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Why we never thank open source maintainers

windsooon.github.io

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Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#21

Post by politelemon »

naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As 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 lazin…

Mine usually go something along the lines of:

"Hi, I use your app and it's wonderful."

So far so good.

It's immediately followed by

"But it would be perfect if it had "

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#22

Post by chrisdone »

I have a bunch of open source projects; I'm getting quite good at giving my projects new homes because I don't want to maintain them anymore.

Speaking for myself, thanks is fine but I don't need it; thanks doesn't do anything for burnout. People using my software is enough thanks. The biggest thanks is someone contributing a useful bug fix or needed feature. Time and effort is the currency in open source.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#23

Post by dictum »

naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As 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 lazin…

Done incorrectly, this can sound passive aggressive, but I suggest adding a short notice in your README:

- Feature requests should follow ((list your rules)). All requests that don't follow the rules will be ((closed|ignored))

- ((The maintainers of this project)) will only add new features ((at their leisure)). If you cannot contribute a pull request for ((feature X)), make a feature request ((following the rules on item 1)) and wait. Please do not be impatient.

- If you can implement ((feature X)), please do so and open a pull request.

My personal experience is that dealing with third-party code, merge conflicts and waiting for responses can be even more draining than writing code, so there's that.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#25

Post by rekado »

speps wrote: post #7

BTW this is actually to promote this: http://www.thankyouopensource.com/ Putting the link here might make it more obvious.

It's a pity that this website is exclusively for repositories on Github and thus contributes to the harmful idea that free software only exists when it is on Github.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#26

Post by gcb0 »

inglor wrote: post #16
naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As 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 lazin…

Send them quotes back: "I'm glad you liked it, I have X hours to dedicate to project Y this month. If you'd like, I'm willing to work on that feature for you under terms Z". People _pay_. You'd be surprised just how much of Chromium and other open ssource projects is written by consulting companies paid by third parties to solve a use case.

> chromium

just like several dev over the years implemented privacy conscious options to restric the referer(sic) header just to have google employees silently remove them later on?

well, I guess it can work if the feature you are paying for is not to improve privacy at the expense of google's Ad business.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#27

Post by dictum »

wolfgke wrote: post #13
naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As 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 lazin…

> 'Hi, can you implement ? Thanks!' Answer with an estimate based on your hourly rate.

Honestly, this exudes arrogance, even if the intention is completely free of ill will. It's better to say a clear NO ("I will not add this feature" or "I cannot implement this at this time"), and let them figure if they want to pay/use something else on their own, than to talk down to users.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#28

Post by betaby »

inglor wrote: post #16
naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As 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 lazin…

Send them quotes back: "I'm glad you liked it, I have X hours to dedicate to project Y this month. If you'd like, I'm willing to work on that feature for you under terms Z". People _pay_. You'd be surprised just how much of Chromium and other open ssource projects is written by consulting companies paid by third parties to solve a use case.

Some different perspective. Example Debian with plenty of poorly maintained packets which broke original behavior (say linked against another library which is not recommended by upstream) or disable some features or outdated (not in sense of stable/unstable). Sending DD messages 'please fix, thanks' looks like is very reasonable (although some of them do not think so). Either your maintainer or not - even say one can do it 'better', one can't preempt or overload - it's not just fork the whole distro at github.

Re: Why we never thank open source maintainers

#29

Post by _jcwu »

naturalgradient wrote: post #5

As 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 lazin…

And what is the issue with just telling them that it could take a lot of work, so probably not? Why does it bother you if someone says thanks? It does not put you in any obligation to do anything...

I do not understand your point of view. Should we stop saying thanks in our daily life? Because it does not really do anything for anyone....

To me the following two messages give off two totally different vibes:

'Hi, can you implement ? Thanks!'

'Can you implement ?'

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