
On Being a Free Software Maintainer - ekianjo
https://feaneron.com/2019/03/28/on-being-a-free-software-maintainer/
======
dingallero
This has been discussed before and it has been true for me as well. I don't
have a large, super-popular package I maintain, but several lesser known ones,
some of which I wrote, and several of which I just adopted and passively
became a maintainer over time.

At some point the pressure from the community made me pass the magical
threshold between fun/useful/rewarding and downright chore.

It has permanently changed my perception of OSS management, to the point that
I stopped releasing further projects, no matter how small, simply due to the
work that these entail.

Just look at the discussions you find here monthly about being "a good
author/maintainer/leader", where most expect full documentation, professional
landing pages, useless code of conduct, and so on... BESIDES the project
itself. You'll be criticized irregardless.

I have deep respect for the maintainers of popular OSS projects because of the
amount of s*it they must take. I know I wouldn't do it for free at these
scales. I also wouldn't do it besides another job since it is so demanding.

~~~
mikekchar
> useless code of conduct

#Code of Conduct

This is not a community project. This is my project. I know that will
disappoint some people, but I do this for fun in my own spare time. If it
stops being fun, I will stop working on it, which will pretty much kill the
project. There are millions of projects in the world and the only reason they
continue (if they actually do) is because the maintainers stubbornly stick at
it.

With that in mind, here is the code of conduct: If it is fun for me then it is
good. If it is not fun for me, then it is not good.

Things I find fun include: Bug reports that explain what you saw and what you
expected to see. Suggestions for features that would make your life better.
Stories of how the software so far has already made your life better.
Entertaining stories of how you used the software (bonus points if it includes
pictures of cats). Offers to volunteer to improve something (super bonus
points if you _actually_ improve it). Questions about how the software works.
Offers to write documentation (super, executive class bonus points if you
actually write some). Answering questions that other people ask (bonus points
if you get the answers right).

Things I don't find fun: Drama. That is all.

To some extent, I will accept drama in exchange for money. But it has to be a
_lot_ of money. Think FANG level money. If you don't have FANG level money
that you are willing to give me in exchange for drama, just don't do it --
even if you think it is the most important thing in the world.

There is no other code of conduct. I may arbitrarily declare some things fun
for me and some things not fun. Please pay attention when I declare one way or
the other and act accordingly.

Thank you.

~~~
GorgeRonde
> This is my project

Ownership is essentially the main problem of OSS here.

> If it stops being fun, I will stop working on it, which will pretty much
> kill the project.

See what I mean ?

Makes me think of Hickey's "Open source is not about you" rant and I can't
prevent myself from hearing "It's about me".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18538123)

~~~
bhaak
It doesn't need to be about me.

But if it isn't about me, somebody else has to do the project management and
the code commits.

That's just the way it is. When OSS goes further than the "my itch to scratch"
scenario, it gets complicated and there needs to be a way to motivate people
to scratch other people's itches.

------
coleifer
Oh this is infuriating:

> You will be told that you need to develop a thick skin.

It's the equivalent of a bully taunting with "stop crying!"

I have been doing open source for about 10 years. A couple of my projects have
1000+ stars on gh for what it's worth.

Most people are chill. Some people disagree without being disagreeable. Then
there's others who are completely toxic. A guy who was cto of a company and
wanted to use one of my libraries made me absolutely miserable for weeks.
Wrote about the experience here:

[http://charlesleifer.com/blog/your-idea-
sucks/](http://charlesleifer.com/blog/your-idea-sucks/)

~~~
etimberg
Chiming in to add that I've definitely had my ups and downs with open source.
When it's going well it feels incredibly rewarding but when it's not, it
absolutely sucks and I've gotten to the point where I avoid GitHub and try to
take a break. It's part of the reason I've avoided taking donations for any
project I work on. I'd feel a lot worse about taking a break if people were
paying for higher expectations.

~~~
coleifer
In 10 years, really the only negative experience that in any way affected my
well-being was the incident I wrote about in the linked blog post. That covers
probably a couple thousand GitHub issues. So really overwhelmingly positive
stuff. Amazing how much I let one guy fuck up my day, in retrospect.

------
StavrosK
This has not been my experience. I maintain various popular and not-so-popular
projects (although maybe not to the level of gnome calendar) and I just work
as much as I want. If I don't feel like handling an issue right then, I say I
won't have time soon and that PRs are appreciated.

The vast majority of people are understanding, I don't remember anyone making
a fuss about it.

