It's not just "being nice to devs" -- open source communities are utter shit for everyone.<p>My experience working on open-source projects, from a Product Manger perspective, is it sucks too.<p>To get it right, modern software takes a team. Everything from BAs, UX designers, QA, DevOps, etc.<p>But the projects aren't treated like a real project. Often it's a dev doing something on their own... often again it's to get away from the "team organizational structure" and just do something on their own. They don't get paid for it, they're just out to "hobby build" so why not play a bit. Test out some ideas.<p>But inevitably it's shit. They don't make decisions based on what's good for the customer (and the customers don't pay), they make decisions based on, "Do I have 20 hours to put in to get this right, or do I want to ignore the edge cases and just do the quick and dirty 30 second solution so I can move on to the next task I find fun?"<p>And the quality suffers. And that's OK, except the expectations are all set so high. "This is the open-source version of Microsoft Office!" or "This is a peer-to-peer replacement for Facebook!" and when a user hears that, and then goes to use it... and finds their expectations were totally mis-set... oof. They're pissy. "I put in all this time thinking it would do whatever basic thing Microsoft Office has done for 20 years... and it didn't do it... and I wasted a day trying... wasted a day looking at obsolete / poorly done documentation... and now I'm mad too!" Expectations need to be set better, and they never are. Everyone over promises based on a vision, not based on actual capabilities.<p>And when a QA person, or a product manager, volunteers to help... then herding devs, who "own" the project into best practices or a team-based workflow becomes a nightmare. Everyone is working on their own version of "off hours" on the project -- no way to sync a 9 to 5 schedule of any sort. Team meetings never happen; maybe you get together on Slack or something, but like very rare anyone is able to be like, "Hey let's all go bond and get a beer..." As a "leader" you can't enforce best practices -- and that's frustrating for everyone as the devs started the project to get away from management, and management gets burnt out trying to manage devs who don't want managers... Corners are cut, opportunities to bring in other talent are squandered because it's all about ego.<p>Long enough rant, but like... TL;DR: Open Source sucks. If you're gonna build something, start with a business plan. Make enough money to hire BAs to gather requirements, UX designers to build good flows, devs to build it, QAs to test it, managers to wear chinos, and support staff to handle the onslaught of shitty annoyed customers. And guess what, to make all this work... you'll need some sales guys too. Make it a business, you'll be a lot happier in the end. Fundamentally, if you're good at something... why are you giving it away for free?<p>Be Nice, but you can't really un-ring this bell. Fire is hot. Water is wet. The internet is mean. And working on Open Source projects is pretty much universally horrible.