153
Open source maintainers underpaid and going gray
(www.theregister.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
153 points (98.7% liked)
Opensource
1283 readers
97 users here now
A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!
⠀
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I have a lot of free time and am willing to contribute.
But the responses I largely got from reaching out to several projects pushed me away again.
If you make someone who wants to help you for free feel like they're ringing your doorbell begging for money, then don't be surprised when your project dies with you.
My "favorite" was one of the lead devs of Slackware, who deployed an edit I had proposed to one of his pages in the Slackware wiki "in the hope of avoiding conversations like this in the future".
Same with me. I asked upfront if they would accept a PR for a minor change. I described the issue in detail and my proposed fix.
He said sure.
I made the PR.
Same guy comments, "Wtf do you need this for?! We already have X solution with Y features."
I reply back, "Because Y doesn't cover Z use case, which is what I need it for."
The issue was closed without further comment.
I got a single class that supported new hardware written for a controller. They said they don't want the overhead of maintaining an additional class for new hardware (a class that doesn't change ever btw). I thought whatever, works for me, doesn't need to be on the repo and "I got mine". I have since seen 3 people asking if the hardware is supported / asking for it to be implemented. Oh well.
In that case I'd point them to your fork with a link to the PR where they maintainer chose not to include it.
Why? To start problems for me from pissy maintainers when I need help with something?