~~~
siwatanejo
Maybe because the consumers of your work are developers? GNOME Calendar (the
OP's project) is an app for end users.

~~~
StavrosK
Possibly, but not all of them are. This isn't, for example:

[https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt](https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt)

And at most we got a few users asking about why they couldn't install it on 2.
Maybe my users are just better-behaved.

~~~
siwatanejo
Sorry, but any command-line tool is going to be used by advanced computer
users, not normies.

(If you reply to this that GNOME is not for normies either, or Linux in
general, I'll reply 'touche' though.)

------
franciscop
The way I have learned to deal with it is switching to a mostly read-only
software publishing. The default of my answers to issues is some sort of "No",
which might be "good idea, but not now", "good, but not planned, PR open",
"not within the project's objectives", "bad idea, there's a better way", etc.

This is not great, I'd love to be able to do OSS fulltime and help hundreds of
people out there. But the reality is that, with a fulltime job, it is either
not helping 90+% individuals or risking burning out, which would be even worse
(especially for me). Also, the fact that my software is used by millions of
people per year (directly and indirectly) and I've received $10 in donations
in total (~5 years of OSS) hints me that it's a very non-sustainable market.

~~~
hartator
What’s your project?

I am running a fairly popular Ruby gem. Donations are indeed very low. To the
point I have just remove the link.

------
abhinai
Are there any benefits to being a free software maintainer beyond the obvious
pride and satisfaction that comes with the role? For example, is this
something that people mention on their resumes? Does getting a job become
easier and when you do, can you negotiate higher salaries?

Our world is incredibly indebted to _Free Software Maintainers_ and I wonder
how we can pay them back in our little ways.

~~~
httpsterio
People can use sites like Open Collective, Patreon or the likes to directly
pay open source projects or people involved with them. There's a lot of
different platforms for this and I don't even know half of them. If there's a
project you'd like to support, check if they take monetary contributions
somewhere and if not, maybe suggest it to them and start donating :)

~~~
zelphirkalt
This is about free software, not open source software.

~~~
0815test
The "free" in free software is about freedom, not getting stuff free-of-
charge.

~~~
ThJ
English has a serious problem with ambiguity around the word "free". In the
closely related Scandinavian languages, there is a difference between "fri"
(as in freedom) and "gratis" (as in free of charge). Unlike in English, the
Latin borrowing "gratis" is the common everyday word for things that are free
of charge. Free software is known as "fri programvare", whereas free-of-charge
software (a.k.a. freeware) is "gratis programvare".

~~~
mercora
In German there are at least 3 words that describe these somewhat related
concepts. The word "Frei" is mostly meant as in freedom but can also describe
absence of something. The latter form is usually used in compound words like
"kostenfrei" which means "free of charge" however, most of those words can
also be compound with "los" like in "kostenlos" which means the same thing and
is used more often in this case. We also use "gratis" but mostly if something
is given complimentary in addition to something else. Something like "buy one
get one free" for example. Then we also have "umsonst" which is actually not
related but commonly used by people to mean the same thing as "kostenlos".
However, it really means "for nothing" like in "ich habe vermutlich all das
umsonst aufgeschrieben" or "i probably wrote all of this up for nothing". So
the differentiation between getting something for free and something being
free (as in freedom) is quite clear. However, there is no german word for
freeware as far as i can tell and nobody i know says something like "Freie
Software" instead of "free software" or "kostenlose software" instead of
"freeware" but that might be caused by my circle and is more often used then i
recognized :)

------
grandinj
One thing that helps is simply not engaging with tiresome people. I ignore
painful questions and let someone else on the mailing list answer. I make
requests once in code review, and then ignore that PR if there is tedious
argumentation.

------
euske
I kinda have a similar situation. I upload my hobby projects on GitHub. It has
about 90 repos by now. Most of them are just garbage that no one looked at.
One of them amassed about 3000+ stars over time. People keep sending me
numerous pull requests, but I'm very picky about the coding style and I pretty
much ignore all of them. I also ignore most issue reports and feature requests
because I'm not interested. Some people asked to hand over the project to
someone else, but even picking a good person is a huge hassle to me. So I just
left the project pretty much dead as it is. Still, it somehow keeps getting
more stars.

