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Why exactly do you care what the maintainer's motivations are if the result is a better application?

• bayindirh 4y ago
  Because of two reasons. First, the maintainers' attitude directly affects the community around the software being developed. I tend to involve in the community of the tools I use (bug reports, patches if I have time, feedback, etc.). If the maintainers or the BDFL is angry, this anger or harshness tend to spread, and both makes the project unpleasant to communicate with, and tend to drive wannabe contributors away. This generally happens silently, so it's hard to detect. This brings me to the second point. Motivation is the primary fuel of open source & free software projects. What happens when the angry people calms down? What happens differentiating features are merged to main? What happens the locomotives of the community have no more time to pursue their projects? If the community is not nice (or not have a healthy number of newcomers) and the steam runs out, the project just dies. As an example, I'm currently trying to help a tool I use, but its developer just lost interest to maintain. However, there's a small number of kind people who stepped up, and we try to get things rolling again. Many people won't have the motivation if the community is not nice to begin with. Lastly, while tangential, like the GP, I don't want to take sides, just want to read my emails.