3 ms·

Hard work and poor pay stresses out open-source maintainers

• h2odragon 5y ago
  > The bottom line is that, while there's a lot of joy to be found in working in open source, it gets old after a while. There's a thin line between love and hate. Besides being financially unrewarding, maintaining an open-source project is often stressful and thankless. There's a gap here, in what "maintaining an open source project" means. I published some code under GPL years ago, then life changed and things happened and I don't maintain those websites or think about that class of problems anymore. The code lived on in FreeBSD ports for years, and various other sources, and it appeared to have occasional users. I never "managed" that project beyond the bullshit necessary to get my employer to allow me to publish it in the first place, and yet it helped others and thereby satisfied the desire i had in the first place. More recently it feels as if offering a project on a "this may be of use to you, or not" basis is unacceptable; that anyone daring to share a thought with the world must be offering to dedicate themselves to the unrewarded service of others by doing so.