as in mattress left on the side of the road with a "Free" sign. Expect nothing, and you can only be positively surprised.

slver 5y ago

Let’s invent a token so we can trade goods and services with it so people like this can hire more developers and offload work to them.

inbx0 5y ago
Can we call it the Done Labour Reimbursement token?
cortexio 5y ago
hmmm.. so.. money? :)

joeblau 5y ago

I’ve seen few OSS burn out posts lately. I created gitignore.io and I’m thankful it wasn’t that successful because even the 5 hours a month I put in didn’t yield much financial compensation. There should really be a more transparent way that projects like this, canihazip, gitignore, redis, and a bunch of other projects can be sustainably run.

matkoniecz 5y ago
Looking at https://gitignore.io https://gitignore.io - there is plenty of empty space and nothing, even subtle and small like "I would appreciate donations" with link/button. I also see nothing in https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io and GitHub sponsoring seems to be not enabled. (just mentioning in case you would make it more clear that you would be happy about donations)
- joeblau 5y ago
  I sold the site to Toptal 2 years ago, but trust me I had donate buttons, crypto donate buttons, I messaged multiple big tech firms that used my project to ask for sponsorships, I ran ads using carbon. I tried a lot of things over the 7 years of running it and lots of the avenues failed or didn't generate enough revenue. Now I understand that the project was not that valuable but it would have been nice if I could have run it as a lifestyle business.

glangdale 5y ago

Seeing a lot of posts like this. Open source is wonderful in its way, but it's really not sustainable to work on projects that make money for other people - including big commercial interests - when they don't help out in any fashion. I'm not just talking money or contributions. I'm talking about simple acknowledgement: "we use project X" - even privately. A open source library that I worked on at Intel (the Hyperscan high performance regular expression library) had to shed most of its staff (including all the original folks who worked on it, including me). One of the big contributing factors was a sense that "well, who really uses this". The answer was "tons of people, including some major Intel target customers" but a number of Hyperscan users picked up the library and never told anyone (not asking for public plaudits, but even a private communication would have been something to show our management). When you can't even say "thank you, we're using your library now, it's great" in a goddamn email, don't be surprised when 75% of the people maintaining and advancing it don't have jobs anymore. Never mind paying money or contributing - even acknowledgement. Open source is a recipe for burn-out. If something is important to people - especially corporate interests - there needs to be a way of getting paid. Much as I dislike those wacky "free for non-commercial use, otherwise, give me a call" licenses, I'm starting to see the point.

jiofih 5y ago
> there needs to be a way of getting paid You said you worked on the library at Intel. Doesn’t that qualify as getting paid for your work? That’s not the usual setup when developers talk about getting paid for their OSS contributions, usually off the clock, so its not clear what the lesson is here besides politics/resourcing at big co (which is a real but distinct problem). This situation was supposed to be where OSS shines - instead of a dedicated team subject to the will of a single private corporation, a project should have multiple contributors, working on their employers’ time - then there is no central team to be disbanded.
- op00to 5y ago
  Not always. Might be a personal project.
- unreal37 5y ago

kibbleble 5y ago

Has anyone ever modded Bethesda games? And by modding I don't mean "downloading plugins" but making those plugins and doing game development for free? Same sh*t. Same drama and human nature. So much drama about IP and copyright and abandoned mods. Point out that the source code is open. "Feel free to implement something yourself, the documentation is available." Crickets.

eplanit 5y ago

I have a lot of sympathy for developers like this, and this kind of story is too common. It seems like a problem that could be turned into opportunity. If one's software is becoming that popular, and the demands for changes so many that it's too much -- why not try to monetize it? Let the current version stay open source, and create customization and support for a fee. It could make the effort worthwhile, and could even grow into a business. Consumers in the foss world need to understand that getting their wishes fulfilled isn't necessarily going to be free. They might be asked to pay; or, they have the option to fork their own branch.

