Most of my git repos are things where I'm happy if someone finds something useful, but for several of them I'm very explicit that there are a whole lot of things I will plain refuse to merge not because I think they're not great or useful, but because I don't want my packages to be everything for everyone - I'd rather people took my stuff and built a "competing" solution with different tradeoffs if they have different needs. I'd happily even offer help and suggestions if people want to do that.

I think that a lot of projects would be a lot better if they insisted on not solving everything, and stuck to solving one problem well, and instead of merging every new feature on offer instead help make it easier for others to "compete" with them by e.g. separating out shared functionality or writing about lessons learned...

I'd love to find each and every one of my projects are no longer needed because there's a better option (now, I may be very difficult about what is "better", so that's a tall order), because my list of projects I'd like to pursue is longer than I will stand any chance of getting to in my lifetime, so if some are taken off my plate, awesome...

Projects would do well to adopt your views, I believe that always leads to a better product.

Age for example always has someone complaining about a feature they want - the refusal to oblige is exactly why it's a better product than gpg.

I never heard of "Age" before this post. Thank you to share. If others are interested to learn more, here are two other interesting posts about Age:

https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/discussions/432

https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/age-authentication/

I'd guess a significant proportion of OSS maintainers _are_ in it for some combination of ego-trip, or a misguided belief that it will make them rich. Both outcomes may seem less likely if you're just fixing somebody else's software for free.

What have you seen that would lead you to believe that?

My own experiences with open source suggest that no one would stick around for very long if they were motivated by fame or wealth. Being a FOSS maintainer seems to be a constant exercise in dealing with people whining at you for not fixing their problems for free, not something that brings any significant personal attention and certainly not something that provides a sustainable source of income.

Is it really so misguided these days? I see plenty of developers making decent amounts of money via GitHub sponsors, patreon and others. Could be pretty nice if a project gains momentum. And it's ethical: no ads, no proprietary software, nothing.

Can confirm. I wrote an OS library once for a thing. It started getting popular, then suddenly a large, well known project shipped an alternative solution (competitor?). It was the best thing ever to happen to my project. I got what I wanted (what my library aimed to solve) and no longer had to be the maintainer for that thing.

I'd be less interested if in order to fix a new issue related to my problem, that I had spend weeks to learn a whole new language, dev env, build system, etc just to add a feature that would have taken me 15 mins in the language I'm used to.

Of course I'd love to learn rust! But, for the most part, I just need to get stuff done so I'd prefer to stick with what I know and can mod easily and leave the "learn an entire new language" part for something that actually needed that language.