What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

https://andrej.sh/blog/maintaining-open-source-project/

by andrejsshell • 8 months ago

183 146 8 months ago

Kinda frustratingly written by ai

Particularly frustratingly because it's so unnecessary in this case. It's not even that much text, just write it yourself. It would probably take less time.

singpolyma32• 8 months ago

No evidence of this

user_7832• 8 months ago

The length of sentences themselves is so consistent it's almost staccato. Plus, the "it's not x, it's y" troupe. That doesn't mean it's AI - some people certainly can write like that. But so many short sentences can feel odd to read.

anonymous9082134• 8 months ago

The evidence is in all of the text. It is dripping with it. The cadence, the abuse of headers, the abuse of bullet points, "not X, but Y" multiple places it doesn't make sense.

automation isn't lazy. it's sustainable: [bullet points]

A software developer did not write that. I would bet my entire net worth on that if the bet could be arbitrated objectively, at virtually any odds, because it would be free money.

the people using kaneo aren't just users. they're: [bullet points]. they're not demanding. they're engaged. that's a *gift*.

This vomit-inducing sappy "gift" line, too.

them kaneo
cloud-hosted self-hosted (your data, your server)
closed source open source (you can read every line)
feature-rich minimal (does one thing well)
subscription free (as in freedom and beer)

Wow, this looks just like the completely unnecessary comparison table you get any time someone prompts an LLM for a comparison! How much money would you feel comfortable betting "open source (you can read every line)" was written by a human software developer?

someone stars your repo → feels good

An entire paragraph of these ultra-terse "x -> y", under a bold header "the emotional reality", also reeks of LLM output.

The evidence is overflowing, you simply aren't familiar enough to recognise it. Which sounds like a nice state of being, admittedly. Ignorance is bliss. I, personally, am absolutely sick of seeing this LLM spam on HN.

dwohnitmok2• 8 months ago

The author very thoroughly uses AI in their projects. That's not necessarily a bad thing! But this article's text is probably AI generated (if at least from an outline). Both based on the very telltale AI style and the author's use of AI elsewhere.

See e.g. my comment on the commit messages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054935

RohanAdwankar• 8 months ago

Just curious, how do you know / why do you think it's written by AI? The bullet points?

Banditoz• 8 months ago

For me, it could be:

it's not better. it's different
automation isn't lazy. it's sustainable
it's not about gatekeeping. it's about making debugging possible

This is everywhere in the article.

Panzer04• 8 months ago

Hmm, I didn't pick up anything reading it but going back it does have that vibe with the repeated bullet points and cadence.

I wouldn't be certain of it but I can definitely believe it.

amarant2• 8 months ago

I very much doubt it. Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example. The style is efficient in a way that just screams software dev to me. AI's are needlessly verbose. This guy is bordering on needlessly concise. Rather like the style actually.

I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it.

We're at the point we need to coin a law for it. With tongue firmly in cheek, we could call it Turing's Law perhaps?

"Any person who publishes any text on the internet will be mistaken for a robot"

SchemaLoad2• 8 months ago

There's a bunch of typical ChatGPT catch phrases in the post "Here's the thing", "but honestly". You can't know for sure but it really does look like OP wrote it then stuck it in ChatGPT but told it to not fix the capitalisation for some reason.

anonymous9082134• 8 months ago

Never seen an AI consistently miss capitalising the first letter of each sentence for example.

You understand that you can prompt an LLM to do things, right? This was screaming LLM-generated at me the whole way through. Adding "Use only lowercase" to the prompt does not change that.

dwohnitmok2• 8 months ago

This is classic LLM verbosity. It's not concise. The sentences are short, but the passages are verbose.

The author very thoroughly uses AI for everything. If you want further evidence just look at the commit messages for the site. They are almost all AI messages (compare against the author's commit messages for any project pre-2025).

Not saying that the article is bad because it's AI written (or at least heavily AI assisted). After all you enjoyed it! Regardless you're definitely looking at AI prose.

muixoozie• 8 months ago

I do hate that if you publish anything online these days, someone will accuse you of having used AI to write it.

