alt Hacker NewsIf you have a hobby project like writing a blog, crocheting, or almost any other creative hobby, you can dip in and out however it suits you. If you deal with major life events, sicknesses, etc., you can leave the hobby and come back. Nobody is paying you for it, so nobody can complain (maybe the friends who miss you, but it's not actively impacting the real world).
Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.
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> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
This is why forks happen. It’s very common for a maintainer to decide they’re stepping away from a project or even that they’re not supporting use cases or bug fixes. Then someone starts a fork and, if they are supporting it better than the original maintainer, the traction moves to that project. This happens all the time.
> It's like if you loved crocheting, but somehow if you stopped crocheting everyone in your city would no longer have clothes and need to walk around naked.
I think this is the fallacy at the center of a lot of these debates. In this analogy, people wouldn’t actually around naked. They’d come up with a new solution. They’d switch to sewn or imported clothes. Maybe some other group steps in and learns how to crochet and takes over.
The messier situations occur when one person simultaneously wants to maintain a tight hold on a project and its community, but the maintainers or the community don’t want to endorse any fork attempts. I’ve written before on HN about how some past attempts to form projects have been met with undue hostility for trying to “steal” someone’s pet project. Even open source communities can be hostile to companies forking projects, like all of the complaints that come up about big tech companies profiting off of their own forks of open software (which removes the burden from upstream maintainers). Another examples is when BambuLabs forked PrusaSlicer and there were years of cheap shots at the company for it (though those went away as everyone remembered that Prusa forked another project to make PrusaSlicer).
I really think maintainers who don’t want to do things should come out and say they don’t want to do those things. Let the communities and companies adapt accordingly. The worst state is this in between that happens some times where the maintainers want to retain tight control over the project and community and they try to give an impression of being the everything-to-everyone maintainer when they secretly hate it. It would be so much better for everyone if maintainers would just come out and say things like “I’m tired of fixing security bugs so everyone be warned, as security issues come out I’ll fix them when I get around to it.”
And the expectations
- People asking for and always expecting new patterns and colors.
- Raise hell if you miss a few superficial stitches and demand immediate patch work.
- No exit path without complaints. If you find it unsustainable and ask for help with the cost of materials for the *next* batch while the current batch is still out there and works fine, you are blamed for (literal) rug pulling.
When I was a kid, we always had New Year's (read: Christmas) decorations (the maximum that wouldn't be out of place in a mostly Muslim country) on a small park in my neighborhood. One year they never appeared, and people were enraged.
The guy the city hired every year had a mob in front of his door. People's letters to the authorities got no answer, so suddenly he apparently became their contact person. I was buying snacks in a nearby shop. I went out when I heard people shouting. They were shouting accusations at a guy who must have just appeared before his door because he was wearing pajamas in that cold weather.
"You Islamists will ruin this country! [0]
Happy with what you did? My children actually cried!"
and so on.
He calmly answered: "This is something I did on my own. This year I got a cancer diagnosis, so I didn't have the motivation. Sorry!"
Him feeling the need to apologize always comes to my mind when I see the toxic comments on their unpaid work that the open source maintainers feel that they need to respond to.
[0]: Well, they did ruin the country. But that's another story.
If everyone needs it, everyone can pay for it.
Don’t take shit just because you release software under a permissive license.
> Open source is one of those weird things where your hobby project can become an essential piece of infrastructure.
Which you should happily abandon if you get bored.
If people truly need something fixed, they can fix it themselves, or pay someone to get it fixed.