This post is heavily inspired by my experience over the last ten years participating in the open source community and eight years as a maintainer of H

Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing | Mike McQuaid

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2021-10-27 19:00:18

This post is heavily inspired by my experience over the last ten years participating in the open source community and eight years as a maintainer of Homebrew (which I’ve maintained longer than anyone else at this point).

Burnout is a big problem for open source software maintainers. This is avoidable; maintainers can have fun, keep healthy and be productive working long-term on open source projects. How? By realising they have zero obligations to any other maintainers, contributors or users of their software even if they have personally benefited from the project (e.g. through self-promotion or donations).

Is there any basis to state that maintainers have no obligations? In fact, yes: in open source licenses themselves. Let’s start by looking at the most popular open source license used on GitHub: the MIT 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.

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