Vaslo 5y ago

This is kind of sad to read, that someone building and maintaining a free product feels compelled to over apologize for want burning out. It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems like more and more people are demanding higher and higher levels of service for things that they don’t pay much if anything for. I play a game right now that is in Beta called Dual Universe. Some people paid for Kickstarter packages 5-6 years ago for around 40 bucks. The game has its areas for improvement to be sure, but some of the players are just horrible and abusive to the community. I know they paid 40 bucks for a vision some years back and maybe DU has overproduced a bit, but the abuse of the 40 or so staff that is trying to build an amazing game where you can build anything you can dream of with voxels is just unrealistic.

gpanders 5y ago
> It may just be my cynical view of the world but it just seems like more and more people are demanding higher and higher levels of service for things that they don’t pay much if anything for. I know it’s cliche on HN to blame everything on Google and Facebook, but I really do suspect that the “free to use” model pioneered by these companies (among others, of course, but these are the biggest) have got everyone used to expecting things for free.
hnthrowaway2 5y ago
This has probably something to do with big tech companies putting out highly polished products for "free" while making money in no-so-obvious ways. People have been conditioned to expect high quality work for free.
- Vaslo 5y ago
  Excellent point - and people forget the side benefits of those “free” projects are raking millions into the company.

headmelted 5y ago

I can empathise with the author completely here. This exact thing happened to me in the last couple of years (albeit with a much smaller user base than in this case). I maintained a set of Visual Studio Code builds for the Raspberry Pi and for Chromebooks. Unfortunately life happens to us all, and due to similar reasons of mental health (and a few family matters that couldn’t wait) I fell well behind on responding to issues on GitHub and merging patches. It’s hard to know you’re letting people down, especially when it was something you put out there for them that they’ve come to depend on. In my case my project eventually became obsolete due to a combination of direct vendor support from Microsoft for ARM, and because of Linux for Chromebooks. In the end I wasn’t upset to move on from the project, I was just relieved that I was able to stop and still point the users back to something officially supported so they wouldn’t be abandoned. I’m glad Pedro’s doing better, but I really hope for his sake he’s returning to work on this because he wants to and not out of a sense of obligation - his health is way more important than a few feature requests. It looks like a great project, he should be rightly proud of his work here.

cortexio 5y ago

Try to care less about what other people want. It's your project, not theirs. Also, there will always be someone who wants another feature. always. It never stops. So, i'd recommend only doing the features you personally want and tell the others: no thanks. Side note, there are alot of manipulative people on the internet that dont have the skills to create something, and they will try to say certain things to you, so you would create the things they want. And they may act like they care about your project, but they dont, they just care about themselfs, and then on monday they tell their boss, look, i created this new feature. It's sad, but i've met people like that.

hnthrowaway2 5y ago

Instead of expecting corporate users to pay (which can be difficult, corporate finance depts are good at spending large sums of money, but suck at small expenses), or acknowledge use (company policies might mean employees are not allowed to), perhaps the major hosting providers such as Github and Gitlab can directly remunerate open source repo maintainers depending on the popularity of the hosted repo? Surely they make a lot of money by more and more devs adopting their service? Edit: I am the owner of an open source repo on Github which was quite popular a while ago, but fell into disrepair because I could no longer find the time to maintain it. So I understand the pain of this person.

josephg 5y ago
I like the idea, but I don't think it should be on github's shoulders to directly fund opensource. They do more than enough. What I'd like to see is a fund which companies who use opensource are expected to contribute to. For every 100 employees at your company building on top of opensource software, I'd like to see at least 1 employee's salary funneled into the opensource ecosystem. That fund could have a default division based on community needs, or each company could specify how their donations are allocated. And if they donate by having their employees publish generally useful packages, thats fine too. I don't think it should be compulsory, but I want this stuff to be very visible. If someone files an issue against one of my projects, I want to know if the organization they're part of contributes to the community, and how, and to what projects. If you want me to donate my time to fix an issue you're running into, but you don't contribute back in any way, I'd like to know that before I decide if I'm going to spend my weekend helping out. Right now there's no incentive for companies to contribute to opensource because contributions are generally invisible. And bugs they run into usually get fixed anyway. If we tie a company's contributions to their reputation, and make reputation affect public standing, we might have a shot at changing social norms.

allochthon 5y ago

As a user of other people's popular open-source projects, I generally lack awareness of the effort and investment of time that the maintainers put into the projects. It's always eye-opening and helpful for me to see posts like this, because I gradually take their work less for granted.

wrren 5y ago

I feel sympathy for the maintainer here, but at the same time I feel as though they've cultivated a very unhealthy relationship with the users of this project. If the users aren't paying you, you really don't owe them anything and you certainly don't need to apologise for prioritizing your own mental health and happiness over users' demands. It's a different story if you're being paid to do some work, then you hold a degree of responsibility, demarcated by contract, for the thing you're working on. In the case of open source, however, that's not the case and it's absolutely your right to minimise or drop your support for a project at any time.

dzink 5y ago

To reduce burnout among open source developers GitHub could offer a couple of additional features: 1. Repo endorsements by companies or brands that use it. 2. Bounty option on feature requests - aka increase the priority on a request by paying a bounty on it of sorts - attracting more contributors to projects in demand.

