> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.

Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".

There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?

Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.

Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?

An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.

What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.

If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?

Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?

I recently unpublished a couple libraries because I was so fed up with maintaining them.

Lot's of entitled "I want to speak to the manager" types ruined it for me.

I have started a new OSS project and intend to provide optional enterprise offerings on top. I really don't care if someone steals the ideas presented in code because they're actually fairly pedestrian. The much bigger concern for me is the fact that if I do not make my source open by default, I will have a very hard time developing trust in the community and prospective customers. I know I nearly instantly walk away from the "provide your info to download our white paper PDF" sales experiences in 2025.

It is also helpful to remember that 100% of $0 is still $0. And that .001% of a trillion dollar TAM is still a pretty big deal.

Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real.

And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.

I maintain Navigator, a development tool I started over twenty years ago; I am the only contributor to the open source repository [1]. I have rewritten drag and drop in that thing four times (because drag and drop in Livecode [2] is a bit of a hack). It's a pain every time. I'm not rewriting it again.

1. https://github.com/gcanyon/navigator

2. https://livecode.com

I have a side project that I have worked on for years, mainly because I enjoy writing software. I get an adrenaline rush when I can make my data management system do things better and/or faster than other things on the market.

I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.

So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.

A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position:https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...

It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).

Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.

Absolutely. I say that being an OSS maintainer is a job, which can easily become a full time job, where the pay is often non-existent. If you have a separate full time job, you now have to choose:

1. Work two jobs until you burn out.

2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.

3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.

I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.

You can always sell it out for exploits? The price for oss wage is (incident -1 $)

Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.

I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can.

They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!"

One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.

Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV

I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens.

It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.

And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.

Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.

And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.

When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.

The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.

The best is when a random throwaway post blows up for some unexpected and unknown reason and everything you think is good is met with silence!

But did you record a complementary TikTok dance, though?

You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.

Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?

Hello fellow human!

You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so.

Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.

99% of open source authors quit right before they go viral!! Would you please upload your training data ... I mean lovely open source code??

I wrote the article. I'm not a marketing droid, I don't work for GitHub, just a guy recounting his personal experiences and hoping to help others.

I’m sure they probably train on private repos too

oh wow, thanks again for the networking guide Beej!

Same here

This is why it’s luck.

Putting more out there will increase the probability of a reward, but it doesn’t guarantee it.

I've had a similar experience with being a relatively prolific OSS contributor. It's a decent look professionally, but it hasn't led to employment.

Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that.

Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.

I'm a software developer who was, at the time, working in a marketing role. Happy to answer questions.

I feel it’s an evolution of the term “Devrel” which still feels tacky.

Nor would you want someone who built most of their career as an actual engineer to suddenly drop that term and become a generic someone in “marketing”. They’re more than that for sure.

I quite like the terminology the more I think about it.

https://github.com/aarondfrancis

Well the "software" folks started it, I met a full stack engineer the other day, that word used to have some meaning as well.

Sorry to say, but the article is complete BS. Publishing is only desirable when your work is top-notch ;)

If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls.

But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.

When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.

Turn off comments on platforms that allow you to do that.

One of my projects for the next few weeks is to get my blogging stuff up and running again but with a couple of tweaks:

1. I'll never allow on-blog comments again, ever. The signal/noise was always so poor. I'm sorry that you had a similar experience and the unpleasant odour of drive-by sniping got to you. For what it's worth, I'm always interested in finding new writing on tech topics, and I try to never be mean: I am not unique in this, so consider if there's another way.

2. If I ever publish code, it'll not be on a SaaS platform like GitHub, I'll manage the release through tar.gz/zip files, and if people don't like that, fine. I'm not after pull requests or starting a "real" OSS project. If somebody wants to take that OSS license code and host/manage it, godspeed to them.

3. I will write some code that looks for links back to my blogs, so if something I write is referenced by another blog, I'll learn about it at some point and I can go take a look, and that would be interesting. A long, long time ago there was some automation around this using web hooks that almost became a standard, so I'll look into whether that is a thing or not any more.

In my experience if somebody is writing a blog about something they are normally more constructive and thoughtful than if they are just writing something in a text box while "driving by". I'm OK with those articles normally even if they're critical or in disagreement with me about something.

I'd love to read a couple over the holidays and give you feedback if you'd like :)

Then define luck as "connecting with fellow nerds." Still works

And guess how you make friends in high(er) places...

by...

publishing your work and making friends in your industry

A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.