[crystal_revenge]

> Having your OSS library take off

All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.

I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.

Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.

Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.

In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).

OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.

[esperent]

> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.

Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".

There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?

[Aurornis]

> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".

The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.

The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.

To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.

[ranger_danger]

I have a lot of experience with the latter kind of maintainer... some have even quit their own projects after realizing a fork existed that they don't like (especially if it's good enough to take users away from the original), but those forks were always born out of necessity when the original maintainer was toxic to work with or just kept ignoring or outright refusing PRs/issues over personal/ideological reasons.

I really don't understand why so many people will choose a specific license, and then get upset when people do exactly what it allows them to do.

[didgetmaster]

I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when <corporation> doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.

[ranger_danger]

In my experience with exactly what parent comment discussed... it's not effective. In fact, the company may even (which I have witnessed personally multiple times) blatantly violate your OSS license to incorporate it into their proprietary money-making product, because they know they can get away with it... most lone devs do not have the money or willpower to attack a corporation, even if they could win.

Usually I see those lone devs either ignoring them entirely, or ragequitting open-source altogether.

[blitzar]

"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"

[ozim]

That's what we do in closed source corporate code.

[CatMustard]

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"

"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."

"Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

[saghm]

I'd be tempted to try to trick them into merging a small change so then they're the new owner and have to figure it out themselves.

[CatMustard]

The Passing of the Curse

[didgetmaster]

Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.

[ozim]

Mostly it is that you don’t go around fixing random stuff.

You might actually get in trouble picking up stuff that is not a priority.

Company I work for is less strict so we do “fix anything Friday”.

But for some other companies you might get a slap on the wrist for not following the plan and product owners pick what gets fixed and what not based on business plan. If there are big customers nagging - bug will be fixed asap.

[Isamu]

Yeah at work I’m paid to own some components that I didn’t write and don’t entirely understand, so I figure my job is to help discover answers for the questions that arise.

I would not want to be a public maintainer though. I don’t have the patience or motivation to use my spare time for that.

[sph]

I like this, turning software maintenance into a long-running game of tag.

[zrail]

I like to refer to it as the cooties ownership model. I.e. once you touch it you have cooties.

[Aurornis]

Jia Tan has entered the chat. (Jia Tan was the alias used by the group that backdoored XZ utils by becoming a maintainer)

My other comment in this thread has more details, but in my experience it’s more common to encounter projects that don’t want new maintainers or forks. They’re happy with the status quo with their name at the top but also don’t want to let go of control or see competing forks created.

[ErroneousBosh]

That's how I ended up with FlaskBB I guess.

[darubedarob]

"Pikaboo maintainer is who last touched it. Patch is wellcome!"

[notarobot123]

Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.

Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?

An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.

[PaulRobinson]

I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.

However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?

[pona-a]

I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.

[Hendrikto]

It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim.

In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you.

(I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be neutral, and only involve themselves as far as required by law.)

[pona-a]

I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.

In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.

[0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

[DANmode]

Any recent/recognizable examples of this?

They’re on my radar as an alternative.

Thanks!

[pona-a]

See my sibling comment. (TL;DR: they banned most cryptocurrency projects with 2 months advance notice)

[marcosdumay]

We had scale with friction before GitHub was a thing.

It wasn't perfect, but you were required to do things like subscribing to mail lists if you wanted to interact with a project.

[PaulRobinson]

What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.

If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?

Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?

[throw-12-16]

I recently unpublished a couple libraries because I was so fed up with maintaining them.

Lot's of entitled "I want to speak to the manager" types ruined it for me.

[didip]

Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real.

And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.

[MasterScrat]

Exactly - best case scenario is Reddit/HN front page with a cool project you enjoyed working on, have some nice conversations there, reach a few 100s stars which look good on your CV, and that’s it.

If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.

[jimnotgym]

Maybe that is the answer. Put a note in your readme setting out your terms.

1) If you want to send a PR we charge $1000 to review them. This is no guarantee that we will merge. We will quote any further costs needed after a review.

2) Feature requests should be accompanied by a $250 quotation fee. Then we will scope and quote what is required to do your feature. If your feature would compromise the project, or is impractical a started we retain the right to refuse to quote or suggest more work is required. The $250 fee is non returnable.

Something like that?

[bob1029]

I have started a new OSS project and intend to provide optional enterprise offerings on top. I really don't care if someone steals the ideas presented in code because they're actually fairly pedestrian. The much bigger concern for me is the fact that if I do not make my source open by default, I will have a very hard time developing trust in the community and prospective customers. I know I nearly instantly walk away from the "provide your info to download our white paper PDF" sales experiences in 2025.

It is also helpful to remember that 100% of $0 is still $0. And that .001% of a trillion dollar TAM is still a pretty big deal.

[tacker2000]

This is pretty much the only way open source doesnt lead to burnout and continues to be maintained, and a lot of projects are doing this already successfully.

Get “street cred” in the dev space by being open source, and let the enterprise customers “pay” for it.

[gcanyon]

I maintain Navigator, a development tool I started over twenty years ago; I am the only contributor to the open source repository [1]. I have rewritten drag and drop in that thing four times (because drag and drop in Livecode [2] is a bit of a hack). It's a pain every time. I'm not rewriting it again.

1. https://github.com/gcanyon/navigator

2. https://livecode.com

[didgetmaster]

I have a side project that I have worked on for years, mainly because I enjoy writing software. I get an adrenaline rush when I can make my data management system do things better and/or faster than other things on the market.

I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.

So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.

[tor825gl]

A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position:https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...

It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).

Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.

[bmitch3020]

Absolutely. I say that being an OSS maintainer is a job, which can easily become a full time job, where the pay is often non-existent. If you have a separate full time job, you now have to choose:

1. Work two jobs until you burn out.

2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.

3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.

I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.

[darubedarob]

You can always sell it out for exploits? The price for oss wage is (incident -1 $)