CarVac 5y ago

I personally think it's most healthy to develop open-source software when you are the target user. This way incentives align so that there's more intrinsic motivation to work on the software.

diegoperini 5y ago

Dear open source software maintainers, Don't use only PayPal to accept donations. There are countries out there (i.e Turkey) that don't allow PayPal payments. P.S: I'm not specifically addressing to Pedro Nauck.

thiago_fm 5y ago
So now they even have to care a lot about payment providers in order to receive money? I bet if you really want to contribute even receiving some Amazon voucher would help. Just send then an E-mail and sort it out.

vincentmarle 5y ago

One of these days, a startup will tackle this problem and offer paid support for any open source project.

fartcannon 5y ago

Don't use MIT. Use a GPL.

swat535 5y ago
How does that exactly address the core issue of the post which is OSS maintainers are simply burning out due to a lack of support.. ?
- 533474 5y ago
  The support structure is different if you go with the FSF - someone can takeover the project and big corps that use the code must contribute back. My take is, choose MIT if u want to give developers convenience (and u don't care if you r flooded with request and lack of attribution). Or choose GPL and the FSF if you care about legacy, organized support structure and end-user value. I even think dual license GPL version / paid version is a better choice than just releasing under MIT...I feel sorry but this story keeps repeating itself, we've been at it for decades and people are just realizing that open source is pointless without organized support groups or monetisation plan that respects developers and users freedoms

softwaredoug 5y ago

> big companies are using the project and need a lot of things as well from it in order to keep their projects healthy, but in most of the cases this is a talk in just one way. This is everything with what's wrong with open source. Many companies treat open source as something they have a right to consume and no obligation to support financially or with dev time. Some poor schlub is on the other end working their butt off and feeling guilty, while the company realizes all the value...

zx2391 5y ago
Yes, I've seen corporate presentations on that matter, which basically focused on the zero-cost aspect. Well, you get what you pay for, I guess.
- stkdump 5y ago
  Well, often you get way more than you pay for, and it would be stupid not to acknowledge that. For example almost all Linux users never pay for nor support Kernel development in any way or form. And I think the people who do the development and create the value for the rest of us mostly are ok with that. That doesn't negate the fact that when you rely on open source software for your business and need more than just read access to the repo it would be polite to wise up on the maintainership status of the project and ask if you can contribute back in any form.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

It's very sad to see this happen. Open Source project leads, this is important: You need to stop thinking about other people using your project. It's incredibly kind of you to consider your users so much, but OSS only works (in the I'm-just-a-guy-in-a-basement-without-funding way) if it is a personal project. That is to say, if it's something you make for yourself, for fun. Once you start worrying about other people, how they will use it, what they want, etc, it stops being fun. If it's not fun, and you're not getting paid for it, it's just going to kill the project (and can make you totally stressed out). There are strategies you can use to maintain the project: - Put out a call for help on your README. Ask for developers to join your project. Ask for people to field user requests. Ask for people to write documentation. You may not get any help at all, but sometimes all you need to do is ask. - Create a specific method of receiving requests, like a mailing list (one for bugs, one for discussion, one for feature requests, one for security). A mailing list can act as a small road block to filter out less urgent requests, and can make it slightly easier to manage in one place. - In the past I have tried "feature bounties", a sort of donation where someone paid me just to develop some feature. It didn't work out well. I still had a full-time job, so while the extra money was nice, I still had to dedicate all my extra time to the feature, and if I got sick of it and wanted to quit, I felt extra bad because I had accepted a donation just for it. Plus it required more support later. So I still think you should ignore any requests that aren't something you personally want, and remind people to send you patches if they want code merged. Donations are nice, but be wary if they make you feel beholden to the users. - Be direct with people. Tell them, "This is my personal project, I only spend X hours a week/month on it, so do not expect any support or features." Sometimes this is enough to get people off your back. Otherwise, I recommend moving off of GitHub or disabling all the features so you don't get barraged with requests. - Above all: have fun! If you're not having fun with your project, either end it, or make some changes to make it fun again.