Noticing this too. Sabine said something a while ago in one of her videos that stuck with me [0]. about people expecting proof of suffering by next year. She was talk submitting an essay, but it might as well be anything ai could have done.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICjubxfeICo&t=245

stefan5441• 8 months ago

it's probably not even written by ai, but even if the tone is ai and he used ai to re-write some sentences why does it matter? it's not a low effort post, it's not some made up lie, so why does it frustrate you? maybe you should think about that

knowitnone3• 8 months ago

Don't help people who won't help themselves.

groundzeros20153• 8 months ago

I don’t understand. It’s your project, you do what you want and nothing more.

boyter• 8 months ago

People who give away things like this tend to be good people. As such when someone comes asking for help or new things they are inclined to help.

Your response is where it should go when things get rude, but you don't want to start there.

groundzeros20153• 8 months ago

I have projects online. You can use them, or not. Sometimes people file issues that I think are good and fix them.

mickael-kerjean4• 8 months ago

Yesterday I received this message from a random github user: "Seriously. No SSO at all in free version? This is poor. Very very greedy and poor" [1]

If you do not spend a lot of time explaining things at length, people will link back to how much an asshole you are.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/issues/661#issu...

Sleaker• 8 months ago

LOL all that user does is open issues for free support?

timcobb• 8 months ago

Ew gross

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

In the words of Lizzo: "Let 'em say what they gonna say. They gonna feel how they gonna feel." Back in the day, we called this "feeding the trolls", and the advice hasn't changed: ignore them. You don't owe every single person online any part of your short, precious life. Issues have delete buttons (and there are other hosted SCMs besides GitHub). I encourage liberal use thereof.

ohyoutravel• 8 months ago

I would pull my hair out.

groundzeros20153• 8 months ago

Close. Report as spam.

scuff3d• 8 months ago

So what? Fuck 'em. It's your project and it's open source. If they want the feature so bad they can add it themselves.

LtWorf3• 8 months ago

The expired certificate on your own website (linked on your gh profile) doesn't fill me with confidence to hire you as a consultant though.

I'd at least make sure the cert is up to date.

squigz6• 8 months ago

Simply ignore users like that. If someone actually important brings up that instance as you 'being an asshole', then explain your reasoning then. If that doesn't calm them down, they're probably not someone worth working with.

I'll also point out the supportive comments in that thread; sure there's always gunna be some negativity, but there's also positive people. Focus on those.

eviks• 8 months ago

You've got the comment after you've explained at length

icar• 8 months ago

Cool project, gave it a star and bookmarked it.

nickelpro5• 8 months ago

Ya OP is shadow boxing. There is absolutely no need for any of these things.

Tons of open source exists as only source code and a license, nothing else. No docs, no issue tracker, nothing. People who need it use it, learn from it, remix it, whatever, but there need not be any engagement at all from the given repo's maintainer.

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

Seriously. If I throw something up somewhere, you get a tarball, a README, and no way to get in touch with me. If the code helps you, fantastic! If it doesn't, then I hope you at least got something out of the experience. But "as-is" means what it says on the tin. I'm not sure why people are so hellbent on treating every message from every stranger as important.

bitbasher2• 8 months ago

someone opens an issue: "how do i install this?"

Honestly, this is a GitHub thing. You wouldn't get that issue on sourcehut, bitbucket or self hosted.

GitHub is the lowest common denominator for users.

lopatin2• 8 months ago

You’re telling me all I have to do to stop all the noob questions is to switch off of GitHub?

LtWorf3• 8 months ago

Yeah on codeberg you'll get much less of that

squigz6• 8 months ago

I've seen this mentioned a few times lately. Not that I disagree, but why would that be? Is it just Github's poplarity? Is it the ease with which you can sign on and start yelling at FOSS maintainers? Something else?

bitbasher2• 8 months ago

Popularity is part of it. It's the "default" for software.

It's what is taught in every school, bootcamp, youtube channel and corner of the internet. Anyone that had an idea on a random weekend to "learn to code" signed up for GitHub.

