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I'll agree with thankless. But I'm confused about "pays peanuts," because unless you get hired by a company paying you to work on open source software, or have

I'll agree with thankless. But I'm confused about "pays peanuts," because unless you get hired by a company paying you to work on open source software, or have somehow cracked the code to acquiring extremely generous patrons (donations), I would say being an open source maintainer typically pays nothing at all. Which is fine for a lot of us who consider it a hobby and would never _want_ to be paid for it. I also have to believe that if it's a true open source project (meaning, without commercial aspirations), then any stress must be self-induced. FLOSS authors don't owe anyone features, bug fixes, or explanations. And any that are delivered are totally voluntary.

bee_rider 2y ago
I totally agree with this but haven’t actually maintained any open source projects. Have you? For me at least, it is easy to say the, I’m quite sure, objectively correct thing. Open source hobby projects have no obligation to anybody, just release code for fun, and anybody who expects more is the problem and should be ignored. But there are lots of reports of burnout and stress. So I think there must be strong social pressure that people fall to, despite not having any legal or ethical obligations. I mean for most of time, all of pre-history, humans got by with informal social structures and a feeling of wanting to provide their friends continued help, despite a lack of a real state or legal framework, and mostly informal ethics. So it isn’t that surprising that people feel like they have a real obligation to users when they’ve been working on a project for a while, right? Helping others is a human instinct.