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SUPPORT.txt: setting expectations between open-source maintainers and users

3 pointsby signalsmithover 2 years ago

2 comments

signalsmithover 2 years ago
OP here - fairly nervous about posting this, but just to give some context of where this is coming from:<p>A decade ago, I got interested in JSON Schema, and at the time there was no JavaScript validator. I quickly knocked one together and shared it. It took a couple of hours, and was 460 lines plus a bunch of tests.<p>Only a few years after that, it had grown into a much bigger project. Other people were contributing, but I was still the lead developer. I had my own personal life going on (and other projects), and started to feel tied to this thing, like I wasn&#x27;t allowed to leave. I wanted to be a responsible maintainer, but it wasn&#x27;t fun any more.<p>Maybe someone with more experience (or a different brain) could have sustained this project indefinitely, but I eventually hit open-source burnout. I didn&#x27;t sign into GitHub for several years, because I couldn&#x27;t handle seeing the little notification icon. In retrospect I should have stepped back in a more proactive way (reaching out to regular maintainers first, and then putting a notice on the repo if nobody stepped up), but by the time things got bad I couldn&#x27;t face it.<p>The license had standard boilerplate saying: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED &quot;AS IS&quot; - but that&#x27;s a legal disclaimer, not a social one. The package was (and still is) being downloaded millions of times per week on NPM, and those people had a (reasonable!) expectation that a popular and relatively-established package would be maintained, and bugs would be fixed.<p>There&#x27;s a tension between the two sides, and this discussion has happened a few times recently. Some open-source developers want to provide reliable tools, and some others say <i>&quot;this is free work, you shouldn&#x27;t expect anything&quot;</i>. Some open-source users say <i>&quot;you published this, so you wanted me to use it, and that comes with obligations&quot;</i>, and these disagreements can get quite heated.<p>Sharing code is fun, but I think the default assumptions should have more explicit limits, and a natural path to stepping back. I&#x27;m not fixated on this particular format, but I would like to see what happens if a missing SUPPORT.txt raised as many questions as a missing LICENSE.
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quectophotonover 2 years ago
Obligatory link to Rich Hickey&#x27;s (creator of Clojure) &quot;Open Source Is Not About You&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;richhickey&#x2F;1563cddea1002958f96e7ba9519972d9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;richhickey&#x2F;1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...</a>