GitHub is less of a software forge and more like a Facebook for software.

benhurmarcel• 8 months ago

Everyone already has a Github account. Just having to make an account on Codeberg/Sourcehut is enough of a barrier.

neumann• 8 months ago

This is actually nice and balanced, but the title is misleading. I feel like ALL I hear about maintaining an open source project is how hard it is and how people burn our. I almost never read a blogpost or comment declaring how rewarding it is. So, this was a nice (slightly) more balanced view.

gerdesj• 8 months ago

There are a lot of happy open source projects rocking along ... happily.

You may not hear about them here or on your socials but it is possible you are not hearing everything. For example, do you have a presence on Mastodon or Lemmy (for example)?

There are a lot more channels too (you mentioned blogs).

Just like the roads you drive on seem to repair themselves sometimes (sort of), FOSS keeps on rocking along with minimal fuss, driven by a vast army of people who do what they can when they fancy it.

Look at the evidence: There is a vast, publicly accessible, free and open source, pool of software for you to download and play with. It gets larger daily but individual stories are immaterial - they might be described or not.

Look at the community: Along with all that software, often there will be a community. Arch, Gentoo and many others are legendary in providing resources to engage with.

stevage• 8 months ago

the honest truth
maintaining an open source, self-hosted project is:
more work than building it different fun than building it more rewarding than you'd expect harder than you'd expect worth it

I'd say the title is not misleading: what they don't tell you is that is more rewarding than you'd expect and worth it. (Because yes, we mostly hear the "it's too much work and not worth it" story.)

brazukadev• 8 months ago

If all you hear is the bad things, the title is quite accurate

mtlynch• 8 months ago

maintaining kaneo means helping people debug their setups. and honestly? it's taught me more than i expected.
people run kaneo on setups i never imagined:
behind corporate proxies
...
in kubernetes with custom networking

It's OP's project so they're welcome to support whoever they want but I definitely would not offer free support to customers who are obviously using the product commercially, especially in large enterprises.

It's FOSS, so they can use it for free if they want, but if they need custom support or features, they're a great user to tell, "Sure, I'm happy to help you with that if you purchase a $500/yr support contract." You'd be surprised how many customers like that don't care because they have a corporate card and that amount is too little to require approvals or much process.

mbirth2• 8 months ago

But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.

Also, look at Gitea. People got paranoid and forked the project after the original author did exactly that.

Klonoar2• 8 months ago

But the company wants a proper invoice. And not every single developer is interested in founding a Limited and getting the tax office breathing down their neck every year.

I feel like it shouldn't be poor form to say on this site - a site that predominantly has been about building tech companies and revenue streams - to get over it and charge them.

carlosjobim3• 8 months ago

Come on, stop with this slave mentality please. You can make invoices without funding any company and without the tax office getting in your hair. It's not illegal to charge for your services and never has been. You can declare that income just fine, or skip it. The tax office won't bother you.

mickael-kerjean4• 8 months ago

This is not as simple as it sounds. Just yesterday I had a call with the Delft university of technology in Netherland, they want me to add some features on the free version of my FOSS product [1] but they did not want to pay anything. Over the last month, I was in contact with a 800B publicly traded company for a 1.8k per year invoice, once we agreed on the general direction they kept adding expectations, first was to sign tons of paperwork with their security checklist, legal stuff which took a few days but when they start asking for things that would take potentially weeks more, I invite them to do extras on a contracting basis, since them I have never heard back and of course they never paid a dime. I have literally tons of stories like this from governments to F500. In my bubble the paid support plan mostly work with US entities.

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

MrDarcy• 8 months ago

Universities are a special case. They generally don’t spend money because of the red tape.

In much of corporate America expenses under $100 give or take don’t even require documentation, so a $50/month support subscription is easily purchased.

Just need to find the person with the purchase card.

winrid• 8 months ago

It's actually pretty simple. For the former case, you do nothing. Tell the university to find someone to make the improvement, or do it for fun. In the latter case, you should be charging 5-10x that, for starters... You send a Statement of Work, and only do what's in that, and only after they pay.

bruce511• 8 months ago

I agree, it's not as simple as "$500 per year". In some cases it can be, but mostly it's not.

