News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why you should become an open source sustainer by kristianc on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @01:42PM (#14099909)
This reads like an attempt to justify not contributing himself. I read the same thing from sales guys all the time trying to draw analogies between sales guys and engineers. If only projects could run on blog posts and lightning talks...
Re:Why you should become an open source sustainer by jdorfman on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @02:12PM (#14100230)
FWIW I maintain multiple open source projects and a free CDN service for developers that use Bootstrap & Font Awesome. To me, a contribution is not limited to code and never should be. If it makes the FOSS community thrive, then that is a contribution.
Re:Why you should become an open source sustainer by xemdetia on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @03:31PM (#14100972)
If you've never lived on freenode or one of the other support networks the community that develops open source is often very remote from the people that end up 'supporting' it. People sharing expertise is why databases like MySQL and Postgres win for all sorts of people, and there are many ways to provide this support that has nothing to do with contributing code.

A great example is melpa and marmalade for emacs. The difference between having a package manager and not having a package manager has transformed the open source project but all they are doing is mirroring a bunch of elisp.

Sometimes just providing the infrastructure to make a project available is the only reason why the project is popular. npm anyone?

Re:Why you should become an open source sustainer by Underqualified on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @03:55PM (#14101141)
There's a reason most companies have more than just engineers though.