It’s a god-damned miracle to me that open source is as robust as it is in tech. Consider the options. You could have a job (or be entrepreneuria

Open Source & Sustainability

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2022-01-14 02:00:02

It’s a god-damned miracle to me that open source is as robust as it is in tech. Consider the options. You could have a job (or be entrepreneurial) with your coding skills and likely be paid quite well. Or, you could write code for free and have strangers yell at you every day at all hours. I like being a contributing kinda guy, but I don’t have the stomach for the latter.

Fair enough, in reality, most developers do a bit of coding work on both sides. And clearly, they find some value in doing open-source work; otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. But we’ve all heard the stories. It leads to developer burnout, depression, and countless abandoned projects. It’s like we know how to contribute to an open-source project (and even have some ground rules on etiquette), but lack an understanding of how to maintain it.

There’s plenty of write-ups on GitHub about how to start a new open source project, or how to add tooling, but almost no information or best practices on how to maintain a project over years. I think there’s a big education gap and opportunity here. GitHub has an obvious incentive to increase num_developers and num_repos, but I think it’s worthwhile to ease the burden of existing developers and increase the quality and security of existing repos. Open source maintenance needs a manual.