christophergs 5y ago

At my last gig I got budget to bring in the maintainer of an open-source testing library we using for some really important stuff. We paid him $1500 for a couple of days consulting. He showed us how to fix a couple of tricky bugs and gave a talk to the eng team. At this point we've more than recouped the investment. He was psyched to see his tool being used and I feel the visit contributed to him continuing to maintain the project. After those two days we also tried to hire him (he declined because he was making bank elsewhere). But those two days were also the best interview process ever because we did hours of pairing in non-interview mode. If you're a senior dev at a tech company with money you can easily make this kind of thing happen and it's such a win-win

elboru 5y ago
Wow, that never occurred to me, that’s a win-win situation for everyone involved! The maintainer gets recognition and payment for his work, the company learns and has its questions answered. I’ll keep that in mind in my future projects, thanks.
gnarbarian 5y ago
This is exactly how it's done. People are willing to pay for modifications and consulting. The only danger here is turning into Oracle where little effort is put towards usability in order to protect your consulting revenue stream. Just build great tools and libraries and people will come to you for help.
elric 5y ago
About a decade ago, Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo fame set up fosstithe.org, which was about encouraging companies to set aside some percentage of your profit to donate to FOSS projects. Alas, the website no longer seems to exist. I still think it's a great idea, and every year I donate 5% of my profits to FOSS projects I like. Convincing corporates to do the same is a little trickier. They want things like invoices, which can be hard for many smaller FOSS projects. Not every FOSS developer has a consulting gig. Not sure how to help out those developers, except by using their software and being appreciative, I guess.

makecheck 5y ago

Even when open source is “attributed”, that is usually done in the laziest and bare-minimum way possible (like being buried multiple levels deep in some “Acknowledgements” item, that simply displays a 45 page text document with unzoomable and unsearchable text that casually lists the dozens of open source libraries used). Unfortunately there are a lot of people who really will do the bare minimum and take everything they possibly can from projects and give absolutely nothing back.

gabereiser 5y ago

What’s really sad about this (and other open source devs with pressure from users) is the lack of support _from the users_. Open source should be about being able to dive in and add the wishlist item you have. A lot of people put up this wall that only changes can be made by the author, proliferating this onslaught of requests from the user and in the end burning out the author. If you manage an open source project, you owe it to yourself to make it clear how other devs can contribute and add features they want to see. Don’t be the choke point. Open it up. That’s the whole point. Make it clear how a user can add to the codebase and encourage them to do so.

kxc42 5y ago
I was surprised that nobody mentioned the Collective Code Construction Contract of zeromq/Pieter Hintjens [1]. It tries to minimise the friction created by maintaining & contributing to open source projects. It is not perfect of course, but at least it is a good start. Especially the "value-" & opinion-based discussions can be reduced considerably. [1]: https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/ https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/

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santoshalper 5y ago

Imagine giving so much of your life, passion, and energy away for free, then feeling guilty that you couldn't give even more. I'm glad Pedro decided to step back to focus on his health. That is not an easy decision to make. As he starts to return, I hope he will consider letting others take up part of the work and shoulder some of the burden. This kind of open source vampirism isn't healthy.

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sombremesa 5y ago

Reminds me of a phenomenon I see again and again in small business: owners struggling to keep up with demand and sacrificing their sanity in the process. The correct answer there is to raise prices. Another thing that happens a lot is that lower prices bring in worse customers who are more demanding and less respectful of your time.

antirez 5y ago

As somebody with experience in developing many OSS projects of different sizes (Redis, Hping, Jim Tcl, Visitors web analyzer, and many additional smaller ones), I think that the solution is simpler than it appears: just do what you want. When you are inside the flames of a successful open source project, you may think that the solution space is binary: don't do anything, or do everything people are demanding from you. Instead you can just keep doing what you want, cherry picking what issues you want to address, reply to, what features you want to add, and so forth. Just give you a fixed amount of time to spend on the project (in my case most of the time it was "all the time I've in a day, but up to 6/8 max", but it can be even just 10 minutes every day), and in this time do the things you like to do and ignore all the others. A few issues/PRs will be perfectly aligned to what you feel is right and you'll enjoy taking care of them. Others will not, and who cares? And anyway, doing things this way I was able to write a database that beaten, in the market, products developed with hundreds of developers while I was alone, so there must be some merit in what the original author feels is worth investing into. So, just do what you want, but: 1. Don't fall in the trap of thinking that who asks you for things is doing some kind of mistake or abuse just because (for example) they are not paying you. Nope, they are fine asking for things, you are fine to ignore the requests. 2. Don't fall in the trap that you are not accountable about the quality of the software just because it's free software: do only want you want, but ship finished work that is reasonably well written and well documented. To do what you want, at your own peace and according to your own personal expectation has NOTHING to do with the quality of your work. Software fails, but one thing is to ship terrible stuff just because "Hey it's free", another thing is to do things the way you want, but with love. 3. When people attack you, reply gently saying what you think. Don't get trapped into fights, don't feed the troll, remember that many criticizing you, if you are stealing money from the table providing something free, have specific agendas (but sometimes they are just assholes), and their goal is to mount a big case. Stop them replying carefully and without anger, then let the discussion end, or continue without you. 4. Make good friends in the process. They'll help you immensely when there are hard times. Remember: the smartest people 99% of the times have a big hearth and are the most friendly.

