Too difficult to maintain open source projects? The Father of Redis Weapon: Do what you want

Not long ago, Tidelift, an open source software management solution provider, conducted an investigation on open source project maintainers. The results showed that most open source maintainers were doing a less money and more pressure : almost half of the code maintainers had no salary; The amount is heavy; there is a lot of pressure to bear, or even thankless; more than half (59%) of the maintainers surveyed have withdrawn or considered withdrawing from the maintenance project.

Previously, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said that code maintainers “need to deal with a lot of actual work”; the open source project Babel with millions of users was in financial trouble, and the project leader’s $130,000 annual salary was questioned... These events made People have a little understanding of the difficulty of surviving open source projects and the hard work of open source maintainers.

Recently, this has been verified again. Pedronauck, the author of the open source project Docz, wrote that it is too difficult to maintain open source, and this work hurts both body and mind.

He said that in the early days of the development of the Docz project, he needed to get up 3 hours early and sleep 3 hours late in addition to his work. This project provided him with many opportunities. However, with the development of the project, more and more user needs have made it very difficult to maintain an open source project. People hope to get a lot of things from this project, but they are not willing to help, which makes him very broken.

His job and maintenance of open source projects left him lacking in skills, and his health was also affected. In the end, he had to choose the latter between "maintaining open source projects" and "maintaining physical and mental health." However, this caused some damage to the project, and many people thought that the Docz project was unmaintained.

Developers: I feel the same, maintaining open source projects is really hard!

Below this article, many developers thank pedronauck for their work and give their own suggestions.

First of all, thank you very much for your hard work. I think this is a problem that most open source projects will encounter. In addition to seeking community help, project authors also need to keep a calm mind. The reason you created this project is simply because you need it and hope it helps more people. If you don't have enough time to maintain it, you will meet your needs first. It's not all your fault, you don't have to blame yourself.

You didn't disappoint anyone. As you said, maintaining OSS is very difficult and often thankless.

However, when someone gave a suggestion of "why not find more people to maintain together", another developer bluntly said: "It is not easy to find volunteers." It seems that open source project maintainers have a lot of bad things...

Even the big guys are no exception.

The Father of Redis Weapon: Do what you want

Regarding how to deal with the pressure of OSS software development, Salvatore Sanfilippo (also known as antirez), the father of Redis, introduced his experience:

As someone who has developed many OSS projects of different sizes (Redis, Hping, Jim Tcl, Visitors web analyzer, etc.), I think the solution is simpler than it looks: do what you want. When you are in a successful open source project, you might think that the solution is binary: do nothing, or do everything that people ask you to do. However, the fact is that you can continue to do what you want, pick the problems you want to solve, add the features you want, etc. Set a fixed range for the time you spend on open source projects every day. During this time, only do what you want to do, and don't care about other things.

Remember to always "do what you want to do", but at the same time pay attention to the following points:

1. Don’t just ask someone for it because they didn’t pay, and think that they have made a mistake or abused their rights. No, they can make requests, but you can also ignore them.
2. Don't be irresponsible for software quality just because open source software is free: just do what you want, complete the work, and write complete documentation. Don't publish bad things just because the software is free. Do things the way you want, but with love.
3. When under attack, speak your thoughts calmly and don't get into an argument.
4. Make friends during the open source maintenance process. When you encounter difficulties, they will give a lot of help. Remember: the smartest people have a big heart 99% of the time and are very friendly.

Concluding remarks

At a time when open source has become popular, more and more people have noticed the survival problems of open source projects and the plight of open source maintainers. Donald Fischer, CEO and co-founder of Tidelift, previously stated: "The path to a safer and healthier open source software supply chain should begin with ensuring that more volunteer maintainers are paid adequately."

Of course, salary is only one of the difficulties of open source maintenance. How to maintain open source projects, maintain the physical and mental health and growth of open source maintainers, develop open source maintenance teams... These are all issues that need attention. I hope that these problems can be resolved after more people pay attention to the plight of open source maintainers.

Reference link:

https://github.com/pedronauck/docz/issues/1634
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27420554