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by zapita 1701 days ago
A good article making solid points. The bottleneck is indeed scarce maintainer labor. Money is an important factor but not the only factor.

I found the Github product placement distracting. At the 3d mention of a Github product, I checked, and sure enough: the author works at Github.

3 comments

Fair point here, I've added a caveat in https://github.com/MikeMcQuaid/mikemcquaid.com/commit/d70880...

Context:

- I've only ever been an open source maintainer for projects on GitHub (including before I worked there)

- I'd still recommend those tools primarily if I didn't work at GitHub (because of personal preferences to e.g. not run my own servers)

- This blog post was a companion to a talk I presented at GitHub's Universe conference this week

To be fair, a lot of open source projects are hosted on GitHub and advising the use of freely available resources to lighten the burden on scarce maintainer labor doesn’t seem outrageous to me.

A disclaimer would be appropriate, but the content seemed fine to me.

The author is also maintainer of the Homebrew package manager, which has an atypical “funnel” and which practises its own, fairly blunt way of dealing with users. I wouldn’t necessarily extrapolate Homebrew’s experience to other projects.