dimgl 5y ago
This is great advice and it's what I've done with my open source projects as well. The point of open source is that it's just that: it's open and free. People can try demanding things from you, but you don't work for them. So they can fork it and make changes or get lost. I think there's something about seeing a line item on a UI that really breaks people's brains. This is why sometimes having a conversation on Slack can feel different than Zoom or even in person; there's a sort of permanence on these mediums that don't exist in person to person interactions. I think it's similar with GitHub issues. Seeing an issue and getting a notification for it can make repo owners feel inclined to answer. Just don't answer. You don't owe anyone anything.

______- 5y ago

I started appreciating single duty snippets of code instead of creating large abstractions that tie together multiple snippets of code that all work together. I do this to set myself up for success. (Think of it as making the rungs on a ladder closer together). I haven't fully gone no-code[0], but I am close to it. I also do this to avoid the burnout trap. Working on large projects is physically and mentally taxing and it's only over longer periods, you find the project is actually an insurmountable task. Then on top of this, FOSS is never finished. Only few projects have a finished feel to them, and even those require modifications and upgrades. This is why forking dead projects is always a great idea, and why FOSS succeeds. [0] https://bubble.io/blog/no-code-manifesto/ https://bubble.io/blog/no-code-manifesto/

ericholscher 5y ago

I had a similar moment where I almost gave up on Read the Docs, going as far as writing a similar post but never publishing it. I wrote about that experience here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-never-published/ https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve...

debarshri 5y ago

One of the observations I have had is supporting opensource on donations is not a model that works long term. It could have been true back in the 90s and early 2000s. But these days the tech shift happens at very fast rate. So if your opensource product or concept is successful in the market, you cannot compete with another product or a startup cloning you idea on donations. As coding and software development is getting democratized, if you have a concept that definitely has a market even though you are first to market. Other developers will build similar product and saturate the market, essentially diluting your value. For instance, I have been tracking Heroku style deployment tools in the market, there is like tons of opensource platform doing the same thing built by startup as well as individual developers. Same for opensource airtable clones.

ezekielchen 5y ago

I think this is the kind of problem that might be solved by tokenomics. Gitcoin (https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/) seems like a good step forward.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Dude, you spent your own free time which you barely had making software for others. You could've done anything else with that time and you spent it helping others. And now you have to take care of your mental health, because when you're burnt out or miserable you psychologically can't help others. You take time off for yourself now or eventually you'll physically and mentally break down and be forced to take time off. So even now your decision to care for yourself is actually for the benefit of others. You have nothing to be sorry for. Thank you for giving docz to the world, and I hope you feel better soon :)

maerF0x0 5y ago

Commenting more on the general pattern than specific case here, but sounds like the only failure here could have been to either 1) ask for help or 2) effectively delegate At some point a leader/entrepreneur has to get out of the way and open the path for others to do some/all of the lifting.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

steelframe 5y ago

For every single one of my Open Source projects, having an exit strategy has played a central part. This included setting clear expectations and boundaries around what the scope of the project is, defining "feature complete" to be below what some users are happy with, and making sure occasional contributors can fix the critical bugs. Millions of people are currently using what I've built, and I spend zero time on those projects any more. Life's too short to be a slave to anything.

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

First, no need to apologize! Then, I don't think this is a specific problem with open source. My view. The lack of knowledge about how to delegate work is a real problem. I mean, I worked with junior developers on the edge of breaking down while being on same team writing pointless games to pass time. I think this is more of an issue with young people enjoying the heights of the Dunning Kruger Effect.