Am I a bad/irresponsible person? Since anyone can fork the project I don't
think I'm doing disservice to the community (whatever it is). Also I'm frankly
a little annoyed that I am getting this by just using my personal repo and
mostly being passive (I've never promoted my project anywhere, except
uploading it on PyPI).

 _Edit_ I can see that there would be a moral issue if I used my GitHub creds
for my personal gain (such as applying for a job). But I've never done that.
Again, I've never asked for this and I just want to play in my sandbox.

------
jerrysievert
I maintain a few very different packages, and have had some good experiences
and bad experiences. What I maintain ranges in size and complexity from
Javascript libraries, database add-ons, and virtual synthesizer modules.

I've dealt with hostile users, and hostile packagers, but ultimately I've
stuck with it due to some quite incredible challenges and communications I've
received, ranging from very difficult problems that they've reached out for
help solving, causing me to rethink some solutions, to very nice notes asking
if it's ok to use software that I released as building-blocks (what it was
designed and specifically licensed for). But, there are still those people
that I dread hearing from, that make me want to just stop -- thankfully there
are enough of the other kind, and interesting problems, to keep me going.

As for donations - I have only put donation links on the virtual synthesizer
modules, and have received a grand total of $5, not exactly game changing, but
worth a pint of beer.

So, I maintain for another day, maybe not as actively as some would like, but
at least at a level that keeps me from burning out on it.

------
dahart
Having worked on commercial applications with freemium models, I’ve had the
distinct impression that the free users are more demanding and pushy and rude
than the paying users.

I’m not certain about that though, because there are always like 10x or more
free users than paying users, so the volume of interaction with free users is
simply much greater. It would be interesting to study and find out whether
free users are more entitled than paying users, statistically. Anyone know if
such research has already been done?

------
jlg23
These "problems" are not specific to open source projects: Whenever you
provide a service of some kind, very few people will thank you, most will just
use it and another very few will be very vocal about where, how and why you
are an incompetent idiot who is just waiting for their advice.

But the "problem" really does lie with you if you cannot tell people they got
what they paid for (in case of pro bono work, like FOSS-development, even
more).

Once upon a time I organized an annual pretty large demonstration for the
legalization of Cannabis in Europe. After every event, at the first meeting,
we had people show up who understood we desperately needed their advice. You
can either let them hurt you or you sit back, light up and play ping-pong with
them... Listen 10 minutes, then spend 10 seconds to confront them with reality
(actual laws and regulations, the practicalities of your work or simply your
experience of actually /doing/). It can be fun.

But wether it is fun or a dreadful experience is only defined by you.

~~~
mmsimanga
I organise the yearly family Christmas gathering back in our village whenever
I am in my home country. The deal is that every working adult is supposed to
contribute a few dollars towards food and drinks. It really isn't much money.
Everyone is supposed to chip in, in whatever way they are comfortable. No one
is paid to attend and no one is forced to attend.

Back to your sentiments, the amount of nonsense I have to put up with from
some family members is unbelievable. Luckily there are some good family
members who usually step in and put them in their place. So yes people are a
problem, even our own family members give us problems. I still organise get
together and ignore the naysayers.

------
throwaway309740
My advice? Don't.

FOSS, in my experience, will not make you money, will not get you a job, and
will gradually suck up more and more of your free time until you have none
left.

In can also be tedious and frustrating, especially dealing with users.

Usually if any money is made off of your labor, it's made by other people, and
they never contribute any of it back.

Spend your time on something you can monetize.

------
stinos
A lot here applies to non-free software as well: if you omit the 'free' in the
title and article, most of the statements still hold.

------
jancsika
> It means you are trusted. It means you are trustworthy. It means you are
> skilled enough.

It means those things to the org that made you the maintainer. It means
nothing in particular to the users, bug reporters, and people who offer up
fixes and features who don't already know you.

> If you are open to review other people’s contributions, there is a high
> change you will find challengers disguised as contributors.

New devs making a first-time pull request typically do not yet trust a
project's dev process. They also realize that the project has no way to trust
their own skillset. To break the stalemate the new dev typically "oversells"
their patch set and errs on the side of TMI to the point of being defensive.

Doesn't it fall to the maintainer to keep things positive, clear, and on-topic
in such situations? If the org takes that as a necessary skill of a maintainer
and mentors to it, it's at least _possible_ to have a decent experience as a
maintainer. If not, then I speculate any maintainer would interpret those
skills as out of scope for project maintenance.

I also speculate they'll interpret each "challenge" as a distraction from
their duties and steadily progress toward an increasing likelihood of burnout.

------
dennisgorelik
I am running a free job posting website (postjobfree.com). Every day I receive
about a hundred emails with various requests, questions and complaints (from
recruiters, job seekers and operators of other job boards).

Some of these emails are negative or even rude. But that negativity does not
really bother me. I evaluate level of "Negativity" in the email to understand
the nature of the request better (Is the request realistic? Is the request
fair? Could our team realistically prevent that negativity in the first
place?)

Requests like: “How dare you not (use your free time to) fix this ultra high
priority bug that is affecting me?” -- I do not even consider negative. In
fact, that is a positive comment to me, because it may indicate an opportunity
(to make our job board better or to even add another revenue stream).

The complainer in such case already did some of the work for our job board:
identified potential problem, described how to reproduce it, defined the use
case explaining why fixing that problem is important.

If that is not helpful feedback, then what kind of feedback is more useful?

