I am a contributor to Open-Source software(Jina - an AI search framework) and I am annoyed with how some people make fun of the sheer hard work of open-source developers.<p>For the last 1 yr, we had made our contributors team meetings public(everyone could listen and participate during the meeting). And this is what happened in our last meeting - While we were sharing news about upcoming Jina 2.0 release in the zoom meeting, some loud racist music starts playing automatically and someone starts drawing a d<i>ck on the screen.<p>It was demotivating to say the least.
Building open-source project is challenging at multiple fronts other than the core technical challenges<p>- Understand what needs to be built<p>- Improve that continuously<p>- Help people understand the project<p>- Educate people about the domain<p>- Reach out people who might benefit from your
project<p>- Collaborate with other contributors<p>- Deal with issues/PRs<p>- Deal with outdated versions/docs<p>- Deal with different opinions<p>- Sometimes deal with jerks like the ones who zoombombed us<p>The list is long! Open-source is hard!
Open-source exists because of some good people out there like you/me who care about the open-source so deeply to invest their time and energy for a little good for everyone else. It exists because of communities like Hackernews where we can find the support and the motivation.<p>I wanted to vent out my negative experiences and wanted to say a big *Thank you* to you all open-source people, thanks to many(1.6k) contributors who made it possible for us to release [Jina 2.0](https://github.com/jina-ai/jina/) .<p>I'd want to know your opinion, how do you deal with such unexpected events and how do you keep yourself motivated as an open-source developer?</i>
I'm very sorry for what happened, hopefully it does not happen again. From your response I gathered a few things, that contributing to open source seems to be taking a toll on. You may want to look at monitizing (github sponsor) or taking a break (or simply slowing down) from open source.<p>The actions of "jerks" are a self reflection of them. They are trying to get attention, play racist music, draw immature content, get a laugh out of this (which will get boring after x times) . You can probably guess how they are as people in real life, none of the above are positive triats to have. Don't let these jerks get to you rather, use this to strengthen yourself that you are doing something much more constructive and positive with your time.