Starters and Maintainers

Open source is really hard.<p>* Sometimes, issues are just questions that belong on StackOverflow or any other forum online.<p>* Often people suggest pull requests that don&#x27;t really fit what you see as the roadmap for the project, you have to be polite and respectful.<p>* There&#x27;s the case of beginners trying to jump in, if your project is something that appeals to beginners (eg:Rails), you are in for a whole bunch of other issues supporting the getting-started.<p>* There&#x27;s a lot of stress involved with managing all of this, if you are alone in the project it can get pretty overwhelming.<p>* Finding collaborators on open source projects is not easy as well, most of the times the project README doesn&#x27;t suggest that collaborators are welcome and appreciated.<p>* Forking creates a lot of fragmentation.<p>* I can think of many projects that lost the steam. Resque is the perfect example for me, even with new contributors it failed to get going and Sidekiq won.<p>* We still need to figure out a reward system for open source to prevent maintainers from losing steam along the way.

&gt;Well, so much for catching up on these issues tonight. Maybe I’ll just add DEPRECATED to the README, that’ll fix it.<p>Please, please, if you have too many projects like the author or myself, put a huge note in the README that it&#x27;s not maintained. If you&#x27;re lucky, there&#x27;ll be an active fork you can point people to.<p>I wish GitHub had a proper UI for deprecating&#x2F;abandoning projects and setting another fork as the canonical source.

I empathize with the author. The root of the problem can be interpreted as the fact that a well maintained production-ready library is almost an engulfing charity service for the author. Ironically, economically, the optimal solution is for the masses benefitting from the library to return some of that benefit (perhaps in monetary form) to the author. But culturally this is not what free-software is about...<p>That&#x27;s the irony and inefficiency of open-source software.

I make 2 compromises in my open source software work in order to keep up with all the projects I start and at least do a decent job maintaining <i>some</i> of it:<p>1. I don&#x27;t support old stuff. No old operating systems, no old dependencies, no old compilers, etc. The answer to all support requests of the sort is &quot;sorry, I don&#x27;t have the time or funding to support versions below XYZ.&quot;<p>2. I&#x27;m not afraid to roll the major version number of my software. If I make a design mistake, I fix it without regard for backward compatibility, and then I don&#x27;t support older versions.<p>These two things really make a big difference in lowering the difficulty of support without compromising the quality of at least the latest version of code. And if the users are using the latest version of everything and need support, great! They probably have such a similar environment to my own that I&#x27;ll have no problem reproducing their issues.

&gt; 9 new issues since I last checked. 2 new pull requests. Hopefully most of the issues can be closed, and the pull requests are trivial. Ugh, nope, these are some significant changes. I’m going to have to think about this and engage (politely) in a long discussion. They also didn’t update the docs, and this is a breaking change, so we’ll have to figure out how to tell everyone to upgrade.<p>&gt;&#x2F;...&#x2F; who am I kidding, that would just stress me out more. It’s not like I always have time to respond. At least now I can pretend like this doesn’t exist when other things are stressing me out.&quot;<p>So much this. This is why most of my opensource projects come in the form of &quot;Here&#x27;s the code, if you don&#x27;t like it, fork it and maintain your own damn fork&quot;. In 5 years of putting code on GitHub I&#x27;ve probably merged less than 10 pull requests on projects that don&#x27;t directly put food on the table.

Another interesting wrinkle is that starters often get the credit or notoriety for the project, even if there is a large group of others now maintaining and supporting the project. Not to say that the project starters have abandoned the project or did anything nefarious, but when you think of projects like Rails or Backbone -- you think of DHH or Jeremy Ashkenas, not necessarily the other core committers now involved.

Lol I just read this after a &quot;break&quot; working on my winter break on a project I &quot;started&quot; almost three years ago. I checked in with the community and it turns out they&#x27;re still using the junk I made years ago, it&#x27;s helping people be really productive, but nobody understands how to modernize it.<p>So here I sit three years after &quot;starting&quot; the project and basically going back to work. Now I&#x27;ve spent the last 8 days straight coding about 6 to 10 hours a day on my vacation to &quot;start&quot; it again, but way cleaner. My two goals are, one I want my wife to be able to use it (ease of use) and second I want to empower the guy who picked it up to be great at maintaining it after I eventually return to the real world.<p>I learned years ago that I am good at the blank page, the staring back at you empty cursor is my favorite time. The clay is fresh and the images dance in my head of all the potential of that flashing cursor. I&#x27;m not the guy who really enjoys wading in up to my ears into a million lines of code and refactoring it to some new vision. I can do that but it doesn&#x27;t get me out of bed every day at 5am on my &quot;vacation&quot;.