Firstly, you need to clearly define what is included, and even more so, what is not included. How many hours is $500? Who decides what us should bug? Can they get new features because they have support? How many installs does the support cover? And do on.

And if they start with things like "supplier agreements" etc, just walk away.

Yes, some companies have a threshold where managers can just "spend money". Some managers may even use that to support you. But taking any money changes the relationship you have with the user.

Right now, it's completely inside your control. Direction, Priorities, Scope, Pace, levels of effort etc. I'm a huge fan of getting paid, I write software for money, but make no mistake - taking money changes things.

rahimnathwani• 8 months ago

fwiw the pricing page is buggy on mobile:

- the second 'start' button overlaps the list items

- tapping that button darkens the whole page but doesn't display anything new

- even before I get to that stage, it's not clear what you're selling at each price point

OccamsMirror2• 8 months ago

You're too cheap. Anyone that won't pay for a proper enterprise support contract you should tell to pound sand. You'll be surprised that when you start charging more people will actually take you more seriously and will be more inclined to sign up. It's counter intuitive from your side, but perception is reality. A 20k/yr enterprise support agreement is more believable to provide results than a 2k/yr deal.

mperham• 8 months ago

Really: add a zero to your price. These companies burn millions on procurement bureaucracy. Make them pay for your misery.

illusive4080• 8 months ago

I wish. In my company that is an instant no. The amount of legal contracting bull we have to go through for that would quite literally take 9 months.

nickff• 8 months ago

If a company is unwilling to jump through its self-imposed barriers to paying for things it wants, then it obviously doesn't value those features/items. This is definitely a case of 'voting with [one's] dollars'.

degamad3• 8 months ago

I'm almost certain there is a way to get the company to pay for pizzas for a staff meeting which doesn't involve any legal contracting bull.

calvinmorrison2• 8 months ago

if you purchase a $500/yr support contract

500/hr more like.

SoftTalker5• 8 months ago

I mean you might have to negotiate a bit but yeah, a simple professional statement like “My rate for custom enhancements is $X/hr” is not going to ruffle any feathers. They might not bat an eye.

The thing is if you agree, now you have to deliver. Be sure it’s something you want to do. If the project is open source because you don’t want to be a business, then be careful about letting a little quick cash change your mind.

vivzkestrel• 8 months ago

or you could do what tsx does? charge money to fix issues as an option https://github.com/privatenumber/tsx/issues/758 issues are fixed on priority basis for people willing to pay

ChrisMarshallNY2• 8 months ago

I liked the humble, “lessons learned” tone of the post.

every feature you add is a feature you maintain forever.

This.

Keeping a framework/app/SDK “pure” is very important, in my experience.

PartiallyTyped2• 8 months ago

Keeping a framework/app/SDK “pure” is very important, in my experience.

Could you elaborate?

ChrisMarshallNY2• 8 months ago

I’m a fan of “singleness of purpose.”

For example, if the framework provides text storage, adding text processing might be a mistake. Instead, make another framework that can be strung onto the text storage one.

It increases the granularity, and the usefulness of the modules. You could have multiple processing frameworks.

In addition, it allows you to refine discrete functionality domains (which can also be personnel assignment domains), and reduces the places for bugs to manifest. You can devote more tests to each framework.

shagie• 8 months ago

I liked the humble, “lessons learned” tone of the post.
> every feature you add is a feature you maintain forever.

... until it becomes a security flaw.

Log4shell (IIRC) goes back to a feature to do an indirect lookup of a string over jndi in a beta version of the library. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LOG4J2-313

1718627440• 8 months ago

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

bcrl3• 8 months ago

This is why I like building outside plant. You put the fibre up on poles or pull through ducts, splice it, bring it into the building, hook it up to the equipment, make sure it's working and.... you're done. It works until something breaks, usually for a very clear reason (power outage, drunk driver, rodent, vine, lawnmower man, fibre seeking backhoe, dump truck, direct lightning strike, thermal cycling of a marginal splice, failure to seal a gasket properly resulting in water intrusion that stresses fibres when the water turns into ice, ...), but those become quite rare if you're done your job properly.