AtNightWeCode 5y ago

ajarmst 5y ago

The only problem here is that the author perceives a need to apologize, or to even feel regret. If the only compensation for starting and maintaining an open source project is the work itself or personal use of the product, then you are your only customer. The moment it stops being fun or worth the effort, you have every right to just stop without feeling a tiny bit of guilt or remorse. You have a bug they want to fix or a feature they want to add and the author/maintainer is not doing it fast enough? Fork away! Submit a pull request! Oh, you don't have the skills/time to do that? Wow, that's too bad. Offer to pay the author! Post a message to the project list or bug reporting tool offering to pay someone to do it for you. Oh, you want it for free? Immediately? You built critical infrastructure around a tool you don't understand and don't have the skills or resources to maintain? You're a parasite, and can be safely muted and ignored. This is the important bit: If you're afraid the person maintaining your key infrastructure for free might suddenly stop doing that, just take some time to send them a nice note thanking them. Periodically getting one of those in your inbox is remarkably effective in maintaining passion for a project. Find a way to give them a gift. Do they have Venmo/Patreon/Amazon wish list? Use it. Are you a developer or do you employ some? Fix a bug. Say nice things about them in social media. Offer to help pay for the resources to host the project. Send them an effing Starbuck's card with your sincere thanks.

asim 5y ago

After 6 years of working on two open source projects full time (16k and 10k GitHub stars) I decided to close off issues and discussions. GitHub has a nice checkbox you can untick to remove that tab and I did it. It's a thankless job, one that's pretty stressful and it's unclear what you gain from letting people berate or complain at you about their problems. I think I mostly built these tools for myself anyway so it felt like the right time.

young_unixer 5y ago

And Github still doesn't allow you to disable pull requests or issues in a repository. If I had an open source project, I would not publish it on Githib precisely for this reason. Open source doesn't necessarily imply open development, or horizontal organization, or constant support, or anything. It just implies that the source is open. Plus, on the Internet it's very hard to tell when someone is demanding something from you from when someone is just making a suggestion.

rirze 5y ago
I'm pretty sure you can archive a repository and disable issues that way. I've seen that happen (unfortunately) to a few libraries I follow.
Nition 5y ago
You actually can disable issues now; I'm glad they finally added it as an option.[1] [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/managing-repository-settings/disabling-issues https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository...
sodality2 5y ago
I think issues are a great way to get people who are willing to maintain it, together and working on forking and getting on a single repo. Completely cutting it off is a bad idea. Perhaps disable notifications and pin an issue saying "I can no longer work on this project, feel free to fork it" and if people fork and good-faith maintain it, perhaps list it on the Readme or pinned issue.

Waterluvian 5y ago

Tangentially related: My personal opinion is that github UI should make it bloody obvious by default "this project does not provide support." Maybe even with the issue tracker disabled by default. There's a kind of pressure that can come from an unsolicited email of a real human explaining how your project is broken for them.

okareaman 5y ago

It seems like some open source maintainers need to learn the power of "no" and how to say it without guilt. My life improved when I learned I could say no without explanation. Like everyone says whenever this topic comes up, you don't owe anyone anything. Edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+say+no+without+feeling+guilty https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+say+no+without+feelin...

draw_down 5y ago

I don’t understand dhow people do this. It’s just an extra unpaid job on top of your real job. Your reward for your troubles is an endless litany of issues, complaints, requests, and maybe a nice message or two. Thanks but no thanks.

xtat 5y ago

This is the argument for UBI

sagarpatil 5y ago

I maintain a wordpress plugin that is actively used by 50,000+ websites and makes me $10,000+/month. Here's what has worked for me. - Provide a paid version + support: The free version on its own does everything. The paid version saves you time. I have a full time support staff that helps Premium customers (they get first priority) as well as Free customers but we won't hop on a call and provide you one-on-one support. That's simply not sustainable. - I've got bills: As much as I would love to provide everything for free, I can't. I don't have another job, maintaning the plugin and charging for support is how I make money. - Put money to good use: I use the money I make from the paid version to improve the free version. That way, its a win-win situation for all the parties involved.

jude- 5y ago

I think we need to stop seeing open-source development as a form of free-as-in-beer labor, and start seeing it as a form of professional empowerment. Nothing -- nothing! -- stops you from forking my code and making the changes yourself. You don't need to ask me to make the changes for you; you are not helpless. I've already solved 99% of one of your problems, and now I am empowering you to solve yours with 1% of the effort. Just because I release my code under an OSS license doesn't mean you're entitled to my time and attention. My labor is not free-as-in-beer, and I take a very dim view on wage theft. If you want me to care about your issues, you will pay me my consulting rate. If you harass me about it, I'll block you. Framing OSS development as empowering developers I think would remove a lot of the toxicity from OSS. Being involved in OSS should be about improving your effectiveness, not working for free for entitled Internet strangers. You owe it to yourself and the OSS development community to demand that you be paid for your time.