I was reading “Is This Project Still Maintained?” by Matt Palmer:
There is a delusion that “maintained” open source software comes with entitlements – an expectation that your questions, bug reports, and feature requests will be attended to in some fashion.
I couldn’t agree more, as I experienced that myself a few times. Including some people being a bit too pushy for my personal taste, so that I accepted patches and features because my project was upstream for them, and it is obviously better if I maintain those changes instead of them keeping track of my project as a soft fork.
Some of those changes, I accepted them. I recall for example scp support in a sftp proxy for OpenStack Object Storage, despite scp not being part of sftp really. Although I knew I was not going to use that feature, and I was very sure I didn’t want to maintain it.
The consequence is that it makes the maintainer less happy and, although I was employed by a company for which I was maintaining that open source project, it didn’t feel right and made me double-think if I really wanted to release more open source projects.
I recall reading a blog –can’t find the link– where the author said that they would never release anything that is useful, so they don’t get bullied into maintaining it after that. It sounds a bit extreme, but makes a lot of sense.
Matt includes in his post what he calls The Open Source Maintainer’s Manifesto:
I wrote the software in this repo for my own benefit – to solve the problems I had, when I had them. While I could have kept the software to myself, I instead released it publicly, under the terms of an open licence, with the hope that it might be useful to others, but with no guarantees of any kind. Thanks to the generosity of others, it costs me literally nothing for you to use, modify, and redistribute this project, so have at it!
Perhaps I don’t fully share the tone in which he wrote the whole piece, but that’s the gist of it: when I release something as open source, I see it as a gift to everybody, and the licence makes it crystal clear what anyone can expect from it. Yet, it is difficult.
I wasn’t happy with some of the contributions to my ubox MSX lib project, and didn’t accept them –which ended in a fork, that’s OK!–. Other changes, I accepted them, and I’m still unhappy about it because it wasn’t really why I released that code as open source after a lot of work to document and prepare the whole thing.
So it may seem I’m making things more complicated to get contributions now that I’m self-hosting the project out of a forge –it was in GitHub, then in GitLab, and now I self-host it–, but in reality I’m just keeping in the open something I made for myself and I’m sharing with the world.
But is not really a product, and I don’t want it to be. Thanks!