On the other hand, software is never done. Even simple features, like headphones, regress these days. (I missed a meeting today because my phone decided to send audio notifications into the black void of the heat death of the universe because I didn't unlock my phone after plugging the headphones into the USB-C port of my iPhone -- the audio didn't come out of the speaker, nor out of the bluetooth of the car I was driving. No sound worked until after the phone was unlocked.)

At least with open source software I can fix the bugs I care about, but the fun goes away once you have to deal with other people to get things merged.

Is there a community of software Luddites I can go live with where we build simple technology that works and works well?

dylan604• 8 months ago

You're talking about being a tradesman on a forum dedicated to software and maybe making a company out of said software? If people liked the idea of being outside in the weather, doing manual labor as you've described, there is a very large chance they would not be on this forum.

pavel_lishin2• 8 months ago

It's very often that people here lament the fact that they're not outside being outside, in the weather, doing manual labor. How may of us don't dream, at least once a week, of walking out into the woods, or taking up woodworking instead, or wondering how long it would take to retrain as a plumber?

I channel that into my gardening during the appropriate seasons, but now that it's November, all that woodworking equipment in the garage is lookin' mighty appealing.

bcrl3• 8 months ago

Most of my career has been in software development. Running an ISP / carrier is more fun as there's more of a variety from day to day (as is the case for anything entrepreneurial) while still involving technical skills. There is a need for with some programming from time to time, but it is usually tied to solving a particular business need.

I'm sure there are other people out there frustrated with the software grind. My point is that change is always an option. There are interesting problems to solve in the world that exist outside of large software projects that most folks here have the required skill sets to tackle.

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

As we all know, the only real job is writing React web apps.

squigz6• 8 months ago

There is a shocking variety of users on HN. Don't make the mistake of thinking we're all software developers sitting in front of a computer all day.

People like GP - and other hardware monkeys* - are the reason your computer works. Don't be rude.

* Said with much love <3

squigz6• 8 months ago

fibre seeking backhoe

I don't know why but this amused me. Is this a feature one can get when buying a backhoe?

bcrl3• 8 months ago

I think it comes standard!

The third party transport links feeding my company's network have suffered 2 lengthy outages due to backhoes hitting buried conduit with fibre installed. Underground outages tend to be the longest outages since repairs can be quite involved. One of the outages was due to a large municipal construction project (LRT) where the buried conduit's location had been properly marked and yet was still hit anyways. They managed to pull on the fibre hard enough that repairs extended to a total of 4 manholes since the splices in the adjactent manholes were completely destroyed.

The other more recent underground hit occurred due to a process failure since the locates were issued before the carrier had installed their conduit and fibre, with the end result being that the other party doing construction had an all-clear from a locate completed before the fibre was in the ground. Ooops!

Dump truck hits are far more common around Ottawa. I'm aware of at least 8 in the past 5 years around where our network exists, which is only covering about 30 km. Thankfully when they have hit the poles we have fibre on, our fibre / strand was not damaged. The incumbent's fibre on the lowest strand on the pole was not so lucky. By my estimates there must be at least 1 near miss by a dump truck per day in the city. It's not surprising given the abuse dump trucks take.

If we had more fibre installed I'd love to have a proper ring to make these physical outages non-service impacting.

stackskipton• 8 months ago

I mean, Docker Compose could use to be more robust. I recommend Caddy for things like this.

SequoiaHope• 8 months ago

For anyone interested in this (and certainly for OP) I highly highly recommend the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal. When I was raising my profile on my open source farming robot, this book really helped me understand the types of projects one might want to foster, how to think about users, and generally gave me very helpful guidance on becoming an open source maintainer!

Take a look: https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public

andrybak• 8 months ago

"Uncurled" by Daniel Stenberg, maintainer of curl, is a great resource for FOSS maintainers as well:

https://un.curl.dev/

kai2006• 8 months ago

I like the article a lot. Very thoughtful.

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

but here's the thing: people come from different backgrounds. what's obvious to me after building the thing isn't obvious to someone installing it for the first time.

