Why we never thank open source maintainers
windsooon.github.io
Why we never thank open source maintainers
1–10 of 229 posts
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#2Some people, rightly or wrongly, feel that their use of an open source library is endorsement and thanks enough, at least until you meet the maintainer in person or have other cause to be in contact with them.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#3Great post. Amazing what a big difference a simple "thank you" can make, and surely helps reduce burnout.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#4[deleted]
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#5As the maintainer of a reasonably popular library, I actually get irritated by a lot of 'thanks', because they are in the form of this sentence:
'Hi, can you implement ? Thanks!'
Usually from people who have never contributed anything.
Honestly, being thanked in any shape or form does nothing for me, Id rather have users be more considerate of our time and not abuse issues and the community for supporting their laziness.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#6> It is true that some of you guys can build a tool in a hackathon
I've kept some data on how much time I've spent on a somewhat popular open source project (+/-1000 stars on github, if that means anything).
Time to implement to scratch my own itch: +/- 24 hours
Time to write documentation, package, etc: +/- 70 hours
Time to handle bug and feature requests, support: +560 hours
So that's an overhead of around 2500%. If I was paid to do that, it would have cost around €130,000.- (and would have netted me around €5, because dutch taxes ;-) )
The emails and other forms of thank-you's from users make it more than worth it. Plus, I get to give back to the community.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#7BTW this is actually to promote this: http://www.thankyouopensource.com/
Putting the link here might make it more obvious.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#8Anytime I find a very useful tool[1] or get help from a maintainer or author I always offer them a lifetime, free rsync.net account. A fair number of them have taken me up on it.
[1] Some examples of useful tools include: TextBar for OSX, git-annex assistant ... someone wrote a great encfs tutorial ... etc.
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#9Actually, in all projects I've been involved in I've gotten more than enough thank you emails. Not to mention hooks for consulting gigs (which I dislike and _rarely_ do), conference invites and job offers.
Open source has been _tremendously_ cost-effective for me. I do it for fun and because I genuinely like building open tools people like using.
This is me https://github.com/benjamingr https://stackoverflow.com/users/1348195/benjamin-gruenbaum - I have done some work but there are _a lot_ of people who have made bigger contributions than me.
Wondering if other people feel the same way or not. I _do_ give around ~30$ a month on patreon to projects I like just as a nice "thank you for maintaining this".
Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers
#10I interpreted the title as 'We have the policy not to thank maintainers of open source tools. Here is why.' glad it was quite the opposite.