~~~
jlokier
Even though bad faith criticism and complaints can be useful, I find there is
a still an insurmountable problem sometimes: it can be too time- and energy-
consuming to handle the sheer quantity and/or intensity.

Sometimes, especially at "political moments" (like elections in a project I
was involved in recently - and I wasn't even a candidate), it can feel like
being overwhelmed by a tidal wave.

If I only have 1 spare hour per day for a project, there is neither time nor
emotional energy to handle emails that are so full of demanding questions that
it would take 3 hours to process carefully and reply carefully. And if you
don't reply carefully, they send you more, writing longer and getting more
obsessive (and sometimes personal) as if they sense you'll engage them in a
long conversation, so being careful in the first place is a net win.

Even if it only took 1 hour, that's still used up all the time I was going to
use on other productive things, the "real work".

I am in awe of maintainers who seem to reply to an onslaught of demanding
questioners, and somehow satisfy them.

For me, these are relevant:

"Assholes are Killing Your Project" (Donnie Berkholz)
[https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-
yo...](https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-your-project-
mdc-2017)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg)

~~~
dennisgorelik
> If I only have 1 spare hour per day for a project

... then your project is unlikely to become useful anyway. 5-7 hours per week
is just too little in order to make a meaningful progress in a software
project.

And if you are not getting critical feedback from customers, you are unlikely
to know the right direction to develop your project.

> [https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-
> yo...](https://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-your-
> project-mdc-2017)

According to Donnie Berkholz' definition - I do not communicate with assholes
at all, because demanding and even rude feedback does not make me "feel
oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled".

------
bkovacev
I definitely appreciate every free software maintainer out there. Hats off for
your hard work.

What I appreciate a bit less is a burnt out maintainers that does not ask for
help and has his hands full. Hats off for your hard work, we use your library
and we want to help. You are not alone.

What I dislike is a burnt out maintainer / not so great person of multiple
important libraries of a popular language that randomly closes issues and PRs
without explaining the reasons and then blocking people once asked why he did
close an issue that was still relevant.

If it's a personal project open sourced, sure, you have the absolute freedom
to do whatever you like. If it's a multi-maintainer project that has a huge
piece of the market, then that's absolutely not okay - it causes a toxic
environment that only damages the library and it's future.

------
acl777
> People really do find their way to you.

Sigh... and everyone else thinks programming is a lonely job.

------
farlee
My advice to other OSS project maintainers - unless you are paid to do so in a
9 to 5 job, just walk away. It's not worth the aggravation. I just woke up to
the fact that the majority of my self-entitled users were working for multi-
billion dollar firms and they were not contributing a line of code or stitch
of documentation. With a handful of exceptions, you can't make a living off of
open source alone. Patreon and OpenCollective is a great way to make coffee
money.

~~~
throwaway309740
>I just woke up to the fact that the majority of my self-entitled users were
working for multi-billion dollar firms and they were not contributing a line
of code or stitch of documentation. With a handful of exceptions, you can't
make a living off of open source alone.

And those multi-billion dollar firms will show no greater willingness hire
you, despite relying on your software, which they also won't pay for.

Zed Shaw has spoken about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19375895#19376190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19375895#19376190)

> There was sort of like this unwritten contract in open source that we had;
> the unwritten contract with corporations was if you wrote open source that
> they were using, you got some sort of job, or consulting fees, or at least
> some respect so that way you could find jobs.