If you&#x27;re going to abandon a project why not just add collaborators? Add anyone that submits a PR. Let them take over the future vision of the project if you&#x27;re no longer interested in it. I think that&#x27;s good policy anyways, anyone who takes the time to submit a PR (and I deal with so many people who submit a million issues but never will make even the slightest change) has an investment in the project that you may no longer have. Let them own it.

&gt; I’m going to be clear that code I put on github is experimental and I’m not going to respond to issues or pull requests<p>Stating the project maturity is nice but not that important - it&#x27;s pretty easy to glance through a repo&#x27;s code, commits, issues and PRs and judge the project&#x27;s maturity and how many people are using it and how likely ongoing investment is to occur over the next couple years. You can also look at the maintainer&#x27;s online presence, blog, talks, social media (be it a person, a team, a corporation, startup or nonprofit). Pretty easy to predict what their priorities are and will be.<p>People get bit by project maturity only once, and i figure by this time next year it will be common knowledge that for your random semi-popular github project on social media, maintenance is never implied unless promised, and even then not really unless everyone&#x27;s incentives align.

Maybe that could be a solution: a platform enabling people to offer paid support for their open source projects – <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10805236" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10805236</a><p>When things become popular, it would be much easier to find and recruit maintainers if there was some regular monthly income attached to it.

I&#x27;ve started projects that were contextual to the stuff I was working on at the time, but once I stopped working on it, there really wasn&#x27;t much point in maintaining the projects anymore. I feel quite bad about it, but I can&#x27;t remove it either since I show it to potential recruiters as well.<p>Even funnier was one of my projects gained interest in the Android community, and I don&#x27;t even do any Android stuff, which made it almost impossible to support them.<p>Definitely a tip of the hat goes out to those who stay the course and maintains the projects they start. It&#x27;s a gruelling journey

The thing is, people want their new project to get popular, because it validates them and is great portfolio and is motivating to work on, but you can&#x27;t just stop once you have users. a lot of maintainers just quit when they got the users and used them for what they wanted. That&#x27;s not very cool. So I don&#x27;t think the project maturity is so important but rather that the project maturity not go backwards. If you&#x27;re promoting your stuff on social media, positioning your work to be used by beginners, it needs to be maintained at that level until the users move on. I&#x27;m not aiming at anyone in particular right now, im just saying as a thought experiment, what if you make some great thing library and everybody loves it then a year later some idea gets back ported from Elm or ClojureScript and now someone else&#x27;s stuff is exploding. Are you gonna move to the shiny thing and burn the people who believed in you? It&#x27;s an impossible choice. I think a lot of people are gonna get burned on this in the next two years and JavaScript world will move back towards frameworks rather than libraries.

99% of noise is from email notifications for conversations on issues.<p>Turning off Github Issues is the easiest way to change the expectations.<p>On another note, GitHub Issues should be Opt-In instead of Opt-Out for Repo owners.

There was this interesting thread a while ago of someone deciding to give commit rights to anyone who made a pull request. As I remember it, it works out well for the author: Less maintainer time, and the quality of the PRs improved immediately. Unfortunately, I have not been able to dig up the thread.

This reminds me somewhat of &quot;Commandos, Infantry, and Police&quot; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;commandos-infantry-and-police&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.codinghorror.com&#x2F;commandos-infantry-and-police&#x2F;</a>

This resonated with me so deeply. I have played this conversation over and over in my head, wondering &quot;why?&quot; ... but somebody has to. It&#x27;s often a labor of necessity, not love.

I had similar feelings, so I don&#x27;t open source things anymore. I wrote about it here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brianknapp.me&#x2F;open-source-guilt&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;brianknapp.me&#x2F;open-source-guilt&#x2F;</a><p>For me, open source projects aren&#x27;t worth my free time. I&#x27;m fine with giving code away. I&#x27;m less fine maintaining it years later.

Aside from the different &quot;tipping&quot; services, is there a way open source authors and maintainers can raise funds <i>without</i> doing crowdfunding? Something that let&#x27;s them sell something to raise funds like when schools sell chocolates? (:

If you don&#x27;t have a vision for your open source project, then I agree that you probably shouldn&#x27;t be maintaining it - In this case, it&#x27;s better to hand it over to a different maintainer who does have a vision.

Please just keep maintaining nunjucks :)