[travisjungroth]

One of the problems with OSS burnout is this many-to-one relationship with the users and maintainer. It’s sort of like the relationship between an outfielder and the bleacher crowd at a baseball game.

Maintainers get requests to do things they have no interest in, like maintaining software for OSes past a certain date. That doesn’t sound so bad, but there are a lot, and they can even be mean. The maintainer can block these users individually, but it’s different users all the time, so that doesn’t stop it.

So, the maintainer addresses the user base, the whole crowd all at once. The problem is most of these users haven’t seen these interactions, so the message seems hostile. Having someone say “I owe you nothing.” seems really weird when you’ve never asked them for anything. Or, if they list of all the ways and reasons for you to not contact them it looks hostile. The users don’t see the fan next to them throwing a beer can at the center fielder.

[KennyBlanken]

It's not burnout. The homebrew team have been insufferable and egotistical for a long time.

Max Howell (founder of homebrew) went to interview at Google, shoved a coding exercise back in their faces, made a snotty comment about how all the engineers at Google using Macs use his code and how dare they blah blah greatest engineer in the world blah blah, and walked out the door.

That coding exercise was likely given to him precisely because all the google engineers had a lot of experience using brew, or they did it as ego check to see if he'd be insufferable to work with.

Howell failed to realize that and instead went and bragged about it on twitter, almost certainly confirming for the hiring committee that things had worked exactly as designed.

Whole lot of fucking sass from a man who either didn't care or didn't know about the security implications of making a directory in the default path user-writeable, thus making probably hundreds of thousands of developer's systems less secure:

https://infotoast.org/site/index.php/2021/05/30/homebrew-is-...

[rfrey]

This is very reductive. For anyone not familiar with the story, Howell's experience at Google was the original source of the "Invert a binary tree on the whiteboard" meme. Opinions on his experience were all over the map, with very thoughtful people defending Google and other thoughtful people criticizing them.

And for what it's worth, Howell did say he regretted his tweet, and that he wasn't up to snuff technically (in the Quora link in a sibling comment to this one).

[johnsea]

I am glad that there are people like Max Howell who write such (for me) great package managers. In opposite to what you write, here in a quote reply he comes across as very friendly: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin... PS: if really a lot of Googlers use brew I hope they also generously support the project (do. Apple)

[walteweiss]

Great as in ‘I’ve never tried anything else’ great?

[johnsea]

choco, apt, zypper, MacPorts