To riff on this I think this weird expectation of projects to "grow" is a side effect of the increasing corporate influence on F/OSS.

So many conference talks' second slide is a "numbers" slide wit how many github stars, active contributors and other vanity metrics. It strikes me that the point is not just to convey that the project has an ecosystem behind it (with the implication there being that you can get free feature development and support), but to hit some sort of weird OKR-ish goal set.

>To riff on this I think this weird expectation of projects to "grow" is a side effect of the increasing corporate influence on F/OSS.

Or it's because in the end people like being popular and always have. Social standing, social cred and all that. I mean, look at all the people who obsess about their instagram or twitter follower counts. Being a FOSS developer doesn't remove all the usual human drives and desires that most people have.

Right, but human propensity to seek status hasn't changed, and if anything it's been amplified by corporate interests more than simply just the internet's ability to connect.

> instagram or twitter follower counts. Being a FOSS developer doesn't remove all the usual human drives and desires that most people have.

This is corporate influence. Those companies are manipulating that innate status-seeking behavior and amplifying it. In my opinion most F/OSS developers or most creative subcultures clout chase in different ways but it's usually not so overt and it certainly isn't trying to show "hockey stick growth" on slide #2.

I'd argue that for most F/OSS developers making cool (and maybe some overly complicated) things used to be the main way to clout chase, until some corporations came along and helped us "connect" but also sought to make profit from those connections and encourage the connecting.

Let's take HN for an example -- how do people clout chase here? HN's major moderation innovation/advantage is that they've tried their hardest to make clout chasing here equivalent to submitting interesting projects/products/thought/discussion. I'm sure they have the metrics internally, but I just never see HN bragging about how much "engagement" they get.

Open source developers presumably tend to work on projects that they genuinely like and are passionate about. Aiming to help as many people as possible in a subject you're passionate about seems extremely natural to me.

Agreed, this is something that is incredibly obvious when there's no money involved. It's naive, wasteful in a sense (your time could theoretically be used for other things), but that's the open source that everyone respects/admires.

Every once in a while I go back and think of the origins of the F/OSS movement -- the idea is insane on it's face. Labor to make software, then give it away, and license it in a way that anyone who uses it is also forced to give it away? Who would fund/contribute to such a thing? How insane I think that concept is assurance that I consider myself a capitalist on the economic policy spectrum.

I was told that internally at Redhat if you’re assigned to a project and the project becomes unsupported by the company, you have a certain amount of time to be picked up by another team, after which, if you aren’t, you are let go.

I know that this is kinder than just firing someone outright if the project they were on failed, but the thought of it makes me feel uncomfortable.

This is more or less also how IBM operates. I know someone who had to interview for other teams at IBM because their other IBM project ended. After a while of trying to navigate the politics of it all they just gave up on IBM completely.

Sorry maybe I don't have my moral sensors tuned properly today but would you mind explaining what makes you feel uncomfortable about it?

Is it more because RedHat carries itself like a consultancy than other large enterprise businesses? Is it that the possibility of being let go after a large project that you performed a relatively specialized role on feels just about right for a consultancy, but not for a business that carries themselves like a long term player? I feel like I'd expect this behavior from Pivotal for example (not implying that they'd do that).

> Is it that the possibility of being let go after a large project that you performed a relatively specialized role on feels just about right for a consultancy, but not for a business that carries themselves like a long term player?

This. Someone there could hire me onto a project that fails for some reason out of my control, and then, because I’m older, I wouldn’t get picked up by another team.

I don’t know if project-pickup retention is still how they operate; it’s several-year-old anecdotal information from a past worker there before they were acquired by IBM.

My goal with Datasette is to grow a plugin ecosystem that provides a wide range of extra feature which I didn't have to build myself - so in my case I have a strong incentive to attract more users for non-vanity reasons.

This riff was much less about Datasette and more about other projects (let's say the latest CNCF incubation stage project). Not that I'm important but I distinguish small-ish (or even projects that have grown larger) trying to publicize to attract more talent, but that smells different than large professional-looking efforts for open-core software or shareware which I often also see. Someone putting a "hey we're 1000 strong, come join us and contribute" at FOSSDEM is different than a company with some light VC funding talking about Github stars and "engagement" at Kubecon.

Datasette is a great project and in the traditional F/OSS sense is delivering an intense amount of value off the backs of passionate volunteers (for better or for worse) -- Thanks for making it and persisting in making it better.

Office hours working great for Datasette is fantastic (thanks for sharing) and you arguably an objective benefit to the world with the amount you've already created and released. I don't think it's right for every single open source project but more power to you. This riff definitely wasn't meant to poo-poo your approach.

I understand that, but a person new to the development world might see this as something expected for anyone starting an open source project.

I don't mean to exaggerate or make an unfair comparison, but I had very similar experiences 15 years ago when I was considering being interested in trying to get a contribution (any contribution) merged into the linux kernel. That process is so off-putting I lost interest. Granted, kernel development is an entirely different beast and I understand (better now after a career) why it's partly the way it is.

I think I'm rambling - tl;dr: this sort of attitude is off-putting from open source, even as someone who's been in software a long time.