> ... I started to realize that “No, that contract has completely been
> rewritten. It’s totally different now. If you write open source, you’re not
> gonna get a job”, and now what’s been happening - and part of my tweet storm
> and whatnot about open source - is that it’s gone the opposite direction,
> where what I see is sort of like almost direct action to prevent open source
> developers from making money…

------
iamgopal
What is the latest, state of the art way to earn money this way ?

~~~
mikekchar
Completely not proven yet, but I'm convinced: ask for it. Make it easy for
people to pay you. Find a way (and reason) for people to invoice you for
payment. Tell people that you expect payment even if they don't legally have
to pay. Make it part of the "community ethos" that payment is a natural and
good part of working with the community.

Free as in freedom, not beer. Ask for beer and give freedom in return.

I have this idea in the back of my head. Where I live in Japan, in the
countryside they just put up these vegetable stalls. Nobody is there. There is
a box and on it is say "100 yen" (about 1 dollar US). There are bags of fruit
and vegetables. You take a bag and you put a 100 yen coin in the box. Not
rocket science and nobody who isn't starving won't put the coin in (and if you
are starving, take the damn fruit!)

You don't need leverage, you need it to be the norm that people pay for the
software. That requires a cultural shift. Luckily, community cultures can be
crafted (I think... maybe I'm wrong). People need to feel that if they pay for
the software, you will make more (which they want). If they don't pay for the
software, you will not make more (which they do not want). I think that's all
it probably takes to earn money at this. I think... One day I'll test that
theory.

~~~
pytester
>Make it easy for people to pay you.

There's definitely a startup opportunity for this - making it super easy to
receive payment as an OSS developer (either as a business or sole developer)
and making it easy for businesses to pay.

If I saw a new issue on github and it came from a corporate "OSS gold account
member" which potentially comes with $$$ attached I'd be much more inclined to
implement it.

As it is my motivation drops off fairly quickly unless it's a serious bug or
it's a relatively easy ask.

I think it would be much easier to get budget if the cost to get expedited OSS
bugfixes were subscription based and accounts gets to deal with a professional
billing department rather than "One Man and His Hat Inc. in Iowa".

~~~
frosted-flakes
This could be a part of GitHub. Imagine there was a '$' button beside the star
button, and each time you clicked it you gave one dollar to the maintainer of
the repo, with a counter beside it. The '$ counter' would only be visible to
the user and the repo maintainers.

GitHub is the de facto hub of open source/free software, and if it was as easy
to donate to a repo as it is to star it, I imagine more people would do it.

------
revskill
One serious problem with most of OSS libraries is that, no project will tell
you, what's the upsides and downside of the project, or the things the project
could do and couldn't do. So, most of the time, the user must spend serious
efforts to evaluate if it's OK for them or not.

Of course, this is hard and often not reasonable to do. But at least, let's do
things based on some assumption.

------
acl777
The author maintained a calendar app and received this level of
"appreciation".

Imagine if he was maintaining a core piece of software more people use, like:
a web browser or SSH client...

------
igi3ql
You need a thick skin to maintain free software, and that's not something that
you can grow... either you have it or not. It's not for everybody.

The biggest mistake some software maintainers make is showing empathy for
abusive and unreasonable users. Most of them simply deserve to have the door
slammed in their faces. If you can't do that, then you'll lose your time and
stress yourself.

~~~
wool_gather
Having empathy for people who are trying to engage with you constructively
while denying it to those who are wasting your time is both very important and
incredibly hard, in any circumstance.

> deserve to have the door slammed in their faces

Totally, but you need to (try to) be careful not to slam it in the
potentially-helpful peoples' faces. There's one very popular open project that
I've moved away from due to getting tired of seeing seemingly every single
question/suggestion being met with "you don't like it, start writing some
code".

Not to say that _my_ decision not to use that project is significant in any
way. I'm just one anonymous person. Just a point that it may be possible to be
too aggressively self-defensive.

I totally get that _I 'm_ not entitled to anything, and you (maintainer) _are_
entitled to do what you choose with your time. It's just that constantly,
repeatedly pointing those facts out isn't going to win you much cooperation.

------
vinceguidry
One of the things I've started to wrap my head around lately is the essential
inhumanity of technology. It's a near-daily occurrence of mine to having to
deal with something that's just plain dumb, and just have no way at all to fix
it. I can't make the system better, I can't make any kind of suggestion to
anyone so that my situation won't come up again.