Sure, but you're also not obligated to do... well, anything. And people are also allowed to read documentation and code and put in the effort to build and install things themselves. What happened to the oldschool hacker spirit that rewarded learning and helping yourself? If you show up to a group of people and say "how do I make this work?" while showing zero evidence that you've actually done anything, you'll be politely told to fuck off. I promise it's okay to say no to people, especially people who haven't demonstrated that they've put in their own time to understand something.

But this is immaterial anyway. I don't know how to better explain that you don't owe your time to strangers on the internet, some portion of whom are probably not even human. Alternatively, you could get them to pay you, especially the organizations "behind corporate proxies". If they can afford a corporate proxy, they can certainly afford your time, as long as you value it appropriately.

So yeah. Stop working for free, and stop treating every last internet stranger as relevant.

burnished• 8 months ago

Ah, the classic hacker spirit of commercializing every interaction?

venturecruelty6• 8 months ago

No, the real one, not the one people talk about here.

squigz6• 8 months ago

What happened to the old school hacker spirit of helping others and sharing knowledge?

noitpmeder• 8 months ago

Economies of scale

nrhrjrjrjtntbt• 8 months ago

Yeah running a miniture incarnation of data centre Jira (i.e. the old one where people self install and uograde) as a single dev. That will be a lot of work!

dbg31415• 8 months ago

I get that he just wants to build something alone in his basement -- without product managers, sales guys, or customers with SLAs breathing down his neck. But he's doing an enormous amount of work specifically to avoid charging money for something that's already providing real value. That's the part that feels odd to me.

If you've got "200 users" who rely on your tool so deeply that a migration glitch would seriously hurt their business, you're past the point where this is a casual side project. That's the point where you should at least have some path for people to pay you.

In my head there are three phases of an open-source project:

* Toy – "I scratched my own itch and threw it on GitHub."

* Product – "People actually rely on this. Now I owe them migrations, docs, and not breaking stuff."

* Infrastructure – "If this dies, someone's company explodes and I'm on the front page of Hacker News for the wrong reason."

This post is basically the story of moving from (1) to (2).

What I rarely see is a maintainer explicitly saying which phase they're in. Users see "kanban board, nice site, good docs" and instantly a user is going to map this to, "Jira replacement!" And the author is thrilled to be compared to a polished SaaS!

But then both will be "shocked" to realize that one person can't match an entire product team, support team, design team, etc.

I think there's a lack of honesty in a lot of open source projects. I'd love to see more READMEs say things like:

* "Hobby project. I reserve the right to disappear for a month."

* "No guarantees, no SLAs. Use at your own risk!" (or even more blunt, "If you use this in production, or for mission-critical business practices, you're a fucking moron.")

* "If you're a company depending on this, you should be sponsoring it."

Anyway, seen this countless times... And the real tension starts when the author's excitement about having users surpasses the amount of work generated by those users. As long as the author wants to avoid working on a team, with business rules, and other stakeholders... it'll never actually scale.

Worse, the difference between users and customers is that there's no barrier to entry. Users expectations drift upward -- whether they are paying or not. Users don't just want fixes -- they want roadmaps, guarantees, backwards compatibility, and custom migration help. The code is open-source, but the longer the project goes on, the more the expectations drift towards enterprise-grade.

Boundaries matter. "No, that's out of scope." "No, I won't support your forked schema." "No, I can't chase down your custom patches." Those aren't signs of being unhelpful -- they're what keep the project from collapsing under its own weight. And when you have to start saying things like this, you've past the point of needing a bigger team... which means you're also past the point of where you should have started charging money for your product.

casey2• 8 months ago

This is hilarious considering the way Google treats their customers, business partners and FOSS maintainers of software they use.

Why should random people take on more responsibility for clearly 0 gain? If you want people to bear the cost for their externalities due to their shit software it has to be regulation.

I think something like this has to happen eventually, we can't keep using the same unix programs forever.

kykat• 8 months ago

From the license:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

impact_sy• 8 months ago

As an Apache PMC member, I often ask myself: Can I maintain focus and dedication to open-source projects for an extended period? My answer is: extremely difficult.

