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Surely this depends on your goals? If you are an OSS maintainer who wants to build a succesful project used by a lot of people and companies and that has much

Surely this depends on your goals? If you are an OSS maintainer who wants to build a succesful project used by a lot of people and companies and that has much mindshare, etc. etc. then yes, you will need to evaluate people's opinions, listen to them, and decide when it's in your interest to fix something or change the design or whatever. Because then keeping people interested in and using your project and in fact growing their numbers is your goal, so obviously you will need to attract and work with them. If you released some code you wrote that was useful to you and sometimes update it or fix it for others because the fix is easy or helps you too or you just feel nice, then the calculation might look a bit different.

invalidname 4y ago
IMHO That's not an OSS maintainer. That's a code dump. I don't mind those, but you don't need even an issue tracker for that...
- scatters 4y ago
  An issue tracker on a code dump is useful for users to share information about bugs, workarounds and forks.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    Yeah, some code dumps aren’t entirely unmaintained, but that doesn’t make their owners beholden to anyone.
disruptiveink 4y ago
Then turn off the issue tracker and DON'T call yourself an "OSS maintainer". Or leave the issue tracker open but make it explicit on your readme this is just a personal project that's not being actively developed so people adjust their expectations. Personal projects or unfinished work on GitHub are perfectly fine and in most cases, better to the world than something stashed on your hard drive, but you're not running any OSS project there. Feels to me some people want to have their cake (claim they "contribute to open source" on their CV/interviews) and eat it too (not have to actually do any work that comes with running an OSS project).
- barnabee 4y ago
  OSS maintainer = anyone who controls an open source repo, no? If you say that you “contribute to open source” I only assume that you write code and release it. If you also project manage and triage and support a “serious” / large open source project, great — put that on your CV too.

invalidname 4y ago

IMHO That's not an OSS maintainer. That's a code dump. I don't mind those, but you don't need even an issue tracker for that...

scatters 4y ago
An issue tracker on a code dump is useful for users to share information about bugs, workarounds and forks.
- barnabee 4y ago
  Yeah, some code dumps aren’t entirely unmaintained, but that doesn’t make their owners beholden to anyone.

disruptiveink 4y ago

Then turn off the issue tracker and DON'T call yourself an "OSS maintainer". Or leave the issue tracker open but make it explicit on your readme this is just a personal project that's not being actively developed so people adjust their expectations. Personal projects or unfinished work on GitHub are perfectly fine and in most cases, better to the world than something stashed on your hard drive, but you're not running any OSS project there. Feels to me some people want to have their cake (claim they "contribute to open source" on their CV/interviews) and eat it too (not have to actually do any work that comes with running an OSS project).

barnabee 4y ago
OSS maintainer = anyone who controls an open source repo, no? If you say that you “contribute to open source” I only assume that you write code and release it. If you also project manage and triage and support a “serious” / large open source project, great — put that on your CV too.