There's nothing to do but to just accept it, put whatever workarounds I can
come up with in place, hope I can remember what I did before the next time it
comes up, and move on. It regularly moves me to anger, with nowhere to put it.
It's not fair to unload it on your coworkers or your manager. So I'll vent a
little bit, still trying to find the best way to do this, and just hope I'm
not a raging alcoholic by the time I'm 40.

But I'm a skilled tech worker whose getting paid very well in order to deal
with these things. If they're not just douchebags, I would guess that most
people who get unreasonably angry at OSS maintainers are not getting paid very
well to deal and are likely the target for generated externalities. They need
a focus, someone to hold responsible.

But tech is inhuman and so there is no one to hold accountable. And if ever
there was someone to hold accountable, by God get rid of that chink in the
armor! The OSS maintainer thus becomes that chink.

I sometimes wonder if the brave new world that the West is building is not the
great horn of plenty that we all believe it to be, but rather a monster that
consumes the best parts of us and spits the rest out, too cruel to just put
its victims out of their misery.

Then I remember that inhuman bureaucracy is nothing new, and pour another
glass.

~~~
peterkelly
This reminds me of the author of libcurl saying that he gets a ton of emails
from people asking about their cars infotainment system, because when they try
to find an email address to contact for support, the closest thing they can
find is his address in the libcurl license text:

[https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-
corola/](https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/11/14/i-have-toyota-corola/)

~~~
vinceguidry
Yeah, I remember that.

This sort of thing seems to hit senior citizens harder because of their
general unfamiliarity with technology. So they use the toolset they're
familiar with, to find somebody to get on the phone to make them deal with the
problem.

I'm tempted to take vicious glee in the notion that this is the comeuppance
Baby Boomers are getting for selling future generations down the river to fund
their own retirements. If they could have just shared the post-war wealth
equally their children wouldn't have needed to destroy the world that made it.

------
robertAngst
>You may not feel the joy of working on what you work anymore. You may want to
move on. You may also not do that due to the sense of responsibility that you
have to your code, your community, and the people who use your software.

I run a popular website, and I switched from selling books, to free content.

I make 6 figs at the day job, but put in 2-3 hours a night on figuring out new
ways to save time or save money. The occasional email is nice, but its a very
temporary feeling. I consider it my responsibility to society, so things will
be free, but it also means only 1-2 people study this.

Capitalism and growth might cause me to change.

------
chris_wot
This is true. But then you get maintainers like Ulrich Drepper.

~~~
adityasaky
Context?

~~~
chris_wot
[https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/](https://lwn.net/Articles/488847/)

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enraged_camel
I use a lot of open source packages, and I’m immensely grateful to anyone who
maintains one.

I also want to mention that I donate whenever the option is available.

However, here is my personal opinion that will most likely get downvoted to
oblivion: if you are putting a tool out there for others to use (not just
software but any tool), then you are responsible for its wellbeing and
maintenance, regardless of whether you charge money for it.

In my opinion, it is irresponsible to release something, _anything_ , and then
abandon it.

If you don’t want to be responsible for it, for example if it’s a hobby
project or something, keep the repo private. If you release it with the
intention of maintaining it, and your circumstances change later, do your best
to find another maintainer.

If you want to charge money for it, do that.

But if your attitude is gonna be “I’ll work on this when I want, however much
I want, and you should just be grateful for what you get and deal with it”
then, well, that’s where my sympathy and respect for you ends.

~~~
jryb
I don't understand the downvotes for this. I feel that by making something
public and open source, there is an implicit assumption (unless otherwise
stated) that the software is _worth_ sharing.

The problem is that this puts what I consider the right amount of
responsibility squarely in the middle of a continuum: library authors
shouldn't be totally free of obligations to others, but the insane abuse that
people level against open source maintainers is also obviously unacceptable.

~~~
watwut
This rule accepted in general would mean that all students who put their
homework on github are doing something wrong.

Or that all professionals who just play around technology or mini projects are
required to keep them secret until they are totally sure they will maintain it
forever.

That is just not workable and overly limited.

While owner can not expect gratitude, the "I’ll work on this when I want,
however much I want, and you should just take it or leave it" is absolutely
fine and should be fine. Just because it exists on the internet does not
entitle the rest of the world to anything.

~~~
enraged_camel
Students putting their homework on github is totally fine _as long as they
clearly state that in the readme_.

~~~
watwut
So maybe assume no maintenance unless stated in readme.