Once the initial enthusiasm fades, it becomes difficult to maintain the project.

imiric3• 8 months ago

These are good takeaways from someone who seems to actually care about the users of their project, which is refreshing to see. I've gotten into discussions on this forum with people who think and do otherwise. (Case in point[1].)

they're not demanding. they're engaged. that's a gift.

100%!

Open source maintenance is a difficult and sometimes thankless job. It requires a lot of communication, careful balancing of the project's vision and user requests; tolerance, patience, honesty, transparency, gratitude, humility, but also confidence, sternness, and above all else, dedication to improve the project for everyone, not just a select few. It seems that the author gets quite a few of these right.

A few notes from my own experience:

- Documentation is important, and they're right that it is never "done". That said, you also have to assume that it's written for a specific audience. If a baseline level of technical proficiency is needed for your project, then you shouldn't need to explain topics that bring people up to that level. Sometimes it's a better use of your time to address the occasional support question, than to add documentation that would be irrelevant for the majority of your users. Besides, if those support questions are visible to the community (e.g. they're on a discussion forum), then your answers there can serve as unofficial documentation for people who need it.

- Speaking of which, a discussion forum is crucial when building a community around an open source project, or any project, for that matter. It is another source of information for users, you can use it for announcements, etc. And once you have power users and people passionate about your project, the community itself can help out with support duties. Definitely make this as accessible as possible, make it public, and don't use a closed platform like Discord. A real-time chat platform could be useful, but an async searchable old-school forum is much better for discussion and support.

- Code contributions are a double-edged sword. On one side, it's incredible that some users are passionate about the project enough to invest their time and effort in improving it, and are willing to share their improvements with everyone else. But on the other, when their code is merged into the mainline project, it becomes an additional maintenance burden for core maintainers. Those contributors will hopefully be acknowledged for their work and everyone will appreciate it, but if there are issues with that part of the code, it will be the original maintainers' job to fix it and improve it, not the contributors'. The article mentions this already, but this is another reason to be extra vigilant and judicious about which code to accept, and which not. Most contributors will understand.

Kudos to the author, and best of luck with the project! It's certainly on my radar now.

BTW, looking at Kaneo's web site now, the "free forever" next to the Cloud link is not a good sign. Maintaining infrastructure is a financial burden. Nothing should be "free", and definitely not "forever". Please: add a commercial tier where people can pay you for the resources they consume. This is orthogonal to open source, and you should be compensated, not just for the infrastructure you maintain, but for your work. Everyone will understand this, as long as you keep it fair. In fact, it serves as assurance for any potential users that the project is in a healthy state, and that it will likely continue to be maintained.

I'd be happy to discuss this further and offer any guidance if I can. My contact info is in my profile.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46051393#46052504

zvr• 8 months ago

It's interesting to see that the "the diversity of environments" section only talks about work for supporting different installation / deployment methods.

Back in the day, with different technologies, most of it would have been "strange compilers and environments" that had to be supported.

bitfilped• 8 months ago

You need to stop wanting to help others as a developer, in that context it's a toxic mindest that will slowly kill your projects, time, personality, passion, and self. You made the project for you and chose to share it to others, that's all you need to feel responsible for. If others need to adapt it to fit their use cases, it's on them to do so.

TomasBM• 8 months ago

The first point about documentation really has to do with the question: whom are you willing to support?

Instead of seeing it as "users of X platform", I think it's more useful to divide user groups into:

1. Completely non-technical users who, at worst, wouldn't know how to download anything, and at best only know how to install from an ".exe" file;

2. Middle-ground users who, at worst, are not willing to learn your preferred way of installation, or at best, are new to non-common installation methods;

3. Technically proficient users who, at worst, have arbitrary reasons for disliking your preferred way of installation, or at best, have legitimate reasons for disliking it;

4. Your ideal technically proficient users.

FOSS is often geared towards the fourth category, and for good reason. But if you want your tool to be adopted more widely, you have to learn more about those other user groups, and how to support them beyond documentation.

And here I'd say it's also fair to look for good reasons or funding for that extra support, because if it's not rewarding work, it doesn't have to stay free as in free beer (even if it's FOSS).

What they don't tell you about maintaining an open source project

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