Re:The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer
by zbentley on Saturday September 16, 2017 @12:27AM
(#15262867)
This was pleasantly nuanced and comprehensive. The gamut of reactions to license changes is always a fascinating roller coaster.
The "most maintainers have very little to lose" point is one that isn't emphasized often enough. For every famous, high-profile FOSS developer who gives big swaths of their life to their projects, there are dozens or hundreds of people who are: a) contributing stuff they build for their job that they convinced the company to open source (hopefully out of good will, and not out of "maybe community PRs can fix our garbage fire") b) contributing code they wrote while learning something new for personal or professional enrichment, or c) just doing it as a fun activity.
The give-your-life-to-a-project folks are important, and prolific. Hats off to them. But so are all those other contributors. They might write less code than the lifers, but their code isn't any worse because they spend fewer hours per week developing it; it just takes longer to get written. And there are a lot more "casual" FOSS developers than lifers. Many FOSS projects started out in that "casual" realm before they became household names today. Sure, a lot of people think some of those casual projects aren't great, but that's not unique to small FOSS projects (cf. systemd).
All this is to say: be careful when communicating, especially negatively, with FOSS maintainers. If ethics and basic decency isn't reason enough to treat your fellow humans with compassion, try self-interest: a lot of these people are so un-invested in the projects you depend on for your {fun|living|freedom from the soulless void of the blinking cursor in an empty terminal} that your "How could you be so stupid?" or "Guess this project has gone to hell" comment on their GitHub PR might be enough to make them abandon it entirely.
Edit[s]: I accidentally some words and punctuation marks.
The "most maintainers have very little to lose" point is one that isn't emphasized often enough. For every famous, high-profile FOSS developer who gives big swaths of their life to their projects, there are dozens or hundreds of people who are: a) contributing stuff they build for their job that they convinced the company to open source (hopefully out of good will, and not out of "maybe community PRs can fix our garbage fire") b) contributing code they wrote while learning something new for personal or professional enrichment, or c) just doing it as a fun activity.
The give-your-life-to-a-project folks are important, and prolific. Hats off to them. But so are all those other contributors. They might write less code than the lifers, but their code isn't any worse because they spend fewer hours per week developing it; it just takes longer to get written. And there are a lot more "casual" FOSS developers than lifers. Many FOSS projects started out in that "casual" realm before they became household names today. Sure, a lot of people think some of those casual projects aren't great, but that's not unique to small FOSS projects (cf. systemd).
All this is to say: be careful when communicating, especially negatively, with FOSS maintainers. If ethics and basic decency isn't reason enough to treat your fellow humans with compassion, try self-interest: a lot of these people are so un-invested in the projects you depend on for your {fun|living|freedom from the soulless void of the blinking cursor in an empty terminal} that your "How could you be so stupid?" or "Guess this project has gone to hell" comment on their GitHub PR might be enough to make them abandon it entirely.
Edit[s]: I accidentally some words and punctuation marks.