One thing that helps is simply not engaging with tiresome people.
I ignore painful questions and let someone else on the mailing list answer.
I make requests once in code review, and then ignore that PR if there is tedious argumentation.
On Being a Free Software Maintainer
11–20 of 147 posts
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#12One of the things I've started to wrap my head around lately is the essential inhumanity of technology. It's a near-daily occurrence of mine to having to deal with something that's just plain dumb, and just have no way at all to fix it. I can't make the system better, I can't make any kind of suggestion to anyone so that my situation won't come up again.
There's nothing to do but to just accept it, put whatever workarounds I can come up with in place, hope I can remember what I did before the next time it comes up, and move on. It regularly moves me to anger, with nowhere to put it. It's not fair to unload it on your coworkers or your manager. So I'll vent a little bit, still trying to find the best way to do this, and just hope I'm not a raging alcoholic by the time I'm 40.
But I'm a skilled tech worker whose getting paid very well in order to deal with these things. If they're not just douchebags, I would guess that most people who get unreasonably angry at OSS maintainers are not getting paid very well to deal and are likely the target for generated externalities. They need a focus, someone to hold responsible.
But tech is inhuman and so there is no one to hold accountable. And if ever there was someone to hold accountable, by God get rid of that chink in the armor! The OSS maintainer thus becomes that chink.
I sometimes wonder if the brave new world that the West is building is not the great horn of plenty that we all believe it to be, but rather a monster that consumes the best parts of us and spits the rest out, too cruel to just put its victims out of their misery.
Then I remember that inhuman bureaucracy is nothing new, and pour another glass.
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#13This has not been my experience. I maintain various popular and not-so-popular projects (although maybe not to the level of gnome calendar) and I just work as much as I want. If I don't feel like handling an issue right then, I say I won't have time soon and that PRs are appreciated. The vast majority of people are understanding, I don't remember anyone making a fuss about it.
Maybe because the consumers of your work are developers? GNOME Calendar (the OP's project) is an app for end users.
Possibly, but not all of them are. This isn't, for example:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt
And at most we got a few users asking about why they couldn't install it on 2. Maybe my users are just better-behaved.
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#14A lot here applies to non-free software as well: if you omit the 'free' in the title and article, most of the statements still hold.
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#15Are there any benefits to being a free software maintainer beyond the obvious pride and satisfaction that comes with the role? For example, is this something that people mention on their resumes? Does getting a job become easier and when you do, can you negotiate higher salaries? Our world is incredibly indebted to Free Software Maintainers and I wonder how we can pay them back in our little ways.
People can use sites like Open Collective, Patreon or the likes to directly pay open source projects or people involved with them. There's a lot of different platforms for this and I don't even know half of them. If there's a project you'd like to support, check if they take monetary contributions somewhere and if not, maybe suggest it to them and start donating :)
This is about free software, not open source software.
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#16Are there any benefits to being a free software maintainer beyond the obvious pride and satisfaction that comes with the role? For example, is this something that people mention on their resumes? Does getting a job become easier and when you do, can you negotiate higher salaries? Our world is incredibly indebted to Free Software Maintainers and I wonder how we can pay them back in our little ways.
When I interview someone who is a free software maintainer then it's a really big plus because this shows me that they can handle maintainer ship which infers a lot of good qualities, from small facts like that they probably know git well and write good commit messages, to the fact that they know how to handle people in difficult situations when a inexperienced maintainer would let bad code slip in but a experienced one will fight for good solutions.
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#17This is true. But then you get maintainers like Ulrich Drepper.
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe because the consumers of your work are developers? GNOME Calendar (the OP's project) is an app for end users.
Possibly, but not all of them are. This isn't, for example: https://github.com/skorokithakis/catt And at most we got a few users asking about why they couldn't install it on 2. Maybe my users are just better-behaved.
Sorry, but any command-line tool is going to be used by advanced computer users, not normies.
(If you reply to this that GNOME is not for normies either, or Linux in general, I'll reply 'touche' though.)
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#19What is the latest, state of the art way to earn money this way ?
Re: On Being a Free Software Maintainer
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
People can use sites like Open Collective, Patreon or the likes to directly pay open source projects or people involved with them. There's a lot of different platforms for this and I don't even know half of them. If there's a project you'd like to support, check if they take monetary contributions somewhere and if not, maybe suggest it to them and start donating :)
This is about free software, not open source software.
The "free" in free software is about freedom, not getting